'Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society?: Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism'

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MrMacSon
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'Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society?: Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism'

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https://www.amazon.com/Were-Jews-Medite ... s_li_ss_tl

"How well integrated were Jews in the Mediterranean society controlled by ancient Rome? The Torah's laws seem to constitute a rejection of the reciprocity-based social dependency and emphasis on honor that were customary in the ancient Mediterranean world. But were Jews really a people apart, and outside of this broadly shared culture? Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? argues that Jewish social relations in antiquity were animated by a core tension between biblical solidarity and exchange-based social values such as patronage, vassalage, formal friendship, and debt slavery.

"Seth Schwartz's examinations of the Wisdom of Ben Sira, the writings of Josephus, and the Palestinian Talmud reveal that Jews were more deeply implicated in Roman and Mediterranean bonds of reciprocity and honor than is commonly assumed. Schwartz demonstrates how Ben Sira juxtaposes exhortations to biblical piety with hard-headed and seemingly contradictory advice about coping with the dangers of social relations with non-Jews; how Josephus describes Jews as essentially countercultural; yet how the Talmudic rabbis assume Jews have completely internalized Roman norms at the same time as the rabbis seek to arouse resistance to those norms, even if it is only symbolic.

"Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? is the first comprehensive exploration of Jewish social integration in the Roman world, one that poses challenging new questions about the very nature of Mediterranean culture."
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MrMacSon
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Re: 'Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society?: Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism'

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Also by Schwartz:

Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E.
Princeton University Press, 2009

"late in the Roman Empire, the Christianized state played a decisive role in ''re-Judaizing'' the Jews. The state gradually excluded them from society while supporting their leaders and recognizing their local communities. It was thus in Late Antiquity that the synagogue-centered community became prevalent among the Jews, that there re-emerged a distinctively Jewish art and literature--laying the foundations for Judaism as we know it today."

https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B0 ... 35Lu9DidZU
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MrMacSon
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Re: 'Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society?: Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism'

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MrMacSon wrote: Fri Oct 07, 2022 7:47 pm
Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E.
Princeton University Press, 2009



Introduction

Imperialism and Jewish Society traces the impact of different types of foreign domination on the inner structure of ancient Jewish society, primarily in Palestine. It argues that a loosely centralized, ideologically complex society came into existence by the second century B.C.E., collapsed in the wake of the Destruction and the imposition of direct Roman rule after 70 C.E., and reformed starting in the fourth century, centered now on the synagogue and the local religious community, in part as a response to the christianization of the Roman Empire.

This book thus covers a longer period and has a broader scope than is conventional for books on ancient Judaism, aside from the not uncommon handbooks, which are characterized by varying degrees of comprehensiveness but the absence of an explicit argument. One reason I chose to treat a broad topic is the character of the evidentiary basis of ancient Jewish history. In brief, it is slender ...

It is intuitively obvious that the ancient Jews (assuming that they behaved like a recognizably human group) were profoundly affected by the imperial powers under which they were constrained to live. It is equally obvious that the effects of imperialism were not limited to reaction—to the impulse to “circle the wagons” that has so often been attributed to the Jews by historians and others. Nor can the effects of domination by Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Empire all usefully be crowded under the rubric of “hellenization.”

The effects of domination were complex, pervasive, and varied ...

... that the descendants of the Jewish leaders for several centuries after 70 [C.E.] had no [Torah] authorization helps to explain the importance of Greco-Roman urban culture in northern Palestine demonstrated by archaeological remains. The political marginality of “rabbinic Judaism” matters profoundly for our understanding of it and for our interpretation of rabbinic texts, not to mention for our understanding of the history of the Jews in the period of its consolidation.


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