This book is a study of the city and urban life in Roman Palestine during the Talmudic period, 100-400 B.C. Rather than focus on a specific city, Daniel Sperber synthesizes what is known about city life in Talmudic Palestine to create a paradigmatic hypothetical Palestinian city. Drawing on numerous literary records for his information, he describes the structure and use of many physical aspects of the city, such as its markets, pubs, streets, bathhouses, roads, walls, toilets, and water supply. Rounding out the study is a chapter describing the archeological evidence, written by Sperber's colleague, Professor Joshua Schwartz. With the recent upsurge of interest in urbanization in the Greco-Roman world, The City in Roman Palestine will attract not only scholars of Judaic literature and history, but also classicists and ancient historians.

Relations between Jews and non-Jews in the Hellenistic-Roman period were marked by suspicion and hate, maintain most studies of that topic. But if such conjectures are true, asks Louis Feldman, how did Jews succeed in winning so many adherents, whether full-fledged proselytes or "sympathizers" who adopted one or more Jewish practices? Systematically evaluating attitudes toward Jews from the time of Alexander the Great to the fifth century A.D., Feldman finds that Judaism elicited strongly positive and not merely unfavorable responses from the non-Jewish population. Jews were a vigorous presence in the ancient world, and Judaism was strengthened substantially by the development of the Talmud. Although Jews in the Diaspora were deeply Hellenized, those who remained in Israel were able to resist the cultural inroads of Hellenism and even to initiate intellectual counterattacks. Feldman draws on a wide variety of material, from Philo, Josephus, and other Graeco-Jewish writers through the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, the Church Councils, Church Fathers, and imperial decrees to Talmudic and Midrashic writings and inscriptions and papyri. What emerges is a rich description of a long era to which conceptions of Jewish history as uninterrupted weakness and suffering do not apply.

Studies and Texts in Jewish History and Culture, The Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies, University of Maryland, no. 5 Essays on the architecture, art, religious institutions, cemeteries, etc. of Jewish and Christian life in Palestine, based on the archaeological finds from the Classical and Byzantine periods.

"An indispensible companion text, Texts and Traditions includes the essential documents of the various religious trends of the Second Temple and Rabbinic periods as well as Josephus, Greek and Aramaic inscriptions, classical historians and talmudic sources." --Book Jacket.