In this book, master Talmudist and scholar of the Greco-Roman world, the late Professor Saul Lieberman, elucidates words, texts, customs, and practices in either rabbinic or classical literature, often by reference to passages in the other. In “Greek in Jewish Palestine”, he demonstrates that “almost every foreign word and phrase have their raison d'etre in rabbinic literature” and that “all Greek phrases in rabbinic literature are quotations.” “Hellenism in Greek Palestine” is “an inquiry into the spirit of many rabbinic observations and investigations of the facts, incidents, opinions, notions and beliefs to which the Rabbis allude in their statements.”

"Hard to believe but true: - The Passover Seder is a Greco-Roman symposium banquet - The Talmud rabbis presented themselves as Stoic philosophers - Synagogue buildings were Roman basilicas - Hellenistic rhetoric professors educated sons of well-to-do Jews - Zeus-Helios is depicted in synagogue mosaics across ancient Israel - The Jewish courts were named after the Roman political institution, the Sanhedrin - In Israel there were synagogues where the prayers were recited in Greek. Historians have long debated the (re)birth of Judaism in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple cult by the Romans in 70 CE. What replaced that sacrificial cult was at once something new-indebted to the very culture of the Roman overlords-even as it also sought to preserve what little it could of the old Israelite religion. The Greco-Roman culture in which rabbinic Judaism grew in the first five centuries of the Common Era nurtured the development of Judaism as we still know and celebrate it today. Arguing that its transformation from a Jerusalem-centered cult to a world religion was made possible by the Roman Empire, Rabbi Burton Visotzky presents Judaism as a distinctly Roman religion. Full of fascinating detail from the daily life and culture of Jewish communities across the Hellenistic world, Aphrodite and the Rabbis will appeal to anyone interested in the development of Judaism, religion, history, art and architecture. "--

"The ancient Greeks were consequential - not by creating "timeless values", but by questioning them. This book is for anyone interested in the ancient world and its modern meaning and follows the history of science and of the literary canon to reveal how the Greeks set off a train of progress"--

This volume gathers sixteen essays on monarchy and power in the Hellenistic period and charts a new approach to Hellenistic history by focusing attention on biblical and Jewish evidence and reading that evidence in new ways. The essays consider the kings, queens, and power figures of the Hellenistic dynasties, as well as ancient Israelite kings, the Babylonian and Persian rulers of the Bible, Parthians, and Romans. The volume also represents a new kind of interpretation of the Greek Bible (Septuagint) and of the Jewish literature of the period, setting them in the context of Hellenistic political thought and practice.

Few encounters in antiquity have had more profound consequences than the encounter between Greek culture and that of Republican Rome during the third and second centuries B.C. Focusing on the response of the ruling elites, for whom Hellenic literature, religion, and visual arts were at once intimidating and irresistibly appealing, Erich S. Gruen offers a compelling account of the assimilation and adaptation of Greek culture by the Romans. Gruen examines such key cultural developments in the history of Republican Rome as the adaptation of the legend of Troy to create a special place for Rome within Hellenic traditions, and Cato's campaign to distinguish Roman cultural achievements by comparing them to those of the Greeks. He describes the diverse purposes - civic, religious, and political - for which the Romans used Greek art, as well as the development of distinctively Roman artistic expression in portraiture, historical reliefs, and comic drama within a Hellenic context. In addition, he accounts for the perseverance of two competing strains within Republican Roman culture: on the one hand, philhellenism, and on the other, the subordination of the Greek legacy within the living Roman tradition. Gruen shows that this complex process of cultural transformation served to sharpen the Romans' sense of their own values, their national character, and their international responsibilities. Demonstrating that the Roman response to Hellenism was far more subtle and dynamic than has generally been acknowledged, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome will be welcomed as an outstanding contribution by readers interested in ancient history, classical literature, and the history of art.

This provocative new history of Palestinian Jewish society in antiquity marks the first comprehensive effort to gauge the effects of imperial domination on this people. Probing more than eight centuries of Persian, Greek, and Roman rule, Seth Schwartz reaches some startling conclusions--foremost among them that the Christianization of the Roman Empire generated the most fundamental features of medieval and modern Jewish life. Schwartz begins by arguing that the distinctiveness of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and early Roman periods was the product of generally prevailing imperial tolerance. From around 70 C.E. to the mid-fourth century, with failed revolts and the alluring cultural norms of the High Roman Empire, Judaism all but disintegrated. However, 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. Through masterful scholarship set in rich detail, this book challenges traditional views rooted in romantic notions about Jewish fortitude. Integrating material relics and literature while setting the Jews in their eastern Mediterranean context, it addresses the complex and varied consequences of imperialism on this vast period of Jewish history more ambitiously than ever before. Imperialism in Jewish Society will be widely read and much debated.

"In the first of four volumes on A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period, Lester Grabbe presents a comprehensive history of Yehud - the Aramaic name for Judah - during the Persian Period. Among the many crucial questions he addresses are: What are the sources for this period and how do we evaluate them? And how do we make them 'speak' to us through the fog of centuries? This first volume, Yehud: A History of the Persian Province of Judah offers the most up to date and comprehensive examination of the political and administrative structures; the society and economy; the religion, temple and cult; the developments in thought and literature; and the major political events of Judah at the time."--

"The key methodological commitment of this book, then, is to the study of literary culture as a whole. From this follow certain other methodological consequences. Studying literary culture as a whole implies an attention to overall patterns more than to individual details. I thus regularly offer statistics and maps. While I do make many qualitative pronouncements, these are, with a few exceptions, generalizing and impressionistic, and not based on close readings. Studying the regularities of literary culture as a whole also implies adopting a perspective which need not have been available to the ancient actors themselves (they had pursued their own practices, without necessarily pausing to consider their literary culture as a whole). For this reason, I make no effort to identify the authors' concepts and am content to deploy my own observer's concepts throughout. The result is a book very different from traditional classical philology. The complex footnote with its plethora of primary and secondary sources is almost entirely avoided (my footnotes, instead, merely point to the key, recent studies with which the reader, wishing to pursue a point of detail, may begin her research ). Only rarely do I offer close readings of individual passages or reconstructions of the meanings of original terms. Fortunately for me, traditional philology now has few champions and I will not spend time arguing against the straw man of the philological critic. Instead, I will apologize to him "--