Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

An interesting page in the book:
http://books.google.com/books?id=uuJasO ... 9&lpg=PA39

Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian

Louis H. Feldman

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.

Review:

"The most comprehensive recent study of relations between Jew and Gentile in the ancient world. It will take its place with the classic works . . . as an indispensable resource for the study of Judaism in the Hellenistic and Roman world."--John J. Collins, Journal of Biblical Literature

Endorsement:

"Feldman is a world-class expert in the difficult but vitally important area of the intersection of Jewish and Gentile cultures in the Greco- Roman world. His encyclopedic knowledge of pagan, Jewish, and Christian writings of the period is nothing less than breathtaking. Scholars are deeply indebted to his writings, which are unfailingly accurate and unfailingly fair. Our ... debt to him is only increased by this latest exciting work."--John P. Meier, The Catholic University of America

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5145.html

WHEN JEWS BEGAN TO ARRIVE IN America in the middle of the nineteenth century, they found themselves in circumstances very different from those they had left behind in Europe. They were no longer the only, or at least the most visible, minority. While they stood out to some extent as non-Christians, they were one of many ethnic groups hurrying to America's shores. They have since been joined by other religious minorities. The position of the Jews in America, then, is very different from their status for more than a millennium of European history, but it has a great deal in common with their place in the ethnically and religiously diverse Mediterranean societies of the third century B.C.E. through the third century C.E. In the several empires ruled by the successors of Alexander the Great and in the Roman empire that later absorbed them, the Jews were one of many conquered peoples under the rule of the new empires. Nor were they the only people with a significant diaspora: the presence of Arameans in Egypt, Syrians in Rome, Egyptians in Asia Minor, also drew their neighbors' attention. In a polytheistic religious culture, the Jews stood out for their monotheism, but they were by no means the only group devoted to a distinctive deity.

Louis Feldman's Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World sets out to offer an understanding of the place of the Jews in the ancient world, primarily in the period before the dominance of Christianity changed the rules forever. Feldman has devoted a distinguished scholarly career to the Jews in antiquity, particularly to the worlds of Josephus, but also to Greek and Roman attitudes toward the Jews and the question of Jewish proselytism, and the book is based to a considerable extent on his many articles. The book is learned and dense, and all students of these subjects are certain to learn something from it. Yet its analysis is deeply disappointing, in considerable part because it is unable to escape a tendency to examine the period before Christianity became the state religion of the Roman empire through the lens of the experience of the Jews in medieval Christendom.

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-16348302.html