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.
Through masterful scholarship set in rich detail, this book challenges traditional views rooted in romantic notions about Jewish fortitude.
Correspondence with the Palestine Arab Delegation and the Zionist Organisation 1922. ... 82–116, 172–77; Adam Lebor, City of Oranges: An Intimate History of Arabs and Jews in Jaffa (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 179–81; and Tom Segev, ...
This book offers a new perspective on this formative period in Jewish history and will be much discussed."--Michael D. Swartz, Ohio State University "An original, interesting, and important book.
An accessible and up-to-date historical narrative with detailed thematic discussion of crucial historical changes.
In this iconoclastic work of history, Shlomo Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel’s future.
Thus this volume sheds new light on the interrelationship between religion, ethnicity, culture, and the economy, revealing the potential of an “economic turn” in the study of history.
Letter from M. Cohen to Alliance headquarters, AAIU, Tunisie I.G.3, in Rodrigue, Images of Sephardi, 255. 54. Tunisia never witnessed anti-Jewish activity on the scale of 4. 5. that seen in Constantine, Algeria, or French Morocco.
Detailing the transmission of cultural sensibilities in the medieval money market and the world of Jewish money lenders, this book examines objects pawned by peasants and humble citizens, sacred relics exchanged by the clergy as security ...
This book challenges the standard conception of the Middle Ages as a time of persecution for Jews.
Zionism, Imperialism, and Racism