An exhaustive discussion of Roman Diaspora Judaism is not possible in a chapter such as this. Nevertheless, the foregoing has attempted to reconstruct in general terms the Judaism which characterized Jewish communities in the urban settings of the Greco-Roman Diaspora from approximately the mid-first to the mid-fifth centuries CE. In more recent scholarship, much has been written about Diaspora Jews, their literature, social history, and cultural traits, and their relations with non-Jewish authorities - based on the plethora and wide variety of evidence which has come to be available. However, few, if any, scholarly attempts had been made since the mid-1980s to describe what we may safely assert about the shape and character of their Judaism, or about that Judaism’s place in Diaspora Jewish communities’ struggle for social success and social continuity as a religio-ethnic minority in the Greco-Roman urban landscape. This chapter has attempted to begin to fill that void.
The precise constructs adopted by Roman Diaspora Judaic society and culture to address this dual problematic have enjoyed considerable longevity, from late antiquity through medieval and into modern times. So normative did these constructs become that rabbinic Judaism, well before it became dominant in Mediterranean Jewish societies sometime near or following the rise of Islam, had no alternative but to adopt these constructs as their own, to “rabbinize” them when they could, and to promote them as part of the rabbis’ version of the Torah of Moses. Indeed, if one looks at forms of Jewish communal organization in today’s highly secularized Jewish communities, it is easy to see much more than mere vestiges of Roman Diaspora synagogue/communal patterns of organization and authority still at work - with a contemporary version of a Jewish curial class, benefaction, and honors once again reflecting other contemporary non-Jewish patterns (see e. g. Weinfeld 2002).
FURTHER READING
For a general political and to some extent social history of Jews in the late republican and earlier imperial Roman period, one may turn to Smallwood (2001). Three relatively recent and very readable works do a good job of tackling the complex evidence from and about Greco-Roman Diaspora Jews. They are: Barclay (1996), Gruen (2002), and Rutgers (1998). With respect to the development of the ancient synagogue, the reader will find a comprehensive and engaging account in Levine (2000).
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This chapter was written in the academic year 2004-5 during a leave of absence granted by Concordia University (Montreal QC Canada). It was completed in the winter and spring of 2005 while I was a visiting research fellow at the Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies at the University of Miami. The research for and writing of this chapter were aided by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to support my research on the impact of urbanization and the urban environments during the Roman imperial period on the development of ancient Judaism. I am grateful for the support of all of these parties.
World History
