A BGC Cultural Histories of the Material World Publication

Seth Schwartz

This exploration of Jewish identity in Ancient Asia Minor sheds light on a unique community and offers a valuable contribution to the canon of Jewish studies.

This book explores the benefits and pitfalls of writing about an archaeologically rich but literarily poor topic. The results of this inquiry are strongly revisionist: the Jews in ancient Asia Minor, or Anatolia, are shown to have been far from the perfect balance of integration in their host cities and self-preservation that scholars have long ascribed to them. Rather, the Jews experienced conflict and poverty, struggling to carve out a place for themselves in the Greek cities of Asia. Jewish communal institutions played little role before late antiquity, but Jews sometimes achieved a diffuse sense of community through trade guild membership and participation in theatrical events. Surprisingly, many of them actually expressed pride in their Roman identities, but rarely––or never––their local civic identities. Even during the Jews’ brief period of prosperity and heightened civic engagement, circa 400 CE, their lives were characterized by strong localism, featuring many elements that distinguish them sharply from Jews elsewhere in the Roman Empire.

Tackling a history shrouded in myth and fiction, The Jews of Asia Minor reconciles literary and archaeological evidence to create a detailed analysis of the evolving history of Jews in Asia Minor under Roman law.

Seth Schwartz is the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Classical Jewish Civilization in the Departments of History and Classics at Columbia University, where he also chairs the Graduate Program in Classical Studies. Before teaching at Columbia, Schwartz taught at Cornell University, the University of Rhode Island, and the Jewish Theological Seminary, and held research fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Harvard Society of Fellows, and King’s College Cambridge. He wrote Consuls of the Later Roman Empire, with Roger Bagnall, Alan Cameron, and Klaas Worp; Josephus and Judaean Politics; Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE; Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism; and The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad.