This book is a welcome addition to ‘Key Themes in Ancient History’, the well established series devoted to topics in Greek, Roman or Graeco-Roman history, of which Seth Schwartz's study of The Ancient Jews is the first to focus on the history of a particular people. In this slender volume, aimed primarily at students and teachers of classics and ancient history, S. offers what is ‘in part abbreviation, rethinking, updating and re-orientation’ of his monograph Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (2001). At the heart of this new book are fundamental questions about who the ancient Jews were: how did they emerge in antiquity as a ‘distinct and enduringly distinctive group’ (3) and how should we understand their relation to Jews of later periods? In a stimulating and rigorous introduction, S. sketches the conceptual and methodological challenges of writing a history of the Jews ‘which resonates oddly because so much of it … is simultaneously uncannily familiar and completely unrecognizable’ (6).
S.'s history of ancient Jews covers a vast timespan from the triumph of Alexander over the Persian Empire to the ‘relatively well-attested’ (15) fourth century c.e. The approach is organized according to major periods of radical transformation in Jewish history: (1) the Maccabaean Revolt against Seleucid rule and the rise of the Hellenistic Jewish dynasty of Hasmonean rulers (167–152 b.c.e.); (2) the period of anti-Roman Jewish revolts in Palestine and the Jewish diaspora (66–135 c.e.); and (3) the Christianization of the Roman Empire begun under Constantine. The focus throughout is on the Jews of Palestine/Judaea, with relatively little detailed discussion of diaspora Jewish communities in antiquity.
By way of introduction to Period 1, and with an eye to readers interested in the broader context of the ancient world, S. sketches the origins of the Jews and Jewish culture centred on the Jerusalem temple and sacred books (ch. 1). Following the Maccabean Revolt, reversing the Seleucid proscription of Jewish laws and the abolition of the Jewish cult, the rise of the Hasmonaean dynasty marks the beginning of S.'s first period of drastic, transformational change in the lives of ancient Jews (ch. 2). Under this dynasty, Judaea becomes for the first time a major player in the Mediterranean world and a ‘flagship example’ of the cultural hybridity of a post-Seleucid kingdom. S.'s approach to Herod the Great highlights this monarch's huge importance for ancient history: ‘the best attested of all ancient Jews, of all Roman client kings, probably one of the best attested of all Romans’ (59). Herod's rule marks a massive increase in the prosperity and international importance of his kingdom, linked in large part to his grand building projects for the Jerusalem temple and the harbour of Caesarea Maritima. Under Herod too, however, the main Jewish ‘sects’ that had emerged in response to the Hasmonaeans (Josephus’ Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes) became more definitively ‘sectarian’ (‘organizations characterized by some type of pietistic religious extremism’ (69)), effectively marginalized or even ‘radicalized’ by Herod's policies of promoting non-Judaeans and the integration of his kingdom into the Roman world.
Three Jewish revolts within the Roman Empire mark the second of S.'s periods of fundamental change for ancient Jews (ch. 4). For S., contrary to revisionist attempts to reduce or relativize the impact on Jews of the fall of Jerusalem, the year 70 c.e. represents ‘as sharp a turning-point as any in Jewish history’ (85). The catastrophe of the diaspora revolt under Trajan, which saw the extinction of Jewish life in Egypt, Libya and Cyprus for several hundred years, is discussed only briefly, reflecting the paucity of sources that might illuminate its causes. Relatively better attested, thanks to archaeological finds in Judaea, the Bar Kohba revolt under Hadrian marks, in its failure, the decisive crushing of the Jews of Judaea, ‘their deconstitution as a nation strongly confirmed … their presence in their own land … diminished to nearly nothing’ (97). William Horbury's magisterial volume (The Jewish War under Trajan and Hadrian (2014)) appeared too late for discussion in this study.
S.'s treatment of ‘Jews in the high Roman empire’ (ch. 5) focuses on rabbis. Against a maximalist position, which argues for relative continuity between the Pharisees of the Second Temple period and the rabbis of the post-destruction era, S. presents a controversially minimalist case for the emergence of the rabbis as ‘a component of Jewish leadership’ no earlier than the end of antiquity (c. 900 c.e.). For S., the importance of the early rabbis is not as leaders but in their ‘unusual’ or even ‘unique’ rôle within the Roman imperial context as, ‘elite or sub-elite preservers, rationalizers and elaborators of a recalcitrantly unromanized but very much altered local tradition transmitted in its original Semitic languages’. As such, S. argues, the rabbis have much to teach ancient historians ‘about the possibilities and limits of cultural resistance in the Roman Empire’ (98).
A final substantial chapter deals with the ‘partial recovery’ of Jewish life under early Christian rule (ch. 6), the definition of Jews now organized as a lawful and relatively privileged religious community, the reappearance of a limited institutional authority in Palestine with some degree of authority over Jewish diaspora communities, the development of rabbinic literature, and, largely independent of rabbinic influence, the spread of local religious communities, known to us through their monumental synagogues and the records of their charity collection and distribution.
Elegantly written, this volume admirably fulfills the goals of ‘Key Themes in Ancient History’ in presenting to its readers a work that is accessible, informed and significantly original. S. does an excellent job of explaining why ancient historians and classicists should know about the texts and history of ancient Jews, and of challenging them to engage with complex material that remains largely peripheral in the study of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.
