Françoise Mirguet. An Early History of Compassion: Emotion and Imagination in Hellenistic Judaism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 271 pp.

Abstract

Reviewed by: An Early History of Compassion: Emotion and Imagination in Hellenistic Judaism by Françoise Mirguet R. Gillian Glass Françoise Mirguet. An Early History of Compassion: Emotion and Imagination in Hellenistic Judaism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 271 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000151 In her second book, An Early History of Compassion, Françoise Mirguet analyzes the discourse of pity, compassion, and sympathy in Hellenic Jewish writings and demonstrates the roles these emotions play in the Jewish community's hybrid identity and cultural imagination. In this publication, Mirguet continues her work on emotions in ancient Jewish literature and contributes to the growing corpus of academic publications on the sentiments in antiquity. The book begins with an introduction that outlines the aims of the project, and the different methods and frameworks employed by the author. Mirguet draws on social scientific and postcolonial approaches, as well as on the fields of classics and religious studies. The first half of chapter 1, "Between Power and [End Page 208] Vulnerability," breaks down the three main concepts for analysis—pity (oiktos and eleos), sympathy (sumpatheia), and compassion (terms derived from splagchna, "inner organs")—contextualizing the emotions of Jewish literature within the larger framework of classical literature. This chapter goes on to provide several key examples from Josephus, the Testament of Zebulun, and Philo to show how pity and compassion result from and highlight a power imbalance or hierarchy. This tension "between power and vulnerability" is a central theme of the book, and a key concept in the subsequent chapters. In chapter 2, "Found in Translation," Mirguet argues that the role of pity and compassion in Judeo-Hellenistic literature is a product of translation, and she traces its purpose and development from the Pentateuch, where pity occupies an affective, but not emotive plane, into Greek Scriptures, where it develops into an emotion and virtue. Chapter 3, "Within the Fabric of Society," returns to the idea of relational imbalance presented in the first chapter, but broadens the discussion to include Sirach, Tobit, Job, and 4 Maccabees, and analyzes how a discourse of pity addresses the precariousness of social status and the risks inherent in pitying someone, as well as how it contributes to gender construction and raises anxieties of political subjugation. The dynamics of particularism and universalism come out in chapter 4, "Bonds in Flux," in which Mirguet examines emotions in Tobit, the Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides, the Letter of Aristeas, Philo, and the Sibylline Oracles, revealing the ways in which compassion plays into the representation of both self and other in the Judeo-Hellenistic corpus. Chapter 5, "In Dialogue with the Empire," juxtaposes the Judeo-Hellenistic concepts of pity and compassion to their Greek and Roman counterparts, both contextualizing their use and showing influences of Roman thought on Jewish writing, paying particular attention to Stoic philosophy. The conclusion summarizes the different parts of the book nicely, and draws larger inferences about pity and compassion as means of communicating vulnerability and authority, and constructing the self and the other, both within a community and in relation to the outside world, in Judeo-Hellenistic literature. An Early History of Compassion arrives as the history of emotions is expanding as a discipline, and interdisciplinary approaches to Hellenic Jewish texts are being championed. It therefore fits in well with several other works published in the past two decades.1 Moreover, drawing on recent approaches to Hellenistic and early Roman Jewish writings, Mirguet contributes to our understanding of Hellenic Jewish writings as a part of the Greco-Roman corpus, even though it is its own bounded corpus. In other words, the author approaches Hellenic Jewish writings as a coherent group of texts that can be read together, and on their own, across genres, but also considers several texts as examples to be compared against their Greek and Roman counterparts. [End Page 209] The strengths and weaknesses of any given research are often two sides of the same coin. Mirguet has mastery of the Judeo-Hellenic corpus and deftly brings in classical literature where pertinent, innovates in her literary method and analysis, and draws nuanced conclusions. She clearly states her aims and approach, sprinkling methodology throughout the chapters as necessary...