Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity ed. by Natalie B. Dohrmann and Annette Yoshiko Reed (review)

Abstract

ANCIENT Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity. Edited by Natalie B. Dohrmann and Annette Yoshiko Reed. [Jewish Culture and Contexts.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2013. Pp. x, 388. $69.95. ISBN 978-0-8122-4533-2.)This set of thirteen papers on Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire assesses how Jews and Christians functioned as Romans. All but one or two of the contributors are specialists in Judaism in late antiquity, and Jewish topics and materials are the major focus of the collection. papers treat a wide variety of literary genres, and archaeological and artistic evidence, over a broad expanse of space (from Gaul and Spain to Mesopotamia) and time (from the third century to the early Middle Ages). unifying theme is Judaism's and Christianity's experience of and response to Romanization, both before and after Constantine's conversion, when Christianization further complicated Romanization. Rather than seeing Jews and Christians as stuck between the stark alternatives of assimilation or resistance, however, the papers approach them as subgroups carrying on their lives in what to them was normalcy, both subject to and at the same time exploiting the particular legal, social, and cultural conditions attached to being Roman. perspective thus owes something to postcolonial theorizing, but most of the contributions are mercifully sparing in their use of fashionable terminology.Space limitations only permit comments on a few especially noteworthy papers. William Adler's The Kingdom of Edessa and the Creation of a Christian Aristocracy studies the third-century Eastern Christians Bardaisan of Edessa and Julius Africanus, who illustrate the book's theme of creative and self-serving provincial accommodation to Western invasion, first via Greek paideia, then via Roman imperium. Readers unfamiliar with the swashbuckling figure of Africanus should read this well-informed portrait of a cultural entrepreneur, whose Christianity sat easily with his cultural pluralism and service to pagan royalty, first in Edessa and then in Rome.Natalie B. Dohrmann's Law and Imperial Idioms: Rabbinic Legalism in a Roman World asks why rabbinic legality triumphed so totally as to eliminate any surviving mention of the many other types of authority and literary genre that prevailed in pre-1970s Judaism. She identifies three Roman aspects that the rabbis might have been inspired to imitate in their devotion to scholastic jurisprudence: Roman imperial administration, which offered a model of efficient governance and social order that invited and needed local cooperation; the second-century emergence both of scholastic jurists and Greek rhetors, whose prestige grew rapidly (pro- a model of meritocratic cultural dualism, p. …