Etta and Milton Leve Scholar-in-Residence

A dominant trend in scholarship about Jews in the Roman Imperial diaspora emphasizes the Jews' achievement of a successful balance between integration and separation, and regards this happy equilibrium as essentially stable for centuries. I will argue that this view rests on a fundamental misreading of the sources. Asia Minor (modern Turkey) provided the richest...

The phenomenon of “Godfearing”—adoption by gentiles, usually supposed to have been pagan—of Jewish practices including support for local Jewish communities and attendance in synagogues—has loomed larger in scholarship than it does in the sources. But the phenomenon surely existed. Some ancient writers suggest that in the first century most diaspora jewish communities had a “fringe”...