Join us this spring for the Leon Levy Foundation Lectures in Jewish Material Culture. Seth Schwartz will deliver three lectures in a series entitled “Materiality and Politics: How Integrated were Diaspora Jews in the Roman Empire?”

A dominant trend in ancient Jewish scholarship regards the Jews of the high Roman imperial diaspora as having reached a successful and sustainable balance between friendly integration and the separation necessary for the maintenance of a particular religious identity. The archaeological remains of the Jewish communities of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) provide the bulk of the evidence for this characterization. (Evidence from other provinces, primarily Egypt and Cyrenaica—modern Libya—has drastically more disturbing implications). In the course of three lectures Schwartz will challenge the rosy picture of stable and successful Jewish corporate life under Rome through skeptically minimalistic analysis of Asian Jewish materiality and the ways in which it has been deployed in modern historiography. He will also try to account for what in the final analysis were divergent Jewish experiences in different Roman provincial settings.

Lecture 1—The Problem of Asian Jewry (May 4)

The evidence for Jewish life in Roman Asia is in effect bisected chronologically. For the early and high Empire (31 BCE–c. 250 CE for our purposes) we have little archaeology but several important literary sources, most importantly the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus (c. 90 CE), Acts of the Apostles (90-120 CE), Martyrdom of Polycarp (conventionally but probably wrongly dated c.170 CE) and Martyrdom of Pionius (soon after 250 CE). Though these texts have been used to support an optimistic historiography, abundant evidence of maladjustment and even conflict lies just below the surface. After 250, there is a sudden and decisive shift to the material, and these material remains have been aggregated to produce a synthetic account of successful and stable Jewish adaptation.

Lecture 2—Politics: Jews, Asian Cities, and the Roman State (May 11)

Lecture 3—Materiality and Culture: Did the Asian Jews Attain Stability in the High and Later Roman Empire (250–600 CE)? (May 19)

Seth Schwartz (BA, Classics, Yeshiva University, 1979; PhD, History, Columbia, 1985) is a political, social, and cultural historian of the Jews who specializes in the period between Alexander the Great and the rise of Islam, and has become especially interested in the anthropological and social theoretical aspects of his field. Before returning to Columbia in 2009 he taught for fourteen years at the Jewish Theological Seminary after having been a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a senior research fellow at King’s College, Cambridge. In 1999/2000 he was a Guggenheim Fellow and in 2006/7 a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He is co-author, with Roger Bagnall, Alan Cameron and Klaas Worp of Consuls of the Later Roman Empire (Atlanta, 1987), and author of Josephus and Judaean Politics (Leiden, 1990) and Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton, 2001), Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism (Princeton, 2009), and The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge, 2014).