The Jews in Late Ancient Rome: Evidence of Cultural Interaction in the Roman Diaspora.

• Author: Price, Jonathan J.

The purpose of this important book (a revised dissertation) is announced in the subtitle. Rutgers sets out to replace the prevailing notion, that the Jews of ancient Rome lived in isolation from their surroundings, with a more nuanced picture of cultural interaction in which the Jews borrowed and adopted elements from Roman culture while retaining their own particular identity.

This is a fairly ambitious program, as it must struggle under the weight of three hundred fifty years of scholarly consensus. To be sure, this consensus, as Rutgers shows with splendid learning in his first chapter (pp. 1-49), originally derived from ancient preconceptions about the Jews. But clearing away these prejudices does not necessarily invalidate the conclusion, based on the evidence and advocated (although for radically different reasons from their predecessors) by scholars such as Harry Leon, author of the still-fundamental study, The Jews of Ancient Rome (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1960), and Arnaldo Momigliano (review of Leon, Jews in Gnomon 34 [1962]: 178-82).

Almost all that is known about the Jews of ancient Rome is contained in their archaeological and epigraphical remains; and it has seemed, from a plain reading of this evidence, that the Jews' preponderant use of Greek through the fourth century, their separate burial sites and apparent lack of participation in Roman social and political structures, and the absence of Jewish literature in Latin, all point to the Jews' separation from the Latin-speaking culture around them. Rutgers is satisfied with neither the method by which this conclusion has been reached nor the conclusion itself. He not only reexamines well-known evidence with a critical eye but also - and here is his innovation - rigorously compares it with contemporary pagan and Christian archaeological, epigraphical, and literary remains.

The heart of the book lies in the middle three chapters, which contain Rutgers' comparative analysis of the ca. six hundred Jewish inscriptions from the second through fourth centuries C.E. First (ch. 3, pp. 100-138) Rutgers shows that the frequency with which age at death is mentioned, age spread, male-female ratio, and other such epigraphical data statistically match the Roman world at large. To Rutgers this means that the Jews "would never have borrowed epigraphic formulae" without an "organic and dynamic . . . relationship" with non-Jews (p. 138). This seems to me to go too far; the...