The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism: Jewish and Christian Ethnicity in Ancient Palestine.

• Author: Attridge, Harold W.

Historians have often given an account of the history of the Jewish people in the late Second Temple period, a subject of vital interest both to Jews and Christians. Mendels, a professor of ancient history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is well qualified to tell the tale once again as part of this relatively new Anchor Bible series aimed at making contemporary biblical scholarship accessible to a wide audience.

Mendels organizes his version of the period from Ben Sira to Bar Kokhba, from 200 B.C.E. to 135 C.E., around the theme of "nationalism," recognizing that this is a potentially problematic category that might import anachronistic presuppositions into the account of the past. Nonetheless, he finds the category useful and appropriate, when properly explicated in institutional terms relevant to the period. Mendels identifies the key institutions as the monarchy, the national territory, the capital city, the Temple and priesthood, and the army. He argues that Jews of the period saw themselves as a distinct nation in and through those institutions, despite the fact that each changed dramatically during the course of the roughly three hundred and fifty years in question. The issue of Christian "ethnicity" suggested in the subtitle is treated only in an incidental fashion.

The institutional grid forms one axis of Mendels' study; chronology the second. The periodization is not surprising. The first three decades of the second century B.C.E., under the tolerant rule of the Seleucids, were followed by another three decades of struggle, first for religious liberty, then for political independence. The independent Hasmonean state, lasting from 142 to 63 B.C.E., saw the reestablishment of a Jewish monarchy along with maximal territorial expansion of its sovereignty. Pompey's conquest of the Near East for Rome in 63 B.C.E. was a watershed, ending the political independence of the nation and leading to the transformation of all national institutions. The puppet kingdom of Herod (37 to 4 B.C.E.) displayed the forms, but not the substance, of national identity. The complex arrangement of Palestine under Herod's sons created new miniature versions of the Jewish nation, even more firmly under the sway of the imperial power. The brief reconstitution of a jurisdiction ruled by a Herodian monarch, Agrippa I, from 37 C.E. until his untimely death in 44, constituted the last vestige of the national state created by the Maccabees. The subsequent...