Overview

Conventionally, the history of the rabbinic movement has been told as a distinctly intra-Jewish development, a response to the gaping need left by the tragic destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. In Rabbis as Romans, Hayim Lapin reconfigures that history by drawing sustained attention to the extent to which rabbis participated in and were the product of a Roman and late-antique political economy. Rabbis as a group were relatively well off, literate Jewish men, an urban sub-elite in a small, generally insignificant province of the Roman empire. That they were deeply embedded in a wider Roman world is clear from the urban orientation of their texts, the rhetoric they used to describe their own group (mirroring that used for Greek philosophical schools), their open embrace of Roman bathing, and their engagement in debates about public morals and gender that crossed regional and ethnic lines. Rabbis also form one of the most accessible and well-documented examples of a nativizing traditionalist movement in a Roman province. It was a movement committed to articulating the social, ritual, and moral boundaries between an Israelite us and the nations. To attend seriously to the contradictory position of rabbis as both within and outside of a provincial cultural economy, says Lapin, is to uncover the historical contingencies that shaped what later generations understood as simply Judaism and to reexamine in a new light the cultural work of Roman provincialization itself.

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9780195179309

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<br> This is the big book on the Palestinian Rabbis that we've been waiting for from Hayim Lapin for quite a while. There is simply not another person on the planet who is capable of producing an account of the rabbis which is simultaneously so grounded in a correct and comprehensive apprehension of the factual details, so conceptually sophisticated, so theoretically aware, and so informed by the consciousness-when all is said and done-of a historian. --Seth Schwartz, Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Classical Jewish Civilization, Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, Columbia University<p><br> This is an immensely learned and sophisticated study of the place of the rabbis within the society and politics of Roman Palaestina and an exemplary work of historical scholarship. --Shaye J. D. Cohen, Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University<p><br> In this important and erudite book, Hayim Lapin provides a complete and up-to-date study of the early rabbis. Lapin convincingly argues that the rabbis must be understood as firmly embedded in the wider Roman and Byzantine world. The book thus also throws light on the dynamics of the monumental shifts that occurred in late antiquity. This is necessary reading for students and scholars of both early Judaism and late antiquity. --Michael L. Satlow, Professor of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies, Brown University<p><br>

Author Information

Hayim Lapin is Professor of History and Robert H. Smith Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland.

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