Proselytes and proselytism, Jewish

Applying the terms "Jew" and "Judaism" in the ancient period has recently been challenged by a number of scholars. First, the terms translated as Jew and Judaism are rare in the ancient period, and second, it is argued that these terms retroject later understandings of Judaism as a religion back into a period when Israelites and Yehudim/Ioudaioi are rather understood as an ethnic group. "Judeans" is preferable as a designation to "Jews." Two challenges have arisen. Some argue that the ethnic meaning of Yehudim/Ioudaioi changed to a more religious meaning in about 100 B. C. E.. Others insist that "Jew" and "Judaism" have always communicated both an ethnic and religious meaning-and still do-and so to insist on an ethnic-only meaning ("Judeans") in the ancient period is misleading. Here I take up a number of the previous arguments and modify them to form an alternative proposal: Yehudi (feminine Yehudiyah) and related terms arose as assertive, emotive identity terms to reflect a strong affirmation of identity in an international situation. Much as "Quaker" or "American" can be assertive, emotive identity terms relative to the default Society of Friends or United States respectively, so Yehudi/Yehudiyah was used occasionally, then more often, as a strong identity term relative to the default Israel/Israelite. Every twenty years or so, scholars take up each of their most used terms and exclaim, "I can't believe that this term has accumulated so many unexamined accretions." The term is then thrown into the wash on the heavy-duty cycle to wash away the accretions, and when it is taken out again and held up, the term has shrunk, unable to do the work it once did. The goal is a sort of precision and linguistic purity, perhaps an inevitable result of the "linguistic turn" in theory (which, ironically, also includes a critique of the possibility of an objective precision). These terms sometimes bounce back, but sometimes they remain permanently shrunk and reduced in their use. Within Jewish Studies it has recently been argued that "Judean" should be used rather than "Jew" as a translation for Yehudi or Ioudaios, and "Judeans," understood as an ethnic group, rather than "Jews" or "Judaism" as a religion. 1 A correlative challenge is the question of when "Judaism" began, or when "Jew" should be used as the appropriate term for a member of the Jewish "religion." These interrelated questions have 1 See Paula Fredriksen's article, "Mandatory Retirement: Ideas in the Study of Christian Origins Whose Time Has Come to Go," Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 35 (2006): 231-46, although it is important to note that she does not suggest retiring "Jew" or "Judaism." The substance of this article was first delivered as the Presidential Address of the New England and Eastern Canada Region of the Society of Biblical Literature, at Andover Newton Theological Seminary, April 24, 2015. I would like to thank those who responded there and others who helped me shape this argument:

Religions, 2020

For several hundred years, from the late Iron Age to the end of the 2nd century BCE, the southern neighbor of Judea was "Idumea", populated by descendants of Edomites, together with Qedarite and other Arabs and a mix of additional ethnicities. This paper examines the known data on the identity, especially religious identity, of these Idumeans, using a wide range of written sources and archaeological data. Within the Bible, "Edom" is presented as Israel's twin and its harshest enemy, but there are hints that the Edomites worshipped the God of Israel. While the origins of the "Edomite deity" Qaus remain obscure, as does the process of their migration into southern Judah, the many inscriptions from the Persian period show that Qaus became the most widely worshipped deity in the area, even if other gods, including Yahweh, were also recognized. The Hellenistic period brought heightened Greek and Phoenician influence, but also the stabilization of "Idumea" as an administrative/ethnic unit. Some of the practices of this period, such as male circumcision, show an affinity to the Judaism of the time. This paper also discusses the outcome of the Hasmonean conquest of Idumea and the incorporation of its inhabitants into the Jewish nation.

The Journal of Theological Studies, 2013

Envisioning Judaism: Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, 2013

New Perspectives on the Ancient World. Modern perceptions, ancient representations. BAR International Series 1782 (eds. P.P. Funari; R.S. Garraffoni; B. Letalien), 2008

The goal of this paper is to present a comparative study of Jewish identity as expressed by the Jewish community of Alexandria, in Egypt, and as expressed by the Jewish community of Antioch, in Syria, in the first half of the 1st century CE.

2013

and the individual. After outlining the scope and methodology of the volume in the introduction, Scheid offers a very comprehensive presentation of the arguments presented by the adversaries of the polis-religion model in Chapter 1. The fallacy of the city-states' end with the coming of Rome is addressed in Chapter 2, whereas Chapter 3 discusses the place of the individual in the city-states. Chapter 4 fends off the position that civic religion was nothing but a discourse of the elite. In Chapter 5, Scheid supports the functionalist nature of the civic-religion model, which he further explores in relation to rituals in Chapter 6. Chapters 7 and 8 further demonstrate the civic nature of Roman religion by discussing occasions of impiety and oppression by the Roman political administration, as well as the different smaller scale religious activities that were also administered by a central power. Chapter 9 tackles the important issue of belief and emotion in Roman civic religion. Chapter 10 discusses the reasons for religious change in Rome-according to Scheid not based on the assumption of a different "religiosity" as the critics of the polis model maintain-whereas Chapter 11 summarizes his argumentation. Scheid's call to return to the sources is valuable and accurate considering the peculiarity of Roman religion; his erudition and ability to offer a clear and concise discussion makes the volume an indispensable source for anybody interested in Roman religion.

Jewish Quarterly Review, 1995

The recent publication of Louis H. Feldman's study of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in antiquity offers a welcome opportunity to reflect on the state of a field that has attracted intense scholarly attention for almost a century.2 Ever since the appearance of Theodore Reinach's Textes d'auteurs grecs et romains relatifs au Judaisme in 1895 scholars have been studying how pagan and early Christian writers viewed Jews and Judaism. The last twenty-five years in particular have witnessed the publication of several monographs on how Jews and non-Jews related to one another during the Hellenistic and Roman periods.3 Yet, even though many primary sources are now available in reliable editions, scholars continue to disagree about how to evaluate the extent and nature of interaction between Jews and non-Jews. The documentation that can be brought to bear on this issue is enormous. It includes not only Jewish, pagan, and early Christian literary sources, but also papyri, inscriptions, and 1 This research was carried out within the framework of a larger research project supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and by the Dr. M. Aylwin Cotton Foundation of Guernsey. I would like to thank both organizations for their financial support. I am grateful to Boudewijn Sirks for his detailed criticisms of the section dealing with the Theodosian Code. Frank H. Stewart kindly read this paper, criticized it, and helped me to improve the English. I am also indebted to Steven Hijmans who reviewed an earlier version of this paper and made several useful observations. Finally I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of JQR for their insightful criticisms. A list of abbreviations follows the article. 2 L. H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton, 1993): xii + 679 pp. All references to Feldman in this article are to his new work unless otherwise indicated. 3 To give but a few examples: M. Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine During the Early Hellenistic Period (Philadelphia, 1974 [1969]); E. M. Smallwood, The Jews under Roman Rule from Pompey to Diocletian (Leiden, 1976); H. Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos-Texte und ihr literarisches Umfeld (1.-11. Jh.) (Frankfurt on the Main-Bern, 1982); G. Stemberger, This content downloaded from 131.211.206.65 on Fri, 23 Aug 2013 02:56:58 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 362 THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW