PROFESSOR GARY GILBERT AND KIMIKO ADLER

“JEWS AMONG GREEK AND ROMANS”

What did it mean to live as an ethnic or religious minority in the ancient world? How do religious ideas inspire collaboration and confrontation with others? How do minority groups negotiate the dominant political, social, and cultural domains in which they live? These questions are at the center of a new class that Professor Gary Gilbert will be developing on Jews and Jewish life in antiquity. The course, “Jews Among Greek and Romans,” will examine the history of Jews during the Hellenistic and Roman periods (roughly 300 BCE - 300 CE), focusing on the interactions between Jews, Greeks, and Romans. For much of antiquity, Jews lived within and under the imperial systems of Greek and Roman rulers. In this class students will study the ways that Jewish communities across the Mediterranean experienced Greek and Roman political, social, and cultural forces and in the process devised new ways of being Jewish. During the course, students will engage mostly with the primary sources, literary texts, inscriptions, papyri, and material objects, in order to understand relations between Jews and Greco-Roman society. Particular attention will be devoted to the ways in which Jews used religious ideas and practices as ways to accommodate and also resist the political and cultural hegemony of the world in which they lived.