Content area
Abstract
This dissertation, The Reinvention of Judean Collective Identity in a Hellenistic World Contending with Rome, focuses on conceptions of group identity constructed by elite Judeans from 161-104 BCE. The newfound dominance of Rome at this time profoundly affected both inter-communal cultural exchange and the reinterpretation of local communal tradition throughout the Hellenistic World or Oikoumenê. Through a complex process of “communal reinvention,” Judean elites followed Roman precedent by creating legitimate cultural space for themselves within the Oikoumenê on their own terms.
Like the Romans before them, Judean elites negotiated their collective identity through an exchange of ideas with Greeks, commonly referred to as a process of Hellenization. However, this was more than a mere two-sided exchange. My study emphasizes both a triangulated conversation between Jews, Greeks and Romans, and an even more complex “shared elite discourse” consisting of a multitude of communities throughout the Oikoumenê. In their interactions with Greeks and Greekness, Judean elites were informed by the approach of their Roman “friends and allies” to Greeks and Greek culture, while they simultaneously “reinvented” the Judean community in emulation of the elite-constructed image of Rome. I develop this thesis largely by comparing the Jewish sources I and II Maccabees with the life and writings of the Achaean-Greek historian Polybius and Cato the Elder, his famous Roman contemporary.
Judean emulation of Rome is marked by the extreme loyalty of the individual to the unified commonwealth and ancestral custom and law. Both elite groups emphasized these communal qualities as part of the co-option and subversion of Greekness. Judeans followed the Roman example of claiming the best of traditional Greek virtues for themselves—and denying the same to certain, but not all, contemporary Greeks—while transforming the meaning of virtue from the full range of Greek aretê toward a more Romanized virtus: “manly courage” and “martial valor.” In sum, Judean elites reconciled their reconceived notion of “the community” in a Hellenistic context with their native Israelite heritage by creating a Judean community that claimed the best virtues offered by the Hellenistic marketplace of ideas within the practice of ancestral Judean custom.
