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Alan Appelbaum The Dynasty of the Jewish Patriarchs Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 156 Mohr Siebeck: Tübingen, 2013 Pp. xii, 246. $135.00.
What was the origin and nature of the Jewish patriarchate? Did the Jews of Palestine lobby for a leader after the temple's destruction, or did the Romans appoint one? What connection did the patriarchate have to second temple period institutions and the Hillel and Gamaliel of the New Testament? In answer to these questions, a flurry of revisionist articles on the topic of the patriarchate was published in the 1990s and early 2000s (see the articles by Seth Schwartz, Lee Levine, and Sasha Stern).
Key to Appelbaum's monograph is Schwartz's historical reconstruction (1999), which traced the source of the patriarchate's prestige to the diaspora, where the patriarch helped Jewish communities navigate relations among gentiles in exchange for voluntary donations, which were later formalized into the aurum coronarium. Schwartz called for a dynamic history of the patriarchate, one that would trace the hard won individual efforts of each generation of patriarchs. Appelbaum's book answers this call and adds a dynastic emphasis.
Though previous scholarship interrogated the origins and fortunes of the...