Böcker av Erich S. Gruen

This study raises that difficult and complicated question on a broad front, taking into account the expressions and attitudes of a wide variety of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian sources, including Herodotus, Polybius, Cicero, Philo, and Paul. It approaches the topic of ethnicity through the lenses of the ancients themselves rather than through the imposition of modern categories, labels, and frameworks. A central issue guides the course of the work: did ancient writers reflect upon collective identity as determined by common origins and lineage or by shared traditions and culture?

This study approaches the topic of ethnicity through the lenses of the ancients themselves rather than through the imposition of modern categories. It takes into account the expressions and attitudes of a wide variety of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian sources. A central issue guides the course of the work: did ancient writers reflect upon collective identity as determined by common origins or by shared traditions and culture?

This book collects twenty two previously published essays and one new one by Erich S. Gruen who has written extensively on the literature and history of early Judaism and the experience of the Jews in the Greco-Roman world. His many articles on this subject have, however, appeared mostly in conference volumes and Festschriften, and have therefore not had wide circulation. By putting them together in a single work, this will bring the essays to the attention of a much broader scholarly readership and make them more readily available to students in the fields of ancient history and early Judaism. The pieces are quite varied, but develop a number of connected and related themes: Jewish identity in the pagan world, the literary representations by Jews and pagans of one another, the interconnections of Hellenism and Judaism, and the Jewish experience under Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman empire.

In this work Erich Gruen draws on a variety of literary and historical texts from antiquity to explore a central question: how did the Jews accommodate themselves to the larger cultural world of the Mediterranean while at the same time reasserting the character of their own heritage within it?

A revisionist study of Roman imperialism in the Greek world, which considers the Hellenistic context within which Roman expansion took place.

This study of the late Republic examines institutions as well as personalities, social tensions as well as politics, the plebs and the army as well as the aristocracy.