Did the ancients have the concept of nationhood? To raise that question is to enter a minefield. The issue of what counts as a nation has generated a flood of articles and monographs, mostly by anthropologists and sociologists, with a smattering by historians.

The very idea of a nation or nationhood has been preeminently associated with modern history. Its relevance for antiquity is not obvious and has prompted much debate. Those who see it as an exclusively modern phenomenon tend to associate it with the creation of new polities in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century as nation-states. Others, however, and they have been growing in number, argue that the existence of a unifying consciousness of affinity, kinship, and shared history goes back to antiquity and amounts to nationhood or whatever one wishes to call it.

This chapter offers an account of Jewish diaspora communities throughout the ancient Mediterranean that serves as a provocative correction to the origin story of diaspora itself. It contends that the biblical narratives of Jewish exile, so central to modern conceptions of diaspora as involving a painful loss of homeland, a continuous longing for return, and stark relations of isolation or assimilation while inhabiting alien lands – did not reflect the actual everyday conditions of Jews living under Greek or Roman rule. Working with textual and archaeological evidence from the Greco-Roman world, including Hellenistic Jewish writing, Gruen offers a very different picture of Jewish diasporic experience from the biblical narratives of exile. He shows that the Jewish diaspora experience was largely productive and stable, where Jews negotiated between their minority status and the literary, cultural, political, economic, and social milieu of the cities and states in which they resided and very much considered their home.

In what sense and to what extent did antisemitism (or anti-Judaism) exist in the pre-Christian world? The attitudes of numerous pagan writers and various episodes of oppression are explored in order to ascertain whether Jews encountered hostility on ethnic, religious, ideological, or political grounds, and whether any of these experiences amounted to antisemitism.

This chapter addresses what appears to be a puzzling paradox. The Romans enjoyed a reputation for broad-mindedness in matters of religion. Their empire contained a multitude of diverse peoples with varied and sometimes outlandish rites, beliefs, and gods. Far from suppressing such practices, the Romans even imported alien cults and made them part of their own extended system of honoring divine powers. Acceptance and embrace of a wide range of modes of worship characterized Roman image and practice. Could this liberal attitude toward religious pluralism extend even to the Jews, notorious as an exclusivist monotheistic sect? The evidence, on the face of it, suggests hostility among Roman intellectuals toward Jewish separatism and offers disturbing examples of official actions against practitioners of the religion itself. How does one account for this apparent exception to general Roman policy? This chapter questions many of the assumptions behind this ostensible paradox. It argues that Jews were not as separatist as often thought, that their diaspora communities in the empire were acknowledged and supported by Roman authority, that official actions against the religion were decidedly exceptional and not at all characteristic, and that abusive comments by Roman intellectuals were no more meaningful than those expressed about numerous other cults that flourished in the empire.

This chapter addresses what appears to be a puzzling paradox. The Romans enjoyed a reputation for broad-mindedness in matters of religion. Their empire contained a multitude of diverse peoples with varied and sometimes outlandish rites, beliefs, and gods. Far from suppressing such practices, the Romans even imported alien cults and made them part of their own extended system of honoring divine powers. Acceptance and embrace of a wide range of modes of worship characterized Roman image and practice. Could this liberal attitude toward religious pluralism extend even to the Jews, notorious as an exclusivist monotheistic sect? The evidence, on the face of it, suggests hostility among Roman intellectuals toward Jewish separatism and offers disturbing examples of official actions against practitioners of the religion itself. How does one account for this apparent exception to general Roman policy? This chapter questions many of the assumptions behind this ostensible paradox. It argues that Jews were not as separatist as often thought, that their diaspora communities in the empire were acknowledged and supported by Roman authority, that official actions against the religion were decidedly exceptional and not at all characteristic, and that abusive comments by Roman intellectuals were no more meaningful than those expressed about numerous other cults that flourished in the empire.

This chapter reexamines the extensively discussed evidence for the circumstances that drove the Jews to a seemingly irrational and hopeless challenge to the power of Rome. The account of Josephus, on which we almost exclusively rely, offers the teleological scenario of a long build-up of hostility that issued inevitably in disaster. While acknowledging the background and circumstances that lay behind the conflict, this chapter emphasizes the numerous contingencies, unanticipated events, personalities, and miscalculations that played a key role in bringing it about. The tension and anxiety that had built up for two generations in a series of individual episodes supplied a significant impetus. But error, accident, and unintended consequences are critical to understanding the course of events. Josephus’ sense of inevitability, born of hindsight and his special situation, needs a corrective.

The fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE left a nation shattered, its memories bitter and agonizing. The trauma afflicted the Jews for many generations thereafter. In some ways the shadow of that event still hovers now. Military confrontation with Roman power proved altogether fruitless, as would be demonstrated once again by the failed Bar-Kochba revolt in the 130s, with its painful consequences. Physical resistance was no longer realistic. Could there be a different kind of resistance? Did the people of the book in Palestine or the diaspora engage in a form of textual resistance? Could apocalyptic literature serve as “hidden transcript” to convey disguised and indirect critique of overweening power, a subtle undermining of authority that could restore a sense of self-esteem or an internal recompense for loss?1 Could oracular pronouncements about the fiery end of Rome provide a means to steel Jewish resolve in the face of otherwise intolerable tragedy?2

Whatever else Greeks were, they were not barbarians - at least not by their own lights. After all, they spoke Greek. Others spoke in unintelligible tongues, thus sounding to Greek ears as so much “bar-bar-bar” (Strabo, 14.2.28). The term “barbarian” served to demarcate the Hellenic world from the non-Hellenic. It provided a useful device to establish (or construct) the distinctiveness of Greek values and character. When the term first came into fashion remains obscure. Its usage was rare indeed prior to the fifth century b.c.e. when the invasion of Persia galvanized the Greeks to develop a sharper sense of their own collective identity. The initial connotation of “barbarian” may have been quite neutral and innocent, nothing more than “gobbledy-gook speaker.” But in the fifth and fourth centuries, it began to carry a lot of extra baggage. It might suggest cultural or intellectual inferiority, lack of refinement, various insensibilities, brutality, chicanery, and a tendency to embrace despotism rather than the rule of law.

It was certainly better to be a Greek than a barbarian. A famous saying, ascribed both to Thales and to Socrates, gave thanks to the gods for three things: “That I was born human not an animal, a man not a woman, and a Greek not a barbarian!” (Diog. Laert. 1.3). Whether either of those philosophers made such a statement we cannot know. But the ascription appears in a Hellenistic text, by the biographer Hermippos of Smyrna in the third century b.c.e. And it earned an echo in rabbinic writings - with, of course, a Jewish twist: a prayer of thanks to the Lord “who did not make me a slave, did not make me a woman, and did not make me a goy.”

Tacitus elected to begin his Annals with the death of Augustus. The free state was already dead - long since. “How many were left who had even seen the res publica?” (Ann. 1.3). Augustus' own longevity had enabled him to outlast almost all whose memories might stretch back to the Roman Republic. Nearly half a century had elapsed since the battle of Actium, sixty-three years since Caesar had crossed the Rubicon. Tacitus sums it up with typically concentrated force at the beginning of the Annals: “Augustus subjected all to his power - under the name of princeps” (Ann. 1.1). The contrast between word and fact, a Tacitean trademark, appears here in the very opening lines. Tacitus makes the same point elsewhere: “Augustus gave us the institutions under which we gain use of peace - and a princeps” (Ann. 3.28). The cynical attitude affected the view of the great eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon, who wrote “Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names. Nor was he deceived in his expectation that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.” It did not happen in a day or a year. Augustus, says Tacitus, grew ever greater in small steps, gradually usurping for himself the functions of senate, magistrates, and laws (Ann. 1.2). Such was the Augustan principate, in Tacitus' jaundiced view.