Introduction Rethinking Romanness, Provincializing Christendom Annette Yoshiko Reed and Natalie B. Dohrmann In histories of ancient Jews and Judaism, the Roman Empire looms large. Already in 1 and 2 Maccabees, Roman power is figured as a factor in the negotiation of Ioudaismos and Hellenismos , and at least since Flavius Josephus, the writing of Jewish history in Greek presumes a Roman gaze. Since Josephus, moreover, the first Jewish revolt against Rome (66-73 ce) has been a primary pivot and problem for recounting the fate of the Jewish people under foreign rule. The revolt serves as the stormy horizon for the Judaean War and Antiquities alike--two works that represent the culmination of Hellenistic Jewish historiography but also the last known Jewish-authored historical writings until the Middle Ages. To be sure, much ancient Jewish literature effaces the specificity of Roman rule. In the apocalyptic imagination, Rome could be collapsed into Babylon; and in the midrashic imagination, Jewish life in the Roman Empire could be folded into the Deuteronomistic dichotomy of Israel and the nations. Among some rabbis, their relationship could even be reread as a rivalry between two commensurate powers, like the wrestling of Jacob and Esau.

Nevertheless, in the Sages'' Edom--as in the Kittim of the Qumran literature and in the blurred Babylon-cum-Rome of 4 Ezra and Revelation--we glimpse hints of engagement with a distinctive imperial culture, not so neatly mapped onto biblical models or onto the historical precedents provided by Assyrian, Babylonian, Achaemenid, Ptolemaic, or Seleucidic rule. Furthermore, as much as a fantasy of isolation envelops the literature of Palestinian rabbis, the ideal of separateness may betray something of the Romanness of its motives and settings. That Roman power is implicated in rabbinic authority, after all, is suggested in the origin myths of the rabbis themselves, wherein the establishment of Yavneh is retrospectively tied to the Roman razing of Jerusalem, as Judaism resurrected--with Roman imperial ratification--from the ashes of the Second Temple. The present volume attends to such paradoxes, subtleties, and ironies of empire, supplementing the scholarly discussion about conflicts or contrasts between ancient Jews and Romans, with reflections on the experiences of ancient Jews as Romans. Much distinguished Jews from others in the Roman Empire, and there is no dearth of sophisticated studies exploring the ramifications of such differences for Jews and Christians in the Land of Israel as well as the Diaspora. It remains, however, that Rome is also the functioning context of almost all early Jewish and Christian literature. Recent attention to the Sasanian Persian settings of the major exceptions to this pattern--the Babylonian Talmud and Syriac Christian literature--serves to sharpen, by comparison, our sense of the Romanness of so much of the surviving evidence for ancient Judaism and Christianity. Not only is Palestinian Judaism our best-attested example of a Roman provincial culture, but the situation, stance, and strategies of Palestinian rabbis share much more than is commonly noted with Greek, Syrian, Egyptian, and other local sub-elites who simultaneously subverted, absorbed, and manipulated Roman norms.

The essays in this volume address such overlaps--highlighting the Romanness of rabbis and other late antique Jews living in the empire, revisiting issues of Jewish and Christian difference in triangulation with Greek prestige and Roman power, and grappling anew with the Christianization of the Roman Empire by considering the role of Jews (real and imagined) in developments traditionally studied in terms of Christians and "pagans." It is a timely moment to try to make sense of the simultaneous Romanness and Jewishness of ancient Jews in the Roman Empire. It is also a timely moment to explore the implications of their typicality and exceptionalism for understanding the meaning and limits of Roman power, on the one hand, and the parallel paradox of persecuted and imperialized Christianity, on the other. In recent decades, subjects of empire have attracted fresh attention within the fields of Jewish Studies, Classics, and Late Antiquity, inspired in part by postcolonial theorists pressed by modern examples to retheorize agency, destabilize the idea of identity at center and periphery, and highlight the role of local elites in producing the illusion of imperial stability. Such work reminds us that no text can be fully understood apart from the power relations in which its authors and readers are imbricated and implicated. At the same time, another dominant theoretical trend--the discursive or linguistic turn--has pushed us to recall the opposite: particularly for those of us who study the past, any understanding of the power at play behind texts is primarily accessible through engagement with the power at play within texts--the sticky and intricate webs woven by their poetics. Such theoretical "turns" have resulted in nothing quite so sweeping as the paradigm shifts in research on ancient Judaism and Christianity in the wake of World War II. Here, as elsewhere, the dramatic revisionism of the late twentieth century has now given way to deeper rethinkings with more gradual and incremental gains.

Nevertheless, the ramifications are perhaps no less significant--not least for opening new types of conversations between social historians of Judaism and scholars of Jewish literature, as well as among specialists in ancient Judaism, Christianity, and the Roman Empire. Accordingly, our concern in this volume is not to promote, debate, or critique any one model or perspective, nor to forefront the data of any single genre, corpus, medium, or locale. What we seek to convey, rather, are multiple efforts at reorientation, in direct or indirect engagement with the hermeneutical and historiographical challenges noted above, but--above all--guided by problems in specific sets of evidence. Not only do the contributors resist romantic narratives about dramatic difference or intractable change, but they draw our attention to the textures of different relevant data for the period, evoking something of the warp and woof of Jewish and Christian life under Roman imperial rule. As much as the chapters in this volume concern themselves with Jews, Christians, and other Romans, the reader will find little in the way of traditional modes and models of comparison, as predicated on the parallel analysis of "religions," "identities," or "cultures," projected as discrete yet commensurable entities. Sidestepping questions about determination of the priority and directionality of influence, our contributors press on to explore more subtle and surprising patterns--ambivalences and asymmetries, ironies and reversals, differences predicated on similarity and similarities predicated on difference. If contributors resist the older temptation to reduce the Jewishness of a text or group to some point along an imagined axis of reaction to a "Graeco-Roman context," they also avoid easy recourse to more recent truisms concerning identity as constructed through the discourse of alterity. What is here brought to the fore are case studies that reveal some of the telling tensions that Romanness could produce for Jewishness and Christianness--as attested even (especially?) within those types of data most readily aligned with one or another seemingly self-contained tradition.

A mishnah, liturgical poem, marriage contract, or synagogue fresco might appear to be sufficiently explained by its rabbinic or Jewish context. But, as we shall see, they may disclose another script or strategy of meaning, when set alongside contemporaneous Roman or Christian evidence. Likewise, the allusive Christianness of a sophist or philosopher of the third century, or the seemingly confident triumphalism of a bishop or biographer of the fourth and fifth, may disclose different dynamics to those attentive to the long shadows cast by Roman power, local politics, or the ever-present Jewish past. That so much of ancient Jewish literature emerged under Roman rule is well known. Nevertheless, just as Jews are frequently dismissed as atypical by scholars of Roman history, so Rome still remains invisible or occluded in a surprising proportion of studies on Jewish materials written under Roman rule and/or by Roman citizens. To lay the groundwork for the essays that follow, thus, we would like to reflect upon some of the reasons for Rome''s marginalization in past research on Judaism and to highlight some of what is at stake in recovering a sense of its ubiquity, even in the world of late antique rabbis. The scholarly bracketing of Rome is telling--we suggest--inasmuch as it replicates the rhetorical stances and strategies found in many of our ancient sources; if the poetics of power in the Roman Empire are skewed or flattened by modern labels like "Graeco-Roman," the persistence and persuasiveness of the distortion attest the power of poetics--the continued force of those ancient Jewish and Christian writings that relativize Rome and mount totalizing claims of their own. Recognizing and contextualizing the rhetoric of our ancient literary sources may open new perspectives on even some sources that do not explicitly address, contest, or represent Rome or empire.

In the process, we hope to clear the way for bringing Jewish evidence to bear both on the reciprocities of provincial Romanization and on their particular mutations in Christianization. Rethinking Romanness The mound of books on Jewish history containing the hyphenate "Graeco-Roman" in their titles attests a scholarly habit, whereby Hellenistic and Roman empires are often conflated to provide a seemingly stable "pagan" backdrop to the drama of Second Temple Judaism, the origins and spread of Chr.