In this challenging set of essays, an attempt is made, from a variety of perspectives, to look again at the question of Romanisation as a subject of importance in the history of Judaism and Christianity, but with particular reference to the former. The editors, in a wide-ranging introduction to the volume, which does much more than simply summarise the thirteen essays which are its content, show how there has often been a tendency in discussion of Judaism and the Roman Empire to speak simply in terms of conflict, in part inspired by the Jewish revolts, and indeed by the way in which Jews often represent the Roman Empire in a variety of writings from different periods. But times have changed. So there is a much greater inclination now in classics departments, reflecting general trends in the wider intellectual world, to view Romanisation as a less hegemonic process, but one in which the ruled in fact had a voice, which was influenced by the Roman presence and in turn influenced it. This view of the Roman Empire, inevitably, complicates ideas of identity in that world, and leads to more nuanced and variant readings of its effects. What remains of real interest to the authors of this volume, and others, is that the Jews remain a considerable and understudied voice from this period, a voice which in distinctive and more typical ways reflected that process.

The volume divides itself up into three parts, each containing a brief introduction to its content. The first section, ‘Rabbis and other Roman sub-elites’, contains four essays. Beth Berkowitz explores Jewish and Christian ideas of universalism and particularism by looking at interpretations of Leviticus xviii.1–5 in the Sifra and Clement of Alexandria, showing how it would be wrong to associate these two terms exclusively with one group rather than the other, and asking interesting questions about their definition in the world out of which they came. William Adler, in a typically erudite contribution, looks at two different characters in the third-century court of Edessa, Bardaisan and Julius Africanus, highlighting, amongst other things, the different ways in which in which they responded to the conquest by Rome of Edessa, and the complex ways in which their works can be construed as Christian, claiming that they are often better understood in comparison with the works of Lucian and Longinus than Christian martyrologies and apologetics. Natalie B. Dohrmann, in a suggestive piece, shows how rabbinic literature, characterised by what she terms its ‘notion of insistent legality’, marks a break from previous Jewish literature and, while its law remains Jewish, it reflects ‘the legally inflected aegis of the high empire’. Here Romanisation is conceived as ‘nativised’. The final essay of the section, by Hayim Lapide, looks at the ways in which rabbinic literature reflects Roman ideas on women and bathing, showing how simple ways of characterising Jews in the Roman empire as examples of acculturation and assimilation will not do.

In the second section of the volume, ‘Christianisation and other modalities of Romanisation’, containing five essays, Joshua Levinson looks at rabbinic responses to the Christianisation of Palestine from the Constantinian era onwards, showing how, in often subtle ways, and increasingly so, the rabbis created a kind of ‘counter-cartography’. Hagith Sivan examines, through the spectacles of two fifth-century Christian writers, Bishop Porphyry and Bishop Severus, the ways in which Jews and women were used to establish a break between the Roman past and the Christian present. In a detailed interpretation of the account by Socrates the historian of the expulsion of the Jews from Alexandria in 414–15 by Cyril, Oded Irshai, inter alia, shows how the bishop's actions, which seemed to go against the wishes of the leading Roman official in the city, and indeed prevailing practice, was based upon an interpretation of the spirit of an imperial directive, which had been passed to deal with events in Calama, North Africa, and which had led to the punishment of the pagan inhabitants of that town. Here Cyril is seen as an interpreter and appropriator of imperial power. Ophir Münz-Manor shows how, in different ways, Jewish and Christian liturgical practices reflected a concern to appropriate and recontextualise sacrificial language in liturgical practice, and Ra'anan Boustan, by examining Christian and Jewish interpretations of the throne of Solomon, a subject of some interest in the Hebrew Scriptures, shows how Jewish interpretation of this imperial object, particularly in the later classical/early medieval period, moved away from concerning itself with an understanding that sought to critique kingly human power, to one that used the throne to describe the greatness of divine rule. In subtle ways, this reflected developments in Christian readings of the throne in the Byzantine court.

The final section of the volume is entitled ‘Community and rupture’. Michael Swartz examines the ways in which the idea of chains of tradition as used, famously, in Mishnah Avot, reflect a long-standing interest in such an idea found in the wider Greek and Roman worlds. Focusing on the Avodah Piyutim, a third- to sixth-century liturgical poem on the Day of Atonement, he shows how they, too, make use of the chain of tradition idea, but here to promote the authority not of the rabbis, but of the priesthood, whose importance for late antique Jews was manifested in a variety of ways. In the process he shows how a reading of this work against a wider Christian backcloth can illuminate concealed polemics. Hannah Cotton examines four legal papyri (P. Yadin 18, 65; P. Nessana 18, 20), from disparate dates – second and sixth centuries – to demonstrate the ongoing importance of Jewish legal records for an understanding of Roman law and its complex presence in local regions of the empire; and Rina Talgam takes a fascinating look at the complicated interconnections and concealed dialogues between Christian and Jewish iconography of the temple in their respective churches and synagogues from the Constantinian era, moving forward. The volume is brought to a conclusion by Paula Fredriksen's contribution on the role of the contra Iudaeos literature in Christianity. In this wide-ranging piece, Fredriksen shows, inter alia, how there is a disjunction between the laws against Jews which develop in the post-Constantinian era and what we in fact know about Christian interaction with Jews. By and large, however, the violence of such interaction is constrained, and the Jewish right to continue life as Jews is protected. This protection, however, falls away in Visigothic Spain once Roman power is itself cast off, Roman power construed here as in some sense constraining and more tolerant than what followed.

This is a very helpful and suggestive collection of essays. It tackles a range of material from literary texts to legal ones, to art, and all its authors are able, in different ways, to make us read this evidence in often stimulating ways. Rome's presence, often only properly appreciated after a complex semiotic drilling of the texts or images under discussion, is indeed multi-layered and cannot easily be reduced to a particular characterisation, though ‘Romanisation’ as a subject of discussion is not equally present in all contributions. So in a number of essays we appear to be concerned more straightforwardly with Jewish-Christian interaction, even if sometimes ‘Christian’ in these contributions should perhaps be read as Roman. The essays by and large avoid simple conclusions about how a Jewish text or image is interacting with the wider Roman or indeed Christian world, rarely talking in terms of the ‘either’ of acculturation or the ‘or’ of rejection. Of course, many of the Jewish texts come from what we might broadly call ‘rabbinic’ literature and, because of the nature of the texts from this tradition, much of what is said about their ‘Roman’ characteristics is dependent upon a kind of mirror-reading of the sources, with all the fragility which comes with such an interpretative enterprise. But the suggestiveness of these often discrete and particular studies is precisely what is so stimulating about them, and why the volume should help give rise to further research in this burgeoning field of study.