S.’s book is a revised version of her Ph.D. dissertation, which she defended at the Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) in October 2016. In 2014 S. joined the team working on the publication of the fourth volume of the Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum (2020, hereafter CPJ), a supplement to CPJ I of 1957, which collected papyri and inscriptions in Greek, Demotic and Aramaic from the Hellenistic period. The present book is based mainly on the documents published in CPJ I and IV.
The book is divided into an introduction, covering the history of the research and its methodology, and six chapters. Chapter 1 offers two surveys, chronological and geographical, of the Jewish settlements in Ptolemaic Egypt. Chapter 2 deals with personal names (onomastics), while Chapters 3 and 4 survey the documented occupations and social life of Jews in the military and civil spheres. Chapter 5 deals with the legal practices of these Jews, especially in financial transactions and family law, and Chapter 6 engages with religious practices and the evidence for anti-Judaism. A brief conclusion follows. The volume also includes four appendices listing the Jewish papyri and ostraca according to date and provenance as well as parallel lists of doubtful documents, a bibliography, a source index and a general index.
The discussion is mostly descriptive, and the main insight restates the consensus view that the Jews were well integrated into the Greek society of Ptolemaic Egypt except for their religious life (p. 201). With the exception of Chapters 5–6, which address legal and religious matters, the comments provided mostly clarify institutional and technical issues related to Ptolemaic society. Remarks bearing on Jewish aspects are succinct, and sometimes based on stereotypes (e.g. on a person named Shabtai buried according to Egyptian traditions, p. 86).
The main interest of the book, therefore, is to present several new files of documents compared to the earlier monographs devoted to the Jews in Graeco-Roman Egypt. These include the Jewish community of Edfu, which produced Aramaic documents in the third century bce (pp. 55–61, 97–100); the tax-rolls documenting the fiscally privileged Jews settled in the village of Trikomia, who bore the pseudo-ethnic ‘Hellenes’ (pp. 143–5); the archive of the Jewish politeuma of Herakleopolis, which comprises 20 legal petitions, including one documenting the use of Jewish law in family matters (pp. 122–38, 187–95); a Demotic text documenting a marriage under Egyptian law (pp. 198–200); papyri mentioning the Sabbath day (pp. 203–6); and hieroglyphic inscriptions allegedly showing anti-Judaic attitudes (pp. 232–6).
The bibliography has not been updated since 2016, which is particularly damaging with regard to the politeuma, though not only (P. Sänger, Die ptolemäische Organisationsform politeuma. Ein Herrschaftsinstrument zugunsten jüdischer und anderer hellenischer Gemeinschaften [2019]). S.’s belief that the Letter of Aristeas genuinely documents the origins of the Septuagint, and her related discussion of the origins of and reasons for the translation are outdated (see, e.g., J.K. Aitken, No Stone Unturned. Greek Inscriptions and Septuagint Vocabulary [2014]; B.G. Wright III, ‘The Letter of Aristeas and the Question of Septuagint Origins Redux’, Journal of Ancient Judaism 2 [2011], 304–26).
Two chapters deserve particular attention. Chapter 5, on the legal practices of the Jews, is certainly the most valuable in the book. S. offers good, readable summaries of the extensive and often technical debates on the legal issues discussed, and provides in-depth analyses of the documents. One can only regret that S. endorses J. Mélèze-Modrzejewski’s outdated theory that ‘the Torah was translated into Greek for legal purposes’ (p. 180). In Hellenistic times biblical law was supplemented by an oral legal tradition that differed from it in important respects.
Two topics are noteworthy. Firstly, petitions to the heads of the politeuma of Herakleopolis refer to a ‘letter of the ancestral oath’, which apparently accompanied contractual transactions. According to S. this oath imitated the royal oath required in legal proceedings in Ptolemaic society and adapted it to the Jews’ religious needs (pp. 188–91). Seven papyri document matrimonial law. Five Greek documents show that most Jews followed Greek law (pp. 191–4, 197–8), while one Demotic papyrus documents a case where it was Egyptian law (pp. 198–200). In contrast, P.Polit.Jud. 4 = CPJ IV 560 seems to imply the Jewish practice of the binding betrothal, and, moreover, the phrase used to refer to it is the one attested in the Septuagint. S. offers a useful summary of the conflicting views that this papyrus has elicited (pp. 194–7).
Apart from family law, however, S.’s view of the Jews is fixed, and she ignores the possibility that their religious practices changed over time and place. Indeed, her comments on the four papyri that show that Jews refrained from doing business on the Sabbath day (pp. 201–6, with 40–1) deny that this practice had a history. Contrary to her claims, in fact, the Ptolemaic papyri may be the earliest documentary evidence of a change in this regard. Her treatment of the proseuche (literally, ‘house of prayer’) is also oversimplified. According to the prevailing view, the institution denoted by this term was an invention of the Jews who settled in Egypt. Moreover, they chose a name that deliberately distinguished their places of worship from those of the Greeks and the Egyptians. At the same time, the original nature and purpose of the proseuche is uncertain due to the lack of evidence.
Ignoring this debate, S. equates the proseuche with the synagogue, and by combining sources from the Ptolemaic inscriptions of the third century bce through Philo and Josephus to the Babylonian Talmud, she sketches a supposedly coherent and essentially static picture of it (pp. 210–22, see also 30–1, 40–1). No attempt is made to compare the early Ptolemaic proseuchai with contemporary Greek and Egyptian religious associations, although several obvious similarities – such as the dedications to the royal family – are documented. Likewise, CPJ I 138, which S. cites (p. 215), shows that the assembly held in the proseuche included a synodos of the syntaphiastai, possibly an association for the burial of its members, a practice well documented for Egyptians and Greeks, less so for synagogues. One also wonders why CPJ I 139 is omitted. Although the word proseuche does not appear in this fragmentary papyrus from Upper Egypt, it records a drinking feast (posis) – a well-known Egyptian practice – in which several people with Hebrew names took part.
The section on anti-Judaism discusses two Egyptian narrative texts in hieroglyphs that supposedly attest to ‘anti-Jewish sentiment’ (pp. 231–6). One narrates the life of the Buchis sacred bull who died in 145 bce and was buried at Hermonthis (Bucheum stela 9); it includes the claim that ‘[Buchis] was taken into the Hut-Nebu in the Opet, for there were no longer any foreigners of Yahu in the temple of Amun’ (p. 233). Unfortunately, the commentary is decontextualised. In fact, we know of several conflicts opposing Egyptian priests and soldiers stationed within temple precincts. The presence of these ‘foreigners’, who did not meet the purity requirements of the Egyptian temples, was obviously disruptive, and their departure was always followed by purification ceremonies (see C. Thiers, ‘Civils et militaires dans les temples. Occupation illicite et expulsion’, BIAO 95 [1995], 493–516). The complaints made in Hermonthis are therefore not unusual.
In view of these shortcomings S.’s book does not really replace earlier introductions to the life of the Jews in Graeco-Roman Egypt, such as J. Mélèze-Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt from Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian (1997).
