In her second book, An Early History of Compassion, Françoise Mirguet analyzes the discourse of pity, compassion, and sympathy in Hellenic Jewish writings and demonstrates the roles these emotions play in the Jewish community's hybrid identity and cultural imagination. In this publication, Mirguet continues her work on emotions in ancient Jewish literature and contributes to the growing corpus of academic publications on the sentiments in antiquity.

The book begins with an introduction that outlines the aims of the project, and the different methods and frameworks employed by the author. Mirguet draws on social scientific and postcolonial approaches, as well as on the fields of classics and religious studies. The first half of chapter 1, “Between Power and Vulnerability,” breaks down the three main concepts for analysis—pity (oiktos and eleos), sympathy (sumpatheia), and compassion (terms derived from splagchna, “inner organs”)—contextualizing the emotions of Jewish literature within the larger framework of classical literature. This chapter goes on to provide several key examples from Josephus, the Testament of Zebulun, and Philo to show how pity and compassion result from and highlight a power imbalance or hierarchy. This tension “between power and vulnerability” is a central theme of the book, and a key concept in the subsequent chapters.

In chapter 2, “Found in Translation,” Mirguet argues that the role of pity and compassion in Judeo-Hellenistic literature is a product of translation, and she traces its purpose and development from the Pentateuch, where pity occupies an affective, but not emotive plane, into Greek Scriptures, where it develops into an emotion and virtue. Chapter 3, “Within the Fabric of Society,” returns to the idea of relational imbalance presented in the first chapter, but broadens the discussion to include Sirach, Tobit, Job, and 4 Maccabees, and analyzes how a discourse of pity addresses the precariousness of social status and the risks inherent in pitying someone, as well as how it contributes to gender construction and raises anxieties of political subjugation. The dynamics of particularism and universalism come out in chapter 4, “Bonds in Flux,” in which Mirguet examines emotions in Tobit, the Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides, the Letter of Aristeas, Philo, and the Sibylline Oracles, revealing the ways in which compassion plays into the representation of both self and other in the Judeo-Hellenistic corpus. Chapter 5, “In Dialogue with the Empire,” juxtaposes the Judeo-Hellenistic concepts of pity and compassion to their Greek and Roman counterparts, both contextualizing their use and showing influences of Roman thought on Jewish writing, paying particular attention to Stoic philosophy. The conclusion summarizes the different parts of the book nicely, and draws larger inferences about pity and compassion as means of communicating vulnerability and authority, and constructing the self and the other, both within a community and in relation to the outside world, in Judeo-Hellenistic literature.

An Early History of Compassion arrives as the history of emotions is expanding as a discipline, and interdisciplinary approaches to Hellenic Jewish texts are being championed. It therefore fits in well with several other works published in the past two decades.Footnote ¹ Moreover, drawing on recent approaches to Hellenistic and early Roman Jewish writings, Mirguet contributes to our understanding of Hellenic Jewish writings as a part of the Greco-Roman corpus, even though it is its own bounded corpus. In other words, the author approaches Hellenic Jewish writings as a coherent group of texts that can be read together, and on their own, across genres, but also considers several texts as examples to be compared against their Greek and Roman counterparts.

The strengths and weaknesses of any given research are often two sides of the same coin. Mirguet has mastery of the Judeo-Hellenic corpus and deftly brings in classical literature where pertinent, innovates in her literary method and analysis, and draws nuanced conclusions. She clearly states her aims and approach, sprinkling methodology throughout the chapters as necessary, and affirms that since this is a literary study she seeks to understand a collective imagination and group identity through a community's narratives, and not to reconstruct history through text. The last chapter, however, highlights the approach's lack of historical framework. In the introduction, the author emphasizes that emotions are socially and historically contingent—they do not exist in a vacuum (cf. pp. 9–12). While the literature analyzed is referred to as Judeo-Hellenistic, the imperial dialogue is only shown to happen with Rome, sowing uncertainty as to which historical and social context(s) these emotions and cultural norms are contingent upon. This has the effect of flattening the literary corpus, at times making it appear more monolithic and geographically ubiquitous than it is. And this occurs in spite of Mirguet's nuanced analyses of individual texts. Over several hundred years of literary production, one expects to find varying and contradictory ideas, which Mirguet certainly does, but whether or not these shifts were the result of any historical events, like the political and social changes that happened as a result of the transition from Hasmonean kingdom to Roman province, or because of the destruction of the temple and the revolts, is left unexplored. However, the brilliant literary analyses and cultural insights that Mirguet offers most certainly provide fodder for future discussions and research into the emotions of ancient Judaism.

This excellent book is the first of its kind in the study of ancient Judaism. It is groundbreaking and vast, covering large swaths of literature. I do not hesitate to recommend it for scholars in a variety of different fields, including scholars of classics, Jewish and Christian literature, as well as those interested in emotion in antiquity, comparative literature, identity construction, and the engagement of minorities with hegemonic powers.