Jews in the Roman Empire

This bibliography surveys the literature and culture of Jews in the Roman Empire from the first through seventh centuries. Jews lived all over the Roman Empire, from North Africa and Italy in the west to Egypt, Asia Minor, and Palestine in the east. The evidence is wide-ranging and includes literary, archaeological, epigraphic, and documentary sources. Literary evidence includes works by individual named authors (Jewish and non-Jewish) and compilations that developed over several centuries. Although this evidence reflects the diversity among Jews in the Roman Empire, it is not evenly distributed geographically or chronologically, nor is it representative of Jews across status and gender. Women, non-elite, and enslaved persons made up a majority of the population, but their voices are not directly represented in literary sources. The rabbinic corpus is the largest extant literary corpus about Jews, or indeed any Roman local elite, but the early rabbis had a relatively narrow sphere of influence. The sources in this bibliography incorporate rabbinic texts as historical sources without taking the rabbis’ claims—about themselves or other Jews—at face value. Within the Roman Empire, Jews were one of many groups that we might refer to as ethnic or religious minorities. The political history of Jews in the empire is beyond the purview of this bibliography, which concerns itself with strategies Jews employed in response to Roman imperial rule. Other provincial populations must have adopted a similarly diverse range of strategies, although we do not have the same wealth of documentation about them. While Jewish populations thrived around the Mediterranean, their relationship to empire changed during these six centuries, not always in a homogeneous or predictable way. Jews went from being the object of brutal Roman reprisal to victims of discursive and physical violence in a Christianizing empire. The topic of Jewish and Christian relations from the Second Temple period to imperial Christendom, while critically important, is only addressed in broad strokes here. This bibliography instead centers Jewish culture and literary production in the Roman Empire, and aims to introduce ancient historians to dynamic recent scholarly approaches to ancient Judaism. The uneven distribution of sources makes it difficult to sustain an overarching historical narrative about Jews in the Roman Empire. Rather than stitching disparate bodies of evidence together to tell an overarching story, most works in this bibliography reckon with the heterogeneity of our sources and the histories it is possible to write with them.