Jewish culture and society under the Christian Roman Empire - Richard Lee Kalmin

This book investigates the complexity, diversity, uniqueness and enduring significance of Jewish life in the Christian Roman Empire from m312 to 634 CE. During this period there occurred an unprecedented Jewish cultural explosion, encompassing the compilation and/or composition of such texts as the Palestinian Talmud, the main aggadic midrashim, an extensive magical/mystical literature, the rived apocalypse, a vast corpus of piyyutim and the beginnings of a practically oriented halakhic literature. Furthermore, this was the era of the florition of Jewish art, for it was only in the fourth century that a specifically Jewish iconographic language came into common use in the synagogues and catacombs, the archaeological remains of almost all of which date from this period. This volume moves towards a synthesising and contextualizing view of the Jewish cultural production of late antiquity, examining the interaction of Jews, Christians and pagans and with the emergence of new religious forms generated by such interaction.