This book is a collection of essays that explore the variety of ways in which Jews in Israel responded to and appropriated Greek culture. In various ways the contributors provide corroborating evidence of the influence of Greek culture in Judea and Galilee, from before the Maccabean revolt on into the rabbinic period. At the same time, they probe the limits of that influence, the persistence of Semitic languages and thought patterns, and especially the exclusiveness of Jewish religion.

Presents a collection of 26 articles, with an introduction on "The Influence of Hellenism on Jews in Palestine in the Hellenistic Period.".

Relations between Jews and non-Jews in the Hellenistic-Roman period were marked by suspicion and hate, maintain most studies of that topic. But if such conjectures are true, asks Louis Feldman, how did Jews succeed in winning so many adherents, whether full-fledged proselytes or "sympathizers" who adopted one or more Jewish practices? Systematically evaluating attitudes toward Jews from the time of Alexander the Great to the fifth century A.D., Feldman finds that Judaism elicited strongly positive and not merely unfavorable responses from the non-Jewish population. Jews were a vigorous presence in the ancient world, and Judaism was strengthened substantially by the development of the Talmud. Although Jews in the Diaspora were deeply Hellenized, those who remained in Israel were able to resist the cultural inroads of Hellenism and even to initiate intellectual counterattacks. Feldman draws on a wide variety of material, from Philo, Josephus, and other Graeco-Jewish writers through the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, the Church Councils, Church Fathers, and imperial decrees to Talmudic and Midrashic writings and inscriptions and papyri. What emerges is a rich description of a long era to which conceptions of Jewish history as uninterrupted weakness and suffering do not apply.

Even though relations between the Jewish people and the Roman state were sometimes strained to the point of warfare and bloodshed, Jewish military service between the 1st century BCE to the 6th century CE is attested by multiple sources.

This is the fascinating story of a group of reformers who tried to go too fast, bungled their reform, and so changed the course of history. Hengel's thesis is that Hellenistic influences were, and had been for centuries, smoothly penetrating Judaism even in Jerusalem; there was respect on both sides between Jew and Greek. Then the Greek party tried to go too fast, make Hellenization obligatory and outlaw the Law. This occasioned a furious defensive reaction; Judaism clammed up, became xenophobic and rigoristic, producing the attitude which in its turn created the defensive reaction of anti-Semitism which has stained so many centuries. The defensive rigidity set up in Judaism made it unable to respond to Jesus' creative reinterpretation of the Law, and so led to the rejection of Christianity. This is a truly important scholarly work. The exhaustive collection of evidence will make it a fundamental textbook for the period' (The Tablet). `A foundation book and essential as a source book and as a guide to trends in present research' (The Expository Times). Martin Hengel was Professor of New Testament and Early Judaism in the University of Tubingen.

This book collects twenty two previously published essays and one new one by Erich S. Gruen who has written extensively on the literature and history of early Judaism and the experience of the Jews in the Greco-Roman world. His many articles on this subject have, however, appeared mostly in conference volumes and Festschriften, and have therefore not had wide circulation. By putting them together in a single work, this will bring the essays to the attention of a much broader scholarly readership and make them more readily available to students in the fields of ancient history and early Judaism. The pieces are quite varied, but develop a number of connected and related themes: Jewish identity in the pagan world, the literary representations by Jews and pagans of one another, the interconnections of Hellenism and Judaism, and the Jewish experience under Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman empire.

Professor Martin Hengel demonstrates from a wealth of evidence, that in the New Testament period Hellenization was so widespread in Palestine that the usual distinction between 'Hellenistic' Judaism and `Palestinian' Judaism is not a valid one and that the word `Hellenistic' and related terms are so vague as to be meaningless.