In histories of ancient Jews and Judaism, the Roman Empire looms large. For all the attention to the Jewish Revolt and other conflicts, however, there has been less concern for situating Jews within Roman imperial contexts; just as Jews are frequently dismissed as atypical by scholars of Roman history, so Rome remains invisible in many studies of rabbinic and other Jewish sources written under Roman rule. Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire brings Jewish perspectives to bear on long-standing debates concerning Romanization, Christianization, and late antiquity. Focusing on the third to sixth centuries, it draws together specialists in Jewish and Christian history, law, literature, poetry, and art. Perspectives from rabbinic and patristic sources are juxtaposed with evidence from piyyutim, documentary papyri, and synagogue and church mosaics. Through these case studies, contributors highlight paradoxes, subtleties, and ironies of Romanness and imperial power. Contributors : William Adler, Beth A. Berkowitz, Ra'anan Boustan, Hannah M. Cotton, Natalie B. Dohrmann, Paula Fredriksen, Oded Irshai, Hayim Lapin, Joshua Levinson, Ophir Münz-Manor, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Hagith Sivan, Michael D. Swartz, Rina Talgam. "Beginning with the editors' fundamental historiographical and programmatic essay, Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire is the most important collection of studies on Jews in late antiquity I have ever seen. In fact, it is essential reading for all students of late antiquity. Especially admirable is the book's implicit argument that late antiquity was constituted not by a single seismic shift but by the slow accretion of small changes over time." ― Seth Schwartz, Columbia University "This volume opens up important new intellectual avenues for students of ancient religion and empire and will undoubtedly have a tremendous impact on multiple arenas of scholarly research. There is, simply, no work that tackles the intellectual question 'How do we integrate Judaism into the Roman Empire, and vice versa?' with such depth and breadth." ― Andrew S. Jacobs, Scripps College Natalie B. Dohrmann is Associate Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the coeditor of Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange: Comparative Exegesis in Context, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Annette Yoshiko Reed is M. Mark and Esther K. Watkins Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, author of Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity, and coeditor of The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity. Introduction Rethinking Romanness, Provincializing Christendom Annette Yoshiko Reed and Natalie B. Dohrmann In histories of ancient Jews and Judaism, the Roman Empire looms large. Already in 1 and 2 Maccabees, Roman power is figured as a factor in the negotiation of Ioudaismos and Hellenismos , and at least since Flavius Josephus, the writing of Jewish history in Greek presumes a Roman gaze. Since Josephus, moreover, the first Jewish revolt against Rome (66-73 ce) has been a primary pivot and problem for recounting the fate of the Jewish people under foreign rule. The revolt serves as the stormy horizon for the Judaean War and Antiquities alike—two works that represent the culmination of Hellenistic Jewish historiography but also the last known Jewish-authored historical writings until the Middle Ages. To be sure, much ancient Jewish literature effaces the specificity of Roman rule. In the apocalyptic imagination, Rome could be collapsed into Babylon; and in the midrashic imagination, Jewish life in the Roman Empire could be folded into the Deuteronomistic dichotomy of Israel and the nations. Among some rabbis, their relationship could even be reread as a rivalry between two commensurate powers, like the wrestling of Jacob and Esau. Nevertheless, in the Sages' Edom—as in the Kittim of the Qumran literature and in the blurred Babylon-cum-Rome of 4 Ezra and Revelation—we glimpse hints of engagement with a distinctive imperial culture, not so neatly mapped onto biblical models or onto the historical precedents provided by Assyrian, Babylonian, Achaemenid, Ptolemaic, or Seleucidic rule. Furthermore, as much as a fantasy of isolation envelops the literature of Palestinian rabbis, the ideal of separateness may betray something of the Romanness of its motives and settings. That Roman power is implicated in rabbinic authority, after all, is suggested in the origin myths of the rabbis themselves, wherein the establishment of Yavneh is retrospectively tied to the Roman razing of Jerusalem, as Judaism resurrected—with Roman imperial ratification—from the ashes of the Second Temple. The present volume attends to such paradoxes, subtleties, and ironies of empire, su