Together with the Department of History and the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean, IIJS was pleased to host Prof. Seth Schwartz for a discussion on The Jews of Asia Minor, 215 BCE–500 CE: Text and Materiality. Prof. John Ma of Columbia University’s History Department joined him for the conversation.

The Jews of Asia Minor, 215 BCE to 500 CE: Text and Materiality explores the benefits and pitfalls of writing about an archaeologically rich but literarily poor topic. The results of this inquiry are strongly revisionist: The Jews in ancient Asia Minor, or Anatolia, are shown to have been far from having achieved a perfect balance between integration in their host cities and self-preservation that scholars have long ascribed to them. Rather, the Jews experienced conflict and poverty, struggling to carve out a place for themselves in the Greek cities of Asia. Jewish communal institutions played little role before Late Antiquity, but Jews sometimes achieved a diffuse sense of community through trade guild membership and participation in theatrical events. Surprisingly, many of them expressed pride in their Roman identity but rarely, or never, their local civic identity. Even during the Jews’ brief period of prosperity and heightened civic engagement, c. 400 CE, their Jewish lives were characterized by strong localism, featuring many elements that distinguish the Jews of Asia sharply from those elsewhere in the Roman Empire.

Seth Schwartz is the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Classical Jewish Civilization in the Departments of History and Classics at Columbia University, where he also chairs the Graduate Program in Classical Studies. He received his PhD in History at Columbia in 1985. Before returning to Columbia in 2009, Schwartz taught at Cornell, the University of Rhode Island and the Jewish Theological Seminary, had research fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Harvard Society of Fellows and King’s College Cambridge. He wrote Consuls of the Later Roman Empire (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987)(with Roger Bagnall, Alan Cameron and Klaas Worp), Josephus and Judaean Politics (Leiden: Brill, 1990), Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), and The Ancient Jews From Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

John Ma teaches in the Department of Classics at Columbia. He completed a BA in Classics and a DPhil in Ancient History at Oxford, where he taught for 15 years before moving to Columbia. He is interested in ancient history, principally Hellenistic, epigraphical evidence, historical geography, paying particular attention to the interaction of local communities and empire. His latest monograph is an essay on the history of the Greek city-state: Polis (2024).

The discussion is available to view in full below.