Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

As Judeans migrated, voluntarily and involuntarily, during the Greco-Roman era from their Levantine homeland and formed diaspora communities in many urban centers of the Mediterranean basin, they addressed multiple challenges. They sought to construct a meaningful, trans-local, and trans-generationally-sustainable group-identity as minority communities, effectively distanced from their national/ethnic homeland and its dominant social institutions and culture. Simultaneously, these migrants and their descendants strove to participate meaningfully in the economic, social and cultural world of their “host” lands’ urban environments. They achieved these ends, in part, by translating a national-ethnic culture sustained by a national cult (to which diaspora Jews no longer had functional access) into a religion-based, ethnic association in their “host” cities of settlement. This paper explores the role that Judean textual traditions played in this process. We will argue that, for example, public reading and exposition of these texts, the “mining” of them for a public liturgy, and the selective appropriation of these texts’ prescriptions and proscriptions provided the principal means for creating the religious associations that defined Diaspora Jewish identity (and, not unimportantly, provided as well the model for the formation of the early Christian association-assemblies in the Roman imperial period).