Military Service and the Integration of Jews into the Roman Empire /
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"According to Raúl González Salinero, the plurality of religious expressions within Judaism prior to the predominance of the rabbinical current disproves the assumption according to which some Jewish customs and precepts (especially the Sabbath) prevented Jews from joining the Roman army without renouncing their ancestral culture. The military exemption occasionally granted to the Jews by the Roman authorities was compatible with their voluntary enlistment (as it was in the Hellenistic armies) in order to obtain Roman citizenship. As the sources attest, Judaism did not pose any insurmountable obstacle to integration of the Jews into the Roman world. They achieved a noteworthy presence in the Roman army by the fourth century CE, at which time the Church's influence over imperial power led to their exclusion from the militia armata"--
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004507258
9789004506756
Inscribing devotion and death : archaeological evidence for Jewish populations of North Africa /
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Reliance on essentialist or syncretistic models of cultural dynamics has limited past evaluations of ancient Jewish populations. This reexamination of evidence for Jews of North Africa offers an alternative approach. Drawing from methods developed in cultural studies and historical linguistics, this book replaces traditional categories used to examine evidence for early Jewish populations and demonstrates how direct comparison of Jewish material evidence with that of its neighbors allows for a reassessment of what the category of "Jewish" might have meant in different North African locations and periods and, by extension, elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The result is a transformed analysis of Jewish cultural identity that both emphasizes its indebtedness to larger regional contexts and allows for a more informed and complex understanding of Jewish cultural distinctiveness.
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1 online resource (xviii, 342 pages) : illustrations, maps. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 315-334) and index. :
9789047423843 :
0927-7633 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.