Noah Hacham

Tal Ilan

The period between the Roman take-over of Egypt (30 BCE) and the failure of the Jewish diaspora revolt (115–117 CE) witnessed the continual devaluation in the status of the Jews in Egypt, and culminated in the destruction of its Jewish community. This volume collects and presents all papyri, ostraca, amulets and inscriptions from this early Roman period connected to Jews and Judaism, published since 1957. It is a follow-up of the 1960 volume 2 of the Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum. It includes over 80 documents in Greek, Demotic, and Hebrew, both documentary and literary. The expansion of the scope of documents, to include languages other than Greek and genres beyond the documentary, allows for a better understanding of the life of the Jews in Egypt. The documents published in this volume shed new light on aspects discussed previously: The Demotic papyri better explain the Jewish settlement in Edfu, new papyri reveal more about Jewish tax, about the Acta papyri, and about the developments of the Jewish revolt. The magical papyri help explain cultural developments in the Jewish community of Egypt. This volume is thus a major contribution to the study of the decline of the greatest diaspora Jewish community in antiquity.

The Early-Roman Period (30 BCE–117 CE)

Geoffrey Herman

Dikla Rivlin Katz

Lilach Sagiv

‘‘‘Who am I?’ and ‘Who are we?’ are the existential, foundational questions in our lives. In our modern world, there is no construct more influential than ‘identity’ – whether as individuals or as groups. The concept of group identity is the focal point of a research group named “A Question of Identity” at the Mandel Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The papers collected in this volume represent the proceedings of a January 2017 conference organized by the research group which dealt with identity formation in six contextual settings: Ethno-religious identities in light of the archaeological record; Second Temple period textual records on Diaspora Judaism; Jews and Christians in Sasanian Persia; minorities in the Persian achaemenid period; Inter-ethnic dialogue in pre-1948 Palestine; and redefinitions of Christian Identity in the Early Modern period.

Noah Hacham

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