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DESCRIPTION:Join us this spring for the Leon Levy Foundation Lectures in Je
 wish Material Culture. Seth Schwartz will deliver three lectures in a seri
 es entitled “Materiality and Politics: How Integrated were Diaspora Jews i
 n the Roman Empire?”A dominant trend in ancient Jewish scholarship regards
  the Jews of the high Roman imperial diaspora as having reached a successf
 ul and sustainable balance between friendly integration and the separation
  necessary for the maintenance of a particular religious identity. The arc
 haeological remains of the Jewish communities of Asia Minor (modern Turkey
 ) provide the bulk of the evidence for this characterization. (Evidence fr
 om other provinces\, primarily Egypt and Cyrenaica—modern Libya—has drasti
 cally more disturbing implications). In the course of three lectures Schwa
 rtz will challenge the rosy picture of stable and successful Jewish corpor
 ate life under Rome through skeptically minimalistic analysis of Asian Jew
 ish materiality and the ways in which it has been deployed in modern histo
 riography. He will also try to account for what in the final analysis were
  divergent Jewish experiences in different Roman provincial settings.Lectu
 re 3—Materiality and Culture: Did the Asian Jews Attain Stability in the H
 igh and Later Roman Empire (250–600 CE)? (May 19)How can we read material 
 culture politically? The question acquires its urgency from the fact that 
 material culture has dominated the study of later imperial Asian Jewry\, a
 nd the mirage of stability produced by the materiality of the material has
  shaped scholars’ understanding of earlier periods too. But there are ways
  to break or bypass—or at very least complicate out of meaningful existenc
 e—the materialist illusion\, even if we cannot in the final analysis extra
 ct a satisfactorily messy and richly ludic political history from it. We c
 an begin by disaggregating the material and resituating specific items in 
 their environments. We can employ comparison: how does Jewish material cul
 ture compare to that of other municipal communities? What is missing from 
 the Jewish record? What are the different ways of accounting for its ambig
 uities? And finally\, how does the Jews’ material culture help us understa
 nd the Jews’ relation to the Roman state?Lecture 1—The Problem of Asian Je
 wry (May 4)Lecture 2—Politics: Jews\, Asian Cities\, and the Roman State (
 May 11)Seth Schwartz (BA\, Classics\, Yeshiva University\, 1979\; PhD\, Hi
 story\, Columbia\, 1985) is a political\, social\, and cultural historian 
 of the Jews who specializes in the period between Alexander the Great and 
 the rise of Islam\, and has become especially interested in the anthropolo
 gical and social theoretical aspects of his field. Before returning to Col
 umbia in 2009 he taught for fourteen years at the Jewish Theological Semin
 ary after having been a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows an
 d a senior research fellow at King’s College\, Cambridge. In 1999/2000 he 
 was a Guggenheim Fellow and in 2006/7 a member of the School of Historical
  Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study\, Princeton. He is co-author\
 , with Roger Bagnall\, Alan Cameron and Klaas Worp of Consuls of the Later
  Roman Empire (Atlanta\, 1987)\, and author of Josephus and Judaean Politi
 cs (Leiden\, 1990) and Imperialism and Jewish Society\, 200 BCE to 640 CE 
 (Princeton\, 2001)\, Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity an
 d Solidarity in Ancient Judaism (Princeton\, 2009)\, and The Ancient Jews 
 from Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge\, 2014).Additional support provided 
 by The David Berg Foundation.This event will be held via Zoom. A link will
  be circulated to registrants by 3 pm on the day of the event. This event 
 will be live with automatic captions.
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210519T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210519T193000
SUMMARY:Bard Graduate Center: Materiality and Politics: How Integrated were
  Diaspora Jews in the Roman Empire? Lecture 3
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