The Jews in Late Ancient Rome

The Jews in Late Ancient Rome focusses on the Jewish community in third and fourth century Rome, and in particular on how this community related to the larger non-Jewish world that surrounded it. The book's point of departure is a refutation of the disputable thesis that Roman Jews lived in complete isolation.
The book examines Jewish archaeological remains and Jewish funerary inscriptions from Rome from various angles, and compares them with Pagan and early Christian material and epigraphical remains. In the last part the author concentrates on an enigmatic legal treatise entitled the Collatio, identifying its author and exploring the implications of this identification.
This study proposes a new way in which the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in late antiquity can be studied.

Leonard Victor Rutgers, Ph.D. (1993) in Philosophy, Duke University, is Research Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. He is presently engaged in the study of Jewish archaeological materials from Israel and Italy.

'It is truly a tour de force...Rutgers deserves the highest praise for his comprehensiveness, thoroughness, and accuracy in examining the epigraphic evidence. His work marks a tremendous advance over that of Leon.'
Louis H. Feldman, The Jewish Quarterly Review, 1996.
'The linguistic questions constitute only one strand in this richly complex and fascinating book. Dr. Rutgers is to be congratuled on his achievement, and we must hope that he will continue his investigation of these important and too-little examined questions.'
Nicholas de Lange, Bulletin of Judaeo-Greek Studies, 1996.
'This book is an important and useful addition to the literature on Roman Jewry in the middle Empire.'
Paul Corby Finney, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum, 1998.

Winner of the 1996 Keetje Hodshon Prize, awarded by the Dutch Society of Sciences.