Happy Jews in the Roman Diaspora? The Case of Asia Minor (Anatolia) – Seth Schwartz
June 2 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
A dominant trend in scholarship about Jews in the Roman Imperial diaspora emphasizes the Jews’ achievement of a successful balance between integration and separation, and regards this happy equilibrium as essentially stable for centuries. I will argue that this view rests on a fundamental misreading of the sources. Asia Minor (modern Turkey) provided the richest evidence for the dominant view but when disentangled tells a story of conflict, instability and, above all, poverty. This rather gloomy picture changed for the better only in the fourth century CE, before a steady decline starting in the fifth.
Seth Schwartz is the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Classical Jewish Civilization in the Departments of History and Classics at Columbia University, where he also chairs the Graduate Program in Classical Studies. He received his PhD in History at Columbia in 1985. Before returning to Columbia in 2009, Schwartz taught at Cornell, the University of Rhode Island and the Jewish Theological Seminary, had research fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Harvard Society of Fellows and King’s College Cambridge. He wrote Consuls of the Later Roman Empire (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987)(with Roger Bagnall, Alan Cameron and Klaas Worp), Josephus and Judaean Politics (Leiden: Brill, 1990), Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), and The Ancient Jews From Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). The Jews of Asia Minor, 215 BCE to 500 CE: Text and Materiality, will be published by University of Chicago Press in November.
Tuesday, June 2, 2026 • 314 Royce Hall • 4 PM
Happy Jews in the Roman Diaspora? The Case of Asia Minor (Anatolia)
Seth Schwartz (Columbia University)
Moderator: Catherine Bonesho (UCLA)
Etta and Milton Leve Scholar in Residence Lecture