Anthology edited by Carol Bakhos covers nearly a millennium of Jewish history
Stephen Geller
A new book edited by Carol Bakhos covers the extensive period between the rise of Alexander the Great and the emergence of Islam.
| September 25, 2025
A 1,360-page book covering more than 900 years of Jewish history? It’s no wonder Carol Bakhos compares the completion of her latest project to finishing an endurance race.
“I do run marathons and I had to sometimes remind myself that this wasn’t a sprint,” said Bakhos, UCLA’s Robert E. Archer Professor of the Study of Religion, professor of Jewish studies and director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion. “But all of that long-distance training definitely helped.”
Bakhos is the editor of “The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 2: Emerging Judaism, 332 BCE–600 CE,” just published by Yale University Press. The book is part of a 10-volume series covering Jewish history from the birth of ancient Israel through the early 21st century.
The installment that Bakhos oversaw covers the years from Alexander the Great to the era just before the emergence of Islam. That transformative timespan saw the destruction of the Second Temple by the Roman Empire, in 70 CE, as well as Judaism responding to the Greek, Sasanian and Parthian empires; the emergence of rabbis; and a transition from temple-based belief to Torah-based practice. The book draws from an expansive range of sources — literary ones translated from Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Ethiopic, as well as archaeological ones.
“What’s unique about this volume is that it gives a multidimensional appreciation of the vitality and richness of Jewish culture and civilization from that period,” Bakhos said. “This was the formative period, when aspects we consider hallmarks of Judaism today started to take shape.”
Bakhos said working on the project, which took nearly 15 years, deepened her appreciation for the need for greater collaboration among scholars of ancient Judaism and for the challenges of presenting the rich heterogeneity of the Jewish experience.
“Scholars of ancient Judaism are committed to excavating the past, to providing a portal into the layered, complicated world of living Judaism. This rubs against the monolithic way we are taught to think of the past,” she said. “This process reaffirmed for me that we need to continue to remind ourselves and others that, just like today, the Jews never all believed in the same thing and never all practiced in the same way.”
Bakhos is also the author of “The Family of Abraham,” published by Harvard University Press in 2014, and “Ishmael on the Border: Rabbinic Portrayals of the First Arab,” published by State University of New York Press in 2006.