Department of Jewish Thought

ROMANA The Roman Turn among Jews, Greek Pagans, and Christians

ROMANA seeks to uncover the pervasive presence of Rome in Jewish, Greek-Pagan, and Christian texts, revealing the strategies of cultural interaction between imperial power and diverse minority groups. It explores how the major intellectual discourses that shaped the West—those of Greek elites, early Christians, and Hellenistic and rabbinic Jews—emerged through complex and often concealed engagements with empire. By redrawing the traditional map of the Roman world, the project challenges the divide between Rome and the provinces, exposing the deep entanglement of “provincial” elites with imperial culture despite their claims to purity. The starting point is first-century Hellenistic Judaism, where Philo and Josephus—Greek-writing Jewish authors active in Rome—combined philosophical, literary, and legal thought to address Roman audiences. Their strategies of acculturation provide a model for tracing similar cultural negotiations in the Second Sophistic, early Christianity, and rabbinic literature. Through close, comparative study of philosophical, literary, and legal traditions across Greek, Hebrew/Aramaic, and Latin texts, ROMANA will reveal the mutual entanglement of these trajectories and Roman discourse, offering new insights into traditions long studied in isolation.