On "Jews in Hellenistic and Roman Cities" edited by John R. Bartlett ***

Generally, if there is more than one book on a subject and one is written by one person and the other is an edited collection, I will choose to read the former before I bother with the latter. The advantage with an edited collection is that one gets different perspectives on a topic. But there's also something nice about a single sustained argument. Occasionally, an edited collection will manage to be tightly enough woven together to do something almost akin to that.

Too often, however, edited collections feel like smorgasboards--whatever the editor was able to cobble together on a given subject. So, say, you're doing an edited collection on American presidents, and there's a chapter on Washington, and then the next chapter is on John Quincy Adams. There's no throughline. It's just random highlights.

This collection, alas, reminded me of exactly why I don't particularly care for such collections. I mean, I could be reading a set of journal articles, which is what such feels like. The individual contributions can be good, but they are still haphazard, and often half of them don't seem to cohere with material that is of interest. In this book, some chapters were focused on really esoteric topics and others were things that I really had wanted to know more about and would still like to know more about. What I was hoping for, I suppose, was a pretty sustained exploration of Jews in Roman cities--but something that seemed more than the sum of its parts.

The book has many highlights, though. I much enjoyed the essay by Lester Grabbe, who I'd long wanted to read, about how Greek culture affected Jerusalem itself. He writes in a very approachable way, even if much of the subject wasn't particularly new. Tessa Rajak's piece on synagogues did a good job of showing how such communities were likely more extensive than sometimes what little surviving architecture suggests. McGing focuses on population. My favorite chapter was Stern's about the Jewish calendar in diaspora cities; he makes some good points about how most Jews would have had a way to set the calendar locally well before the Rabbi's did so in the wake of the destruction of the temple.

As the book, went on, however, the book seemed more and more focused on arguments between scholars, as a scholarly book often is. But such made for fewer takeaways for me, wanting not so much to know why argument X is not right and more about the actual topic at hand.