Jews in a Graeco-Roman Environment

Margaret H. Williams presents a selection of studies, most of them epigraphically based, on the Jewish Diaspora in Graeco-Roman antiquity. Those collected in the first part deal with problems connected with the Jewish community in Rome, its history, organisation and burial practices. The papers in the second part are mainly concerned with other Jewish settlements in the Roman Empire, most notably those of Aphrodisias and Corycus in Asia Minor and Venusia in Italy. The third part focuses entirely on Jewish naming practices such as the use of alternative names, the formation of festal names and the increasing preference in Late Antiquity for Hebrew names. The reception of these studies, previously dispersed over a variety of publications, forms the subject of the over-arching introductory essay. Since the original articles were written, many of the inscriptions have been re-edited in new corpora. References to these are systematically included in this volume.