Noted historian examines the world of the ancient Jews.

By Cindy Mindell

Erich Gruen is an American classicist and ancient historian. Born in Vienna, Austria, he earned BAs from Columbia University and Oxford University, and a PhD from Harvard University, in 1964. He was the Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of History and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught full-time from 1966 until 2008. He served as president of the American Philological Association in 1992.

Gruen’s research focuses on identity and otherness in the ancient world. His earlier work focused on the later Roman Republic, later working on the Hellenistic period and on Judaism in the classical world. His many books include Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome, Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of the Jewish Tradition, Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans, and Rethinking the Other in.

Gruen received a Rhodes Scholarship and the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, in addition to several teaching and faculty awards.

Despite his retirement from full-time teaching in 2006, he continues to oversee doctoral dissertations and is widely sought for visiting professorships. In addition to U.C. Berkeley, Gruen has taught at Harvard University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Cornell University. He claims that his most inspirational teaching experience, however, was a brief stint instructing prisoners at San Quentin State Prison in the late 2000s.

On Tuesday, Jan. 27, Gruen will present a lecture at the University of Connecticut at Storrs that is open to the public, on the topic of Religious Pluralism in the Roman Empire: The Case of the Jews.” The lecture is sponsored by the university’s Center for Judaic Studies

Recently, Gruen spoke with the Ledger about his research into how Jews navigated the Roman and Hellenistic worlds.

Q: How did you develop an academic interest in the Jews of antiquity? You seem to begin to focus on this topic around 1998. Did something specific spark this area of inquiry?

A: Roman history is the area in which I cut my scholarly teeth back in the 1960s and ‘70s, and I have never regretted it. But I moved in other directions in the late 1970s and the 1980s. I drifted into Hellenistic history and became heavily engaged with it, much to my pleasure and gratification. And the focus turned away from political and diplomatic history to cultural history, more particularly the interaction of Hellenic culture and Roman society that occupied much of my work for a decade and more. The exploration of means and media whereby Romans appropriated Hellenism to reformulate their own cultural identity led me in a natural progression – natural, at least, in retrospect – to investigation of a comparable subject, i.e. the relationship of Hellenism and Jewish identity. I regarded the shift in topic as an organic intellectual development – even though some of my colleagues and friends, especially those in Israel, interpreted the new direction as “a return to my Jewish roots.” So, in my view at least, it was a natural evolution and not a sudden change. Whatever the alleged unconscious drive, however, engagement with Jewish history and literature in the Greco-Roman period has held sway in my research for the last two decades.

Q: What are some of the misconceptions or gaps in knowledge about Jews under Greek and Roman rule that might surprise a modern-day Jew?

A: A couple of important ones spring readily to mind. First, it might surprise many – Jew and non-Jew alike – that Jews did not encounter a ceaseless series of calamities under Greek and then Roman overlordship. Common perception tends to concentrate upon the crises, the turbulence, the upheavals, and the disasters: the brutal assault by Antiochus Epiphanes upon Jewish practices and traditions in the 160s BCE that prompted the Maccabean rebellion, the great rebellion against Roman rule that resulted in the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, the bold but failed revolt under Bar-Kochba in the 130s CE. Without minimizing those crucial episodes, it is well to remember that they are exceptional rather than representative of a lengthy Jewish experience that stretched over several centuries in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Our sources do not write much about the long years of calm, stability, and successful adjustment that characterized most of that experience.

Second, the Jewish diaspora, in the usual understanding, began with the fall of Jerusalem to Roman power in 70 CE. On this prevailing notion, the destruction of the Temple and the loss of their spiritual home drove the Jews unwillingly but inevitably to seek new homes and lives abroad, the source of the exodus that sent them to expatriate communities across the Mediterranean. The fact is, however, that the scattering of the Jews began long before the fall of Jerusalem, not through compulsion but through voluntary migrations in increasing numbers from the 5th century BCE on. The Greek cities of the Mediterranean attracted Jews from every walk of life, from writers and intellectuals to mercenary soldiers who settled in places like Alexandria, Antioch, the cities of Anatolia, Macedonia, and Italy. Throughout the Greco-Roman period Jews in the diaspora vastly outnumbered those in the homeland.

Q: What will you talk about at UConn?

A: With regard to the public lecture, “Religious Pluralism in the Roman Empire: The Case of the Jews,” the Romans have long been praised for their tolerance of other peoples, cults, and gods. A wide array of religious practices existed in the Roman Empire, and there was no requirement of conformity to an official creed. The Romans indeed even imported various forms of alien worship and incorporated them into their own sacred calendar. But what about their treatment of the Jews who were occasionally and brutally repressed? Were the Jews an exception to the rule of Roman tolerance? Did their own exclusivity and drive for separateness keep them outside the wide tent of the empire? Or did the Romans not consider them a religion but rather an ethnic group? And, if so, did they need to “tolerate” them at all? These difficult and problematic questions will be addressed in the lecture.

“Religious Pluralism in the Roman Empire: The Case of the Jews” with Prof. Erich Gruen: Tuesday, Jan. 27, 4 PM, UConn, Babbidge Library, Class of ‘47 Meeting Room, Storrs | RSVP: judaicstudies@uconn.edu.