Bibliography
| Title: The Jews of Egypt from Rameses II to emperor Hadrian Pages: XXII-279 Type: Book Year: 1997 Abstract: "S. Cohen has written a Foreword to Modrzejewski's book; in it he speaks of the Jewish civilisation in Hellenistic Egypt as the first Golden Age of Jews and Judaism. Modrzejewski, who has written extensively in French about the Jews of Egypt (this book is a translation of a revised form of his 1992 French volume of the same title), here sets for his project the chronological limits mentioned in the subtitle (he concentrates on the period from 331 BCE to 117 CE). He writes that "this book is based essentially on the written sources, which may be divided into two categories. On the one hand, literary texts; some are well known and easily accessible, such as the Bible, the writings of Philo of Alexandria and Josephus; others, such as the Apocrypha and Judeo-Alexandrian literature, are a bit more specialized. On the other hand, we have gathered a rich supply of information from Greek papyri, which have been unearthed, over the last hundred years, from the sands of Egypt..." (pp. XVIII-XIX). The history moves quickly through the biblical material and dwells at greater length on the time when the military colony was at Elephantine and the Ptolemaic and the Roman periods for which the documentary evidence (to which he devotes more attention) is the most plentiful. The final chapter surveys Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Roman annihilation of the Jewish community in the war of 115-17 and also examines the sparse evidence for Jewish life in Egypt after 117. An epilogue treats the origins and earliest history of Christianity in Egypt. The attractive volum comes equipped with a chronological table, a calendar, a list of monetary units and units of measure, a glossary, a bibliography, maps, and indices of persons/places and of sources". - VanderKam, James C. Keywords: Egypt, Judaism in Alexandria and Egypt |