Catherine Hezser
Biographic Data
| ID | 415761 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Catherine Hezser |
| GIVEN NAMES | Catherine |
| FAMILY NAME | Hezser |
| SIGNATURE | HEZSER C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5246-6898 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Cultural Hybridity, Identity, and Foreignness: The Perception of Space in Jewish Hellenistic and Rabbinic Travel Narratives
Whereas Jewish writers who grew up in a Hellenized environment, such as Philo of Alexandria, Paul, and Flavius Josephus, describe their sea journeys across the Mediterranean and encounters abroad, travel narratives in Palestinian rabbinic literature almost exclusively deal with land journeys of a much shorter duration within the Land of Israel itself and, sometimes, further afield to the adjacent regions of Egypt and Syria and onwards to Babyloni…
Circumventing the Law: Rabbinic Perspectives on Loopholes and Legal Integrity, by Elana Stein Hain
The Hebrew Bible in Ancient Jewish Education
After the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and the end of the sacrificial service in 70 CE rabbis made Torah study and observance the basis of Jewish identity. Since no organised Jewish school system existed in Roman Palestine, only a very small proportion of the mostly male Jewish population would have been able to read, and few people had access to Torah scrolls. Rabbinic Torah experts set themselves up as intermediaries and advisers who hel…
Jews and Their Roman Rivals: Pagan Rome’s Challenge to Israel, written by Katell Berthelot
This monumental book, which is the outcome of a five-year ERC Consolidator Grant, is an excellent synthesis of recent scholarship on the impact of Roman imperialism on the Jewish inhabitants of the Roman empire.The 58-page bibliography as well as the numerous summaries and references to other scholars' work indicate the immense amount of reading that constitutes the basis of this study.The author reemphasizes the communis opinio on Jewish reactio…
Going West: Migrating Personae and Construction of the Self in Rabbinic Culture, written by Kiperwasser, Reuven
Schrift/Schreiben/Schreiber
Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine
Catherine Hezser presents a comprehensive study of Jewish literacy in antiquity. She elucidates similarities and differences between the ancient Jewish and Graeco-Roman use of writing and follows recent social-anthropological approaches to literacy, focusing on the social contexts and purposes of writing.
Class and Power in Roman Palestine. The Socioeconomic Setting of Judaism and Christian Origins, written by Anthony Keddie
The Creation of the Talmud Yerushalmi and Apophthegmata Patrum as Monuments to the Rabbinic and Monastic Movements in Early Byzantine Times
This paper investigates the compilatory processes that led to the creation of the Talmud Yerushalmi and the Apophthegmata Patrum in early Byzantine Palestine. These encyclopaedic works are based on individual oral traditions that emerged from teacher-disciple networks of rabbis and monks. A comparison of the scholastic settings, editorial processes and structural arrangements highlights the complexity of the Talmud's organizing principles, which …
Self-Control in a World Controlled By Others: Palestinian Rabbinic 'Asceticism’ in Late Antiquity
The article suggests that asceticism can best be understood as a religious form of self-control, of using one’s mind to control one’s body. The control of the senses can serve as a category that allows us to compare rabbinic 'ascetic’ behaviours with those associated with ancient Christianity. Askesis and self-control were already present in Hellenistic culture on which both rabbinic Judaism and ancient Christianity are based. Self-control for th…
Law, Jewish
Ancient Jewish law mainly consists of rabbinic law, that is, the legal regulations promulgated by the rabbis of Roman Palestine and Babylonia between the time of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ce and the mid‐fifth century.
Court, Rabbinic
The ways in which rabbinic courts are presented in rabbinic literary sources cannot be considered historically reliable. The literary sources are keen on presenting post‐70 ce rabbis as leaders of a monolithic court system that replicated the priestly monarchy from before the destruction of the Temple. In reality, rabbis seem to have functioned as informal adjudicators who gave individual legal advice alongside a range of other Jewish and Roman j…
Bild und Kontext: Jüdische und christliche Ikonographie der Spätantike
Catherine Hezser shows that late antique Jewish and Christian art was in constant dialogue with each others artistic expressions and theological views.
Bild und Kontext: Jüdische und Christliche Ikonographie der Spätantike
Catherine Hezser zeigt, dass sich die jüdische und christliche Kunst der Spätantike in kontinuierlichem Austausch mit und Bezugnahme auf die künstlerischen Ausdrucksweisen und theologischen Ansichten der jeweils anderen religiösen Gemeinschaft befand. In römisch-byzantinischer Zeit entwickelte sich im Judentum und Christentum eine Kunst, die im Gegensatz zum biblischen Bilderverbot figürliche Darstellungen verwendete und bestimmte, in der griechi…
Rabbinic Body Language: Non-Verbal Communication in Palestinian Rabbinic Literature of Late Antiquity
This study constitutes the first comprehensive examination of rabbinic body language represented in Palestinian rabbinic sources of late antiquity. Catherine Hezser examines rabbis' appearance and demeanor, spatial movement, gestures, and facial expressions on the basis of literary and social-anthropological methods and theories. She discusses the various forms of rabbis' non-verbal communication in the context of Graeco-Roman and ancient Christi…
Jewish Art in Its Late Antique Context
The contributions to this volume examine the emergence of ancient Jewish art from the interdisciplinary perspective of scholars in Art and Archaeology, Ancient Judaism and Rabbinics, Patristics and Church History. They evaluate the manifold ways in which late antique and early Byzantine Jewish art was embedded in its Hellenistic and Roman cultural context by, at the same time, evincing specifically Jewish and local Near Eastern idiosyncrasies. Si…
Greek and Roman Slaving in Comparative Ancient Perspective: The Level of Integration
Graeco-Roman slavery can be properly understood only when compared with slave practices in other ancient societies. This chapter shows that in ancient Israel, Egypt, and Babylonia slavery had a major impact on almost all areas of daily life. Therefore Finley’s categorical distinction between slave societies and slave-holding societies must be dismissed. The main difference between Roman and Near Eastern slaving seems to have been political: Rome …
Essential Figures in the Bible (vol. 1), Essential Figures in the Talmud (vol. 2), Essential Figures in Jewish Scholarship (vol. 3)
Crossing Enemy Lines: Network Connections Between Palestinian and Babylonian Sages in Late Antiquity
The Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds transmit stories about sages who crossed the boundaries between the Roman and Persian empires in late antiquity to sojourn in the “enemy” territory for a certain amount of time. These sages, who were members of local rabbinic networks, established inter-regional network connections among Palestinian and Babylonian scholars which reached across political boundaries. This paper will investigate how these conne…
Twentieth-Century Jews: Forging identity in the land of promise and in the promised land
This collection of nine essays, five of which have already been published in other formats before, examines particular incidents and personages of twentieth-century American Jewish and Israeli hist
Samuel Krauss' Contribution to the Study of Ancient Judaism, Christianity, and Graeco-Roman Culture within the Context of Wissenschaft Scholarship
Although Samuel Krauss can be considered one of the most prominent Wissenschaft scholars of Judaism in the Roman–Byzantine period, no intellectual biography or even a comprehensive assessment of his scholarship—which went beyond the confines of ancient Jewish history—has been written to date.1 This may partly be due to the fact that his personal letters, documents, and manuscripts are scattered amongst archives around the world and are difficult …
Jewish travel in antiquity: Jewish Travel in Antiquity
This book provides the first comprehensive study of Jewish travel and mobility in Hellenistic and Roman times, based on a critical analysis of Jewish, Graeco-Roman, and early Christian literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources and a social-historical evaluation of the material. Catherine Hezser shows that certain segments of ancient Jewish society were quite mobile. Mobility seems to have increased in the later Roman period, when an extens…
The Cambridge World History of Slavery
Volume 1 in the new Cambridge World History of Slavery surveys the history of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean world. Although chapters are devoted to the ancient Near East and the Jews, its principal concern is with the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. These are often considered as the first examples in world history of genuine slave societies because of the widespread prevalence of chattel slavery, which is argued to have been a cultur…
The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine
This book is a reference compendium on the day-to-day lives of Jews in the land of Israel in Roman times. Ranging from subjects such as clothing and domestic architecture to food and meals, labour and trade, and leisure-time activities, it covers all the major themes. Individual articles introduce the reader to the current state of research on particular aspects of ancient Jewish everyday life — research that has been greatly enriched by critical…
The Routledge companion to religion and film
The Routledge companion to religion and film
The Roman Provincial Administration
This is a reference compendium on the day-to-day lives of Jews in the land of Israel in Roman times. The handbook covers all the major themes, from clothing and domestic architecture to food and meals, labour and trade, and leisure time activities in a comprehensive yet easily accessible way
Rabbinic Body Language: Non-Verbal Communication in Palestinian Rabbinic Literature of Late Antiquity
This study constitutes the first comprehensive examination of rabbinic body language represented in Palestinian rabbinic sources of late antiquity. Catherine Hezser examines rabbis' appearance and demeanor, spatial movement, gestures, and facial expressions on the basis of literary and social-anthropological methods and theories. She discusses the various forms of rabbis' non-verbal communication in the context of Graeco-Roman and ancient Christi…
Are you Protestant Jews or Roman Catholic Jews?” Literary Representations of Being Jewish in Ireland
Journal Article “Are you Protestant Jews or Roman Catholic Jews?” Literary Representations of Being Jewish in Ireland Get access Catherine Hezser Catherine Hezser Trinity College Dublin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Modern Judaism - A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience, Volume 25, Issue 2, May 2005, Pages 159–188, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/kji011 Published: 01 May 2005
Crossing Enemy Lines: Network Connections Between Palestinian and Babylonian Sages in Late Antiquity
The Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds transmit stories about sages who crossed the boundaries between the Roman and Persian empires in late antiquity to sojourn in the “enemy” territory for a certain amount of time. These sages, who were members of local rabbinic networks, established inter-regional network connections among Palestinian and Babylonian scholars which reached across political boundaries. This paper will investigate how these conne…
Samuel Krauss' Contribution to the Study of Ancient Judaism, Christianity, and Graeco-Roman Culture within the Context of Wissenschaft Scholarship
Although Samuel Krauss can be considered one of the most prominent Wissenschaft scholars of Judaism in the Roman–Byzantine period, no intellectual biography or even a comprehensive assessment of his scholarship—which went beyond the confines of ancient Jewish history—has been written to date.1 This may partly be due to the fact that his personal letters, documents, and manuscripts are scattered amongst archives around the world and are difficult …
Form, Function, and Historical Significance of the Rabbinic Story in Yerushalmi Neziqin
Form, Function, and Historical Significance of the Rabbinic Story in Yerushalmi Neziqin
"Spier, "Der Sabbat
Die Verwendung Der Hellenistischen Gattung Chrie Im Frühen Christentum Und Judentum
DIE VERWENDUNG DER HELLENISTISCHEN GATTUNG CHRIE IM FRÜHEN CHRISTENTUM UND JUDENTUM VON CATHERINE HEZSER Institut für Fudaistik, Schwendenerstr. 27, 14195 Berlin 1. Einleitung Die hellenistische Gattung Chrie, die gelegentlich auch Apophthegma genannt wird, ist sowohl im friihen Christentum als auch im rabbi- nischen Judentum rezipiert worden. Durch einen Vergleich der ver- schiedenen Rezeptionen dieser Gattung soll festgestellt werden, welche fo…
The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine
The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine
Form, Function, and Historical Significance of the Rabbinic Story in Yerushalmi Neziqin
The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture II
This volume continues the studies on the most important source of late antique Judaism, the Talmud Yerushalmi, in relation to its cultural context. The text of the Talmud is juxtaposed to archaeological findings, Roman law, and contemporary classical authors. The attitude of the Rabbis towards main aspects of urban society in the Mediterranean region of late antiquity is discussed. Hereby Rabbinic Judaism is seen as integrated in the cultural cur…
Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (Texts & Studies in Ancient Judaism)
Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (Texts & Studies in Ancient Judaism, 81)
Since Judaism has always been seen as the quintessential 'religion of the book', a high literacy rate amongst ancient Jews has usually been taken for granted. Catherine Hezser presents the first critical analysis of the various aspects of ancient Jewish literacy on the basis of all of the literary, epigraphic, and papyrological material published so far. Thereby she takes into consideration the analogies in Graeco-Roman culture and models and the…
Shoah Survivors and the Second Generation in American Jewish Writing: Bernard Malamud, Rebecca Goldstein, Thane Rosenbaum
Shoah Survivors and the Second Generation in American Jewish Writing: Bernard Malamud, Rebecca Goldstein, Thane Rosenbaum
A Tree of Life. Diversity, Flexibility, and Creativity in Jewish Law
Jewish Law: Bibliography of Sources and Scholarship in English
This compilation is the result of initiatives undertaken by the Center for Research in Jewish Law and the Library at the New York University School of Law to prepare a comprehensive bibliography of translations of primary sources and secondary literature (both books and articles) on Jewish law (Mishpat Ivri, i.e. Talmudic Civil Law) in English. Bibliographies of the respective Hebrew literature have already appeared, but the increase in the study…
Essays on Law and Religion. The Berkeley and Oxford Symposia in Honour of David Daube
The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture, Vol. 1
Rabbinic Law in its Roman and Near Eastern Context
Ancient Palestinian and Babylonian rabbinic literature developed in a context of constant exposure to and challenge by the dominant Graeco-Roman and Babylonian cultures. Rabbinic legal thinking is unlikely to have constituted an exception in this regard. Yet the positivistic search for influences is increasingly seen as inappropriate in recent scholarship. What is much more important is to investigate the ways in which rabbinic legal thinking par…
The Impact of Household Slaves on the Jewish Family in Roman Palestine
In late antiquity most of the slaves owned by Jewish slave owners in Roman Palestine seem to have been domestic slaves. These slaves formed an integral part of the Jewish household and played an important role within the family economy. In a number of respects the master-slave relationship resembled the wife-husband, child-father, and student-teacher relationships, and affectionate bonds between the slave and his master (or nursling) would have a…
Rabbinic Interpretation of Scripture in the Mishnah
Jewish slavery in antiquity
A comprehensive historical-critical study of Jewish slavery in antiquity, this work compares the Jewish discourse on slavery with Graeco-Roman and Christian attitudes
Are you Protestant Jews or Roman Catholic Jews?” Literary Representations of Being Jewish in Ireland
Journal Article “Are you Protestant Jews or Roman Catholic Jews?” Literary Representations of Being Jewish in Ireland Get access Catherine Hezser Catherine Hezser Trinity College Dublin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Modern Judaism - A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience, Volume 25, Issue 2, May 2005, Pages 159–188, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/kji011 Published: 01 May 2005
Traditions of the Rabbis From the Era of the New Testament: Prayer and AgricultureInstone-BrewerDavid Traditions of the Rabbis From the Era of the New Testament: Prayer and Agriculture William B. Eerd…
The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature: Studies in the Evolution of the Versions, and: Megillat Taʻanit: Versions, Interpretation, History, and: Pirke de-Rabbi Elieser (review)
Reviewed by: The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature: Studies in the Evolution of the Versions, and: Megillat Ta‘anit: Versions, Interpretation, History, and: Pirke de-Rabbi Elieser Catherine Hezser Marc Bregman. Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature: Studies in the Evolution of the Versions. Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2003. Pp. x + 302 (Hebrew section); pp. x + 9 (English section). Vered Noam. Megillat Ta‘anit: Versions, Interpretation, History. [Hebr…
Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. By Israel Jacob Yuval
This book, which is the English translation of the Hebrew original published in 2000, reevaluates the relationship between Jews and Christians in late antiquity and the Middle Ages until the thirteenth century. While most previous scholars assumed that Judaism, the so-called “mother” religion, had a considerable impact on the development of Christianity, Israel Jacob Yuval reverses this argument and suggests that after the destruction of the Jeru…
Capitalism and Christianity, American style
William E. Connolly, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2008, xvi +174 pp., US$21.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-8223-4272-4 Connolly is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopk
The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine
This book is a reference compendium on the day-to-day lives of Jews in the land of Israel in Roman times. Ranging from subjects such as clothing and domestic architecture to food and meals, labour and trade, and leisure-time activities, it covers all the major themes. Individual articles introduce the reader to the current state of research on particular aspects of ancient Jewish everyday life — research that has been greatly enriched by critical…
The Routledge companion to religion and film
Correlating Literary, Epigraphic, and Archaeological Sources
This article introduces the different types of source material for the study of Jewish daily life in Roman Palestine. These include the literary, epigraphic, and papyrological sources. The article also discusses the methodological issues that concern the interdisciplinary cultural-historical study of the material
History (33 works) · Archaeology and Historical Studies (29 works) · Judaism (27 works) · Biblical Studies and Interpretation (25 works) · Archaeology (23 works) · Art (21 works) · Ancient history (19 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Political science (18 works) · Law (16 works)