Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans

One of the more interesting books about the Diaspora published in 2002 and reviewed recently (6/6)on SBL's Review of Biblical Literature is this:
Erich S. Gruen, Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002)pp. ix + 385.
The reviewer (Andrew S Jacobs) introduces his review thus:The thesis of Erich Gruen’s highly readable and thoughtful study Diaspora is easily, and frequently, stated: "Jews of the Second Temple period did not perceive themselves as victims of a diaspora" (135; see similar statements on 6, 53, 69, 131. 158, 193, 243). The traumatic shadow of the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., Gruen claims, has skewed perceptions of the ancient Jewish Diaspora, leading scholars to view
the preceding centuries as the tense build-up to an inevitable, and devastating, conflict between ethnically and cognitively displaced Jews and hostile and ferociously displacing Gentile powers. Gruen refuses to read the momentous Jewish War backward into the centuries-long Diaspora that preceded it, instead preferring to read evidence of the pre-70 Diaspora on its own terms (7). The result, for Gruen, is a portrait of Hellenistic Jewish life outside of Palestine characterized by "self-assurance and comfort in the Greekspeaking lands of the Mediterranean" (212). This challenge to the prevailing view of the Jewish Diaspora is welcome and inspiring. You can read the rest of this review by clicking here.