Cultural Persistence in Jewish Antiquity

A new book, hitherto unknown to me, are being reviewed in the BrynMawr Classical Review these days:Steven Weitzman, Surviving Sacrilege.
Cultural Persistence in Jewish Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. viii, 204. ISBN 0-674-01708-0. $39.95. Reviewed by Marcus Sigismund, Bergische Universitat Wuppertal.
The study explores the struggle for cultural survival of ancient Judaism, their efforts to preserve religious traditions and the tactics that early Jewish culture employed to sustain itself in the face of intractable, sometimes hostile realities. The study is limited to the period between the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. and that of the Second by the Romans in 70 C.E.

The book has 8 chapters, and the review writes this about chapter 3:In chapter 3 the author demonstrates that one of the factors which
allowed the Jews to sustain their traditions under Caligula's rule was
having friends in the right places. This chapter draws heavily on The
Embassy to Gaius by Philo, who thought that the most effective way of
keeping Jewish tradition alive was to cooperate with the Roman rule and
count on the emperor's justice. Weitzman shows how Philo argues that
supporting the Jewish tradition is part of the Roman mos maiorum. Philo
uses exempla from the emperor's own family to argue that a violation of
Jewish tradition would also be a violation of Roman tradition.
The review can be read online here