More on the Diaspora

A couple of reviews on the BrynMawr Classical Review site may be interesting to students of Philo and of his Diaspora world. The volumes do not seem to contain chapters explicitlyu devoted to Philo, but are nevertheless relevant for studies of his social world:
Jas Elsner, Ian Rutherford (edd.), Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity. Seeing the Gods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 532. ISBN 0-19-925079-0. $125.00. Reviewed by Laura Nasrallah, Harvard University Divinity School.

The Reviewer says, inter alia, Part III of the volume addresses Jewish and Christian Pilgrimage. While this section makes a strong contribution in addressing literary texts, it does not present the rich analysis of material culture found in
previous sections of the volume.

"David Noy's "Rabbi Aqiba Comes to Rome: A Jewish Pilgrimage in Reverse?" uses a story from the Talmud -- the accounts of four rabbis who traveled to Rome perhaps at the end of the first century CE -- to "throw some light on what it was like for influential people from Palestine to travel to Rome" (376). Ancient sources assume that regular contact existed between Jews in Palestine and in Rome. Noy interprets such travel not as simple tourism to the center of empire, but as Jewish pilgrimage to see cult objects captured from Jerusalem in 70 CE, placed in Vespasian's Temple of Peace. Such travel, he argues, substituted for pilgrimage to the now-destroyed Jerusalem temple; it was a "pilgrimage in reverse" "(385).

This part also contain articles as Wendy Pullan's "'Intermingled Until the End of Time': Ambiguity as a Central Condition of Early Christian Pilgrimage" and David Frankfurter's "Urban Shrine and Rural Saint in Fifth-Century Alexandria".
Another relevant volume is Ardle MacMahon, Jennifer Price (edd.), Roman Working Lives and Urban Living. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2005. Pp. 223. ISBN 1-84217-186-0. GBP 20.00. Reviewed by Miko Flohr, Radboud University Nijmegen.The reviewer introduces his review thus: "This volume is a collection of twelve papers written by eleven British scholars and advertises itself as being devoted to issues concerning
the life and work of craftsmen in the cities of the Roman world. While this is not completely true, the book contains some very interesting papers offering new insights into the social and spatial contexts of urban production and touches on several topics that are in desperate need of attention by archaeologists and historians. The internal cohesion of the book, however, is rather weak: a good introduction to
the overall theme is lacking and some of the contributions seem to be out of place. There is little interplay between the individual articles. As most authors concentrate on either Roman Britain or central Italy, other urbanized areas, such as Roman Africa, Egypt or Asia Minor, are mostly neglected. Thus, readers should not expect a coherent volume that constitutes a systematic contribution to the discussion about urban craftsmen in the Roman world. Nevertheless, on the basis of the individual papers, the book deserves a place in many university libraries."