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  • Published: 7 May 2008
  • ISBN: 9780141906379
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 656
Categories:

Rome and Jerusalem

The Clash of Ancient Civilizations




In AD 70, after a war that had flared sporadically for four years, three Roman legions under the future Emperors Vespasian and his son Titus surrounded, laid siege to, and eventually devastated the city of Jerusalem, destroying completely the magnificent Temple which had been built by Herod only eighty years earlier. What brought about this extraordinary conflict, with its extraordinary consequences? This superb book, by one of the world's leading scholars of the ancient Roman and Jewish worlds, narrates and explains this titanic struggle, showing why Rome's interests were served by this policy of brutal hostility, and how the first generation of Christians first distanced themselves from its Jewish origins and then became increasingly hostile to Jews as their influence spread within the empire. The book thus also provides an exceptional and original account of the origins of anti-Semitism, whose history has had often cataclysmic reverberations down to our own time.

  • Published: 7 May 2008
  • ISBN: 9780141906379
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 656
Categories:

About the author

Martin Goodman

Martin Goodman is Professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford and President of the Oxford Centre for Jewish and Hebrew Studies. He is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and the British Academy. His Rome and Jerusalem, published in 2008, was acknowledged as a landmark in the study of the Jewish people in the Roman Empire, and has been translated into six languages. In 2002 he edited the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, which was awarded the National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship.

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