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The purpose of the current paper is to contribute to a reassessment of the Jews' position in the Greco-Roman world. 1 That such a reassessment is needed may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the current scholarship on ancient Jews, more voluminous and self-assured than ever before. But much of that scholarly activity is conducted from too narrow a perspective and serves to isolate ancient Jews rather than to place them within the wider historical context in which they lived and to which they reacted. One aspect of this isolationist perspective is the ubiquitous assumption that ancient Jews were a unique social group, distinctly different from all other people of the world we call Greco-Roman. This is, no doubt, a correct assumption, but a misleading one nonetheless for to correctly make such a statement we must begin by noting that Antiquity saw a whole range of unique ethnic groups, each distinctly different from those around it. The question, then, is not whether the Jews were unique they certainly were but how unique was their uniqueness, and in what ways did it manifest itself? Or, in other words, in a world where Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Syrians, Arabs, Jews, Gauls, Germans, Spaniards and many others lived side-by-side, how did the Jews' uniqueness play itself out, and was there
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