Plan and Goals
The sphere of law provided local communities a highly nuanced discursive syntax for constructing local policies, ideologies and identities, by means of the details of legal difference. Arguably, agents of these established systems sought to shape their own legal cultures within the Roman legal sphere as an expression of their specific form of cultural assimilation.
Thus the project pursues the following objectives:
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To demonstrate that rabbinic law-making, on par with other local legal systems in the Greek East, exhibits a wide range of responses to Roman legal administration varying according to legal field, its cultural significance and the role of Roman presence.
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To establish the correspondence between parallel forms of adaptation to Roman imperialism, among the legal communities in the East, while taking into consideration their diverse arenas for legal production: judicial institutions, legal documents or jurisprudence.
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To show that particularly among legally-oriented communities under Rome the details of legal discourse served a tool for cultural distinction, and therefore reflect a unique form of Provincial legalism.
This project proposes a cross-disciplinary approach for reconstructing from diverse sources the distinctive features of the sphere of law among provincial communities drawing from multiple disciplines and applying a range of textual, legal, historical and anthropological tools. The project will proceed from contextualizing local laws under Rome to discerning patterns of integration to ultimately characterizing provincial legalisms.
Comparative Law Platform:
The project will provide scholars with a comprehensive Comparative Platform. This platform will assemble all legal traditions into a shared framework and will allow research and analysis of the relationship between the different forms of legal activity and legal systems. Together these reflect the complex overlap of legal cultures of the Roman Empire. This platform will expand upon the database of rabbinic and Roman parallels, which the IP prepared in previous research and covers some fields of private law. Arguably, within a reality of entangled legalities, no legal system can be studied in isolation, particularly in an imperial environment. This database will allow scholars to study overlapping legal systems in Antiquity
Making Law under Rome
Select Cases of Comparison of rabbinic and Roman law, sources, scholarship and bibliography: https://lawunderrome.dh-dev.com/
funded by the Israel Science Foundation grant number: 1026/18
