Discover the daily life and history of Egyptian Jews during the Graeco-Roman period, drawing on rich insights gleaned from papyrological evidence.
The papyri provide a unique and detailed window into the lived experiences of Jewish communities, documenting various aspects of their social, economic and religious life, from personal correspondence to legal contracts and communal records.
Significantly, these documents are preserved in the Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum, a key collection that compiles Jewish papyri from Egypt. These texts reveal how Jews in this period navigated complex identities, balancing adherence to Jewish traditions while integrating into the broader Graeco-Roman cultural and administrative framework.
The papyri shed light on everything from property transactions and legal disputes to religious observances, offering invaluable glimpses into the interaction between Jewish and non-Jewish populations, as well as the challenges faced by Jews under various political regimes.
Meron M. Piotrkowski is Associate Professor of Ancient Jewish History at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the history of the Second Temple period, the Jews in ancient Egypt, and Jewish papyrology. He is the author of Priests in Exile: The History of the Temple of Onias and Its Community in the Hellenistic Period (Berlin and Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 2019) and one of the commentators and contributors to the Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum project.
