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Rating: 
Summary: Concrete and Dry
Review: As a reader a few "light" histories of the era, I have a passing familiarity with the chronology, personalities, and issues of the time. None of this prepared me for the obscurity of Professor Schwartz's book. It reads like a doctoral thesis; short on description, long on concrete assertions and refutations of such. It's hard to read and hard to appreciate unless you are a REAL student of the time and are throughly familiar with the subject matter. I was so disappointed with how dense this book is that I'm stunned that it's being recommended for the casually interested history reader.
Rating: 
Summary: Seth's Q-rating
Review: As a reader a few "light" histories of the era, I have a passing familiarity with the chronology, personalities, and issues of the time. None of this prepared me for the obscurity of Professor Schwartz's book. It reads like a doctoral thesis; short on description, long on concrete assertions and refutations of such. It's hard to read and hard to appreciate unless you are a REAL student of the time and are throughly familiar with the subject matter. I was so disappointed with how dense this book is that I'm stunned that it's being recommended for the casually interested history reader.
Rating:
Summary: Schwartz redefines the field
Review: Dr. Schwartz's book redefines the field for the study of Ancient Judaism. Any serious student of the topic has to read this book. Clearly the Israeli scholars and other adherents to the "maximalist" school will find Schawrtz upsetting. On the other hand, many other serious scholars agree with Schwartz's direction, if not conclusions. This is state of the art scholarship at its best.This book is not for "novices" when it comes to Jewish history. It was written for an informed academic audience. It is heavily footnoted, makes ongoing references to debates within scholarly circles, and presents an impressive bibliography spanning many different disciplines. My personal copy barely has two pages go by without my notes and underlining. I personally feel that this is one of the most important books in the field to emerge in years.
Rating:
Summary: Schwartz redefines the field
Review: Dr. Schwartz's book redefines the field for the study of Ancient Judaism. Any serious student of the topic has to read this book. Clearly the Israeli scholars and other adherents to the "maximalist" school will find Schawrtz upsetting. On the other hand, many other serious scholars agree with Schwartz's direction, if not conclusions. This is state of the art scholarship at its best. This book is not for "novices" when it comes to Jewish history. It was written for an informed academic audience. It is heavily footnoted, makes ongoing references to debates within scholarly circles, and presents an impressive bibliography spanning many different disciplines. My personal copy barely has two pages go by without my notes and underlining. I personally feel that this is one of the most important books in the field to emerge in years.
Rating:
Summary: Genius!
Review: I had the priviledge of taking a course on Ancient Jewish History from Seth Schwartz. This was actually the same course taken by the previous reviewer, sbelect2. I hardly went. Realizing I was not going to do well on the final, I purchased the book. It was brilliant. Not only was it informative, it kindled an interest in Ancient Judaism with me.
Rating:
Summary: Genius!
Review: Seth Schwartz is a genius. This man takes everything you thought you knew about Ancient Judaism and turns it on it's side ... this man is one of the most brilliant people I have ever had the oppurtunity to meet, and I was lucky enough to take a class taught by him. Genius, pure and simple.
Rating:
Summary: Seth's Q-rating
Review: Seth's favorite letter is Q, by the way. He especially likes words like Qedem and Qerovah where the Q doesn't have a U after it.
Rating: 
Summary: Provocative, but not fully convincing
Review: This is an unusually ambitious monograph. It seeks to describe the history of Jewish society from the Maccabean revolt to the Muslim attacks that ensured the decline of the Roman Empire in the East. Schwartz argues throughout his book that what we consider to be Judaism was much weaker throughout this period than we have been lead to believe. Arguing against the Zionist ethos that marked much of the archaeology of Palestine, Schwartz emphasizes the elite nature of Jewish doctrines and the limited depth of Judaic doctrine. Not even the Maccabean revolts should be considered an attack on hellenization. He also emphasizes the almost unbroken imperial support for the temple from the Persians to Nero. A certain ideological mindset did occur among the common people after the Maccabean's victory which lasted until the Jewish revolt. But for the next several centuries afterwards Jewish doctrines became shadowy and marginal for most Jews as the centre of Jewish doctrine, the Temple had been irretrievably shattered. Rabbis were a distinctly marginal presence in Jewish life and what archaeological evidence shows the strong influence of paganism in Jewish life. Only with the christianization of the empire from the fourth century onwards did synagogue construction truly bloom, rabbinical influence really increase and iconophobic ideologies develop. Much of this revival was partly the result of Christian exclusion of Jews from the patronage networks that run the empire, but it also included the adaption of Christian motifs. The book is extensively footnoted and the bibliography is 23 pages long. But most of this consists of the extensive secondary literature. The actual primary evidence which exists is unavoidably scarce. Much of Schwartz's strongest evidence consists of archaeological evidence, which, however, he does not reproduce in the book. But much of Schwartz's case is based on negative evidence, the absence of support. Schwartz has written well in the past in criticizing nationalist misinterpretations of the Jewish past. One recalls his article in Past and Present emphasizing the increasing marginality of Hebrew in post-exile Judea. And his work coincides with the "minimalist" school of archaeological interpretation which is extremely critical of the accuracy of the Tanakh not just up to Moses, but to the kings of a united Israel. This general mindset has some major problems. The most important one is that if Jewish monotheism was such a late development that it was essentially imposed by Ezra and Nehemiah, why did it succeed? Why didn't the defeated Jews simply view the Babylonian captivity as proof of the strength of Babylonian and Persian gods and abandon their old rituals like their now forgotten neighbors? The same problem arises with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. Schwartz's discovery of pagan symbols and motifs in the ruins of overwhelmingly Jewish Tiberias is certainly peculiar. Yet why did Judaism survive at all, why would the Romans tolerate it since one could argue that it was the most "monotheist" Jews who were most likely to be "seditious?" Moreover, if most Jews accepted Paganism why does this not appear in Christian-Jewish polemic? If Jews renounced their faith, why is there so little record of their support for their new beliefs, or critiques of the old? Much of Schwartz's archaeological evidence and his discussion of rabbinic commentary of it (he suggests that it was evasive in complying with it) comes close to arguing that since pagan religiosity was so ubiquitious that any orthodox presence could not have existed. Yet Christians faced the same challenges of pagan idolatory, yet they eventually survived and triumphed. The limitations of the evidence are quite severe. Schwartz himself acknowledges we have little on the economic background of post-revolt Palestine. We also have few sources on the extent and compliance of the Jewish common people (though the absence of pig bones in the Maccabean and Herodian period suggests that most people kept kosher). Surprisingly there is little on the diaspora, though Keith Hopkins has suggested that more than 80% of Jews lived outside modern Israel. At one point Schwartz suggests that literacy was very small in Jewish communities, 10% is a generous estimate, with only 1% being able to read the holy scriptures. Perhaps, but when one considers that the early Christian apostles were not of a social class likely to be literate, and that their many argument was trying to show, not very successfully, that Jesus fufilled prophecies from the scriptures, one suspects that something was wrong. At another point Schwartz argues that the Maccabeans did not really resist Hellenization because they followed the Hellenic process of coining. One might equally argue that Reformation Europe was becoming more like China because it used compasses and gunpowder. Ultimatley this is not a fully convincing book.
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