The ancient Jews experienced only a brief period (roughly 129–63 b.c.e.) when they were not under the more or less direct rule of an empire. Untangling the complexities of the impact of foreign domination on the Jews has been one of the main tasks of Judaic scholarship practically from its beginnings as an academic discipline around 1820. It is obvious that Judaeans/Jews received different rulers differently. But Katell Berthelot has now argued that for the Jews, Roman rule was different in kind from its predecessors and that the content of this difference was less political/administrative than ideological. The Romans made claims about themselves — about their chosenness, their non-autochthony, their special piety to the gods, and their unmatched dedication to law — that the Jews found particularly noisome because they made the same claims about themselves. For the Jews, possibly unlike the Romans, these claims were part of a zero-sum competition. And so, the proper model for understanding the four-century-long relationship between pagan Rome and the Jews is a one-sided rivalry, rather than domination/resistance, mimicry/creolisation, or partial and episodic integration.

Consideration of ideological rivalry more or less in isolation allows B. to focus on literary texts — inevitably, given the chronological limits, on rabbinic texts, though Philo and Josephus are well represented too — whose analysis entails detection of evidence for familiarity and complex negotiations with Roman ideas and values. This aspect of the book is not entirely successful despite subjecting a huge amount of material, much of it not previously well known to non-rabbinists, to scrutiny. The basic problem is the absence of any apparent methodology of comparison. Frequently texts whose content seems quite formulaic or unspecific are implausibly read as revealing detailed knowledge, and exercising subtle subversion, of Roman lore (B., for the record, also eschews post-structuralist reading, though she cites some post-structuralist rabbinists). For example, Mishnaic law prohibited business with pagans on the Kalends of January, among other holidays, and for three days before. The Palestinian Talmud (Avodah Zarah 1.3, 39c) struggles to understand the Mishnah's list of prohibited festivals (including also the Saturnalia, something called Kratesis, and the emperor's birthday, or accession-day), and explains the origins of the Kalends of January as follows: when the kingdoms of Egypt and Rome were at war (in a mythological past, not the nearer past of the Roman civil wars) they eventually decided to resolve the conflict by declaring victor the army whose commander committed suicide first. Januarius, the Roman commander, agreed to do so on the condition that his twelve sons be appointed duces, eparchoi and stratelatai (in Aramaic transcription: duksin, iparkhin, ve-istratelatin, a stereotypical phrase in later Palestinian rabbinic texts reflecting the Diocletianic reforms). Due to his heroism, the Romans continued to mourn on the anniversary of his death, and named the day Kalendae Ianuarias.

Berthelot (194–7) follows the tradition of scholarship that detects deep familiarity with metropolitan Roman lore in this enigmatic story, but another trend in the scholarship rejects such claims and finds in the story mainly late antique stereotype and biblical allusion. Berthelot acknowledges the existence of both approaches but never explains the hermeneutical advantages of the romanising reading — a pattern common throughout the book. To be sure on some occasions her readings are persuasive, though her hit rate is considerably higher for Philo and Josephus than for rabbinic texts. But there is a fuzzy or associative quality to much of the reading: something in a rabbinic text evokes a Roman idea and so the text's content is ascribed to Roman influence or to the formulator's rivalrous disposition towards Rome. This type of weak reading is most disappointingly a feature of the long chapter on Roman citizenship. Here the problem is perhaps that the most basic and tangible questions about the impact of Roman citizenship, especially of the constitutio antoniniana — which all or almost all rabbinic literature postdates — on the rabbis, on Palestinian Jews, and on the province in general, await comprehensive treatment, so that B.'s readings float unusually free of historical foundation.

There is much to praise. The book is nearly impeccable as a work of scholarship: B. may over-read or under-read texts but she never misreads them in trivial ways. Both the Jewish and the Roman elements of the book are exceedingly well informed, responsible and up to date. (The book opens with several brief chapters on the Jews’ experiences under Assyrian, Babylonian, Achaemenid, Ptolemaic and Seleukid rule: 29–87.) Indeed, in this respect the book is exemplary: neither rabbinists nor Roman historians have an excuse any longer for superficial, stereotype-laden or unconsciously imperial scholarship. Some individual discussions are razor-sharp (so for example the neat demolition of Daniel Boyarin's influential claim that the Romans regarded the Jews as feminised: 205–9). In general, the book is amazingly capacious and rich: rabbinists can learn a huge amount about the Roman Empire from it, and Roman historians and historicising classicists are introduced to piles of primary rabbinic texts absent from the standard anthologies, plus synthesising treatments of the basic interpretive issues, not to mention a huge quantity of current bibliography. This is a particularly valuable feature, given that many Palestinian rabbinic texts still lack adequate English translations.

The book's flaws are not trivial: the ascription of a state of mind — rivalry — to a collectivity (Jewish writers and intellectuals from Philo to the late antique rabbis) over centuries either lacks analytic rigour or, if intended metaphorically, conceals too much variation to be truly informative; the absence of methodological checks and balances on the act of comparison too often results in readings and arguments that are unsatisfyingly impressionistic; finally, the abstraction of ideology from its foundations in power relations and materiality detracts from the book's historical depth and hermeneutical richness. Nevertheless, big books also have their fates. This big book, with its wealth of texts, information and analysis, deserves an attentive and sympathetic, if also argumentative, reception.