This chapter discusses the beginnings of Ladino usage in the United States, introducing the Ladino press and then offering a comprehensive picture of poets and writers who wrote in and about Ladino. It introduces a few contemporary artists who have created and performed in Ladino, and observes their stance toward language preservation, while interrogating their place in both the Jewish and the broader community. Indeed, non-Jewish Latinos have expressed interest in Ladino and in Sephardic genres, and nowhere is this interest more explicit than in music. The chapter focuses on music, a fluid commodity that travels across nation-states and acquires new meanings, as it encounters conditions unlike those in which it was created and is transformed by them. Ladino theater performers as well as Ladino singers and composers have made repeated attempts to reach out to an audience that extends beyond the Jewish community.

The fourth decade of the second century CE witnessed the outbreak and apex of the final Jewish uprising against Roman rule in Palestine. Named the Bar Kochba Revolt for its leader, its details remain shrouded in mystery. This chapter describes the revolt's direct causes, the geographical extent of Bar Kochba's regime and whether it included Jerusalem, and the magnitude of the Roman reaction. It also describes Bar Kochba's leadership style and administration, his state's borders, Jewish observance under wartime conditions, and the strong Roman reaction. Judaean desert documents provide a glimpse of Bar Kochba's administrative system. The list of Roman forces that participated in suppressing the Bar Kochba Revolt, compiled on the basis of epigraphic sources, assists in a tentative assessment of their magnitude. The Roman sense of having won a great victory emerges from Hadrian's second acclamation as imperator sometime after 135, following the revolt's suppression.

The Mishnah, universally attributed to the editorial hand of Rabbi Judah, Patriarch of the Jewish community in Palestine in the late second to the early third century, is the earliest redacted record of rabbinic opinion. Most of the abundant Jewish literature from the late Second Temple period organizes its expression by reference to Scripture. The Mishnah's six orders include: Zeraim, Moed, Nashim, Neziqin, Kodashim and Toharot. The way one interprets the Mishnah's rhetoric concerning its relationship with Scripture depends upon the capacities of its assumed audience. A variety of factors suggest powerfully and unambiguously that the Mishnah was formulated for rabbinic sages and their disciples and not for a mass audience. Because it was formulated more than a century after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, perhaps the Mishnah's most surprising feature is the proportion of its laws dedicated to the Temple cult.

The chronological boundaries of this chapter are based on well-known events in world history. The year 235 saw the end of the Severan dynasty of Roman emperors, while the Muslim invasion of Palestine began in 634. The fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE and the suppression of the Second Revolt in 135 were the beginning of the end of a Jewish majority in Israel. They also believed that the steady decline in demographic strength, coupled with an increasingly precarious political standing when the Roman Empire became Christianized, led to a loss of hegemony within the Jewish world. The older historiography tended to accept most of the evidence at face value and combine it all into a harmonizing account of the Patriarchate from its origins to its demise between 415 and 429. The accumulated archaeological and epigraphic evidence and the application of more sophisticated social scientific analysis have contributed to a reassessment of rabbinical status in Late Roman-Byzantine Palestine.

The social forms of association from the Galilean beginnings to the post-Easter community in Jerusalem and the house congregations in the cities of the Roman empire, the social location of typical converts, forms of worship and ritual and other dimensions of an emerging Christian subculture. In the early churches remembered about Jesus and his disciples, there are a number of elements that accord well with the 'renewal movement' model. In the Acts of the Apostles and the earlier letters of Paul, everyone see a group centred in Jerusalem that seems much more stable and structured than the rural movement. According to Acts, it was in Antioch, too, that the followers of Messiah Jesus were first called Christianoi, likely by outsiders who now recognised them as a sect distinguishable from the main Jewish community. One of the important and distinctive developments in the organisation of the ancient church is the establishment of what came to be called 'the monarchical episcopate'.

The eleventh and twelfth centuries, for Jewish life in Europe and the Mediterranean basin, were characterised, above all else, by diversity and flux. Jews were spread across vast and heterogeneous area in enclaves that differed considerably from one another in size, antiquity, economic foundations, political and social relations with the non-Jewish majority, and religious and intellectual creativity. The foundations for Jewish existence lay, of course, in the realm of economic activity. By the eleventh century, the arrangements governing the existence of the Jews as a minority grouping in Muslim and Christian societies were already well worked out. Throughout Europe and the Mediterranean basin, the locus of power within the Jewish world lay in the local Jewish community. By the early thirteenth century, much had changed in Jewish life, for both good and ill. A vigorous and creative two centuries left a mixed legacy for the subsequent history of the Jews.