Was 70 CE a Watershed in Jewish History?—On Jews and Judaism Before and After the Destruction of the Second Temple

The destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 CE, which put an end to sacrificial worship in Israel, is usually assumed to constitute a major caesura in Jewish history. But how important was it? What really changed due to 70? What, in contrast, was already changing before 70 or remained basically or virtually -- unchanged despite it? How do the Diaspora, which was long used to Temple-less Judaism, and early Christianity, which was born around the same time, fit in? This Scholion Library volume presents twenty papers given at an international conference in Jerusalem in which scholars assessed the significance of 70 for their respective fields of specialization, including Jewish liturgy, law, literature, magic, art, institutional history, and early Christianity.

Daniel R. Schwartz, Ph.D. (1980), professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, works primarily in the fields of ancient Judaism and historiography, especially Josephus and 1-2 Maccabees. His most recent volume is 2 Maccabees (De Gruyter, 2008).Zeev Weiss, Ph.D. (1995), professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has published extensively on Roman and Byzantine art and architecture in Palestine, including The Sepphoris Synagogue: Deciphering an Ancient Message through Its Archaeological and Socio-Historical Contexts (Israel Exploration Society, 2005).