“The King has become a Jew!” – Counter-Assimilation in Jewish Literary Texts of the Second Temple Period

Abstract

In the Second Temple Period, a number of Jewish texts address the idea of Jewish identity in the face of imperial occupation and diasporic life. Though conversations of assimilation run the risk of oversimplifying the complex identity negotiation taking place between empires and their subject peoples, the maintenance of Jewish identity in the face of Empire was clearly a concern for the communities that produced texts such as Daniel, Esther, etc. In a number of cases, not only do Jewish narratives portray Jewish communities as successfully maintaining Jewish identity in the face of extinction/assimilation, but they often imagine a level of counter-assimilation by the ruling empires—that is, many of the texts whose conflicts center on the potential loss of Jewish identity often portray imperial and other non-Jewish characters as actively taking on aspects of Jewish identity instead. In this study, I will seek to explore and analyze instances of counter-assimilation in Jewish literary texts of the Second Temple Period in order to construct a robust framework of how Jewish communities of the period recognized their interaction with the Achaemenid Empire as part of their identity construction and maintenance.