Jewish Studies Workshop with Rotem Avneri Meir: "Josephus’s Samaritan Schism and the Archives of Jewish History"

The Yale Jewish Studies Workshop, which meets regularly throughout the fall and spring semester, features pre-circulated works-in-progress by new faculty members, visiting professors, research scholars, postdoctoral associates, and advanced doctoral students. This workshop provides an important opportunity for conversation across temporal and disciplinary boundaries within Jewish Studies. All members of the university community are warmly invited to join these workshops and learn together. Lunch is provided. 

This workshop revisits Josephus’s account of the Samaritan schism in Antiquities 11 as a critical site for exploring ancient Jewish historiography and archival imagination. Although long read as anti-Samaritan polemic, historical and literary analysis reveals how the narrative uses Samaritan ethnogenesis to address internal Jewish concerns, especially around the succession of Jerusalem’s priesthood and its entanglement with imperial power. This episode’s composition reflects broader Jewish strategies for using temple records, genealogies, and imperial memory to negotiate authority and difference. The paper also introduces key themes related to ancient Jewish documentality and the ways in which imperial discourse networks shaped Jewish ideas of power, identity, the past, and, ultimately, God.

Rotem Avneri Meir is a historian of Jews and Judaism in antiquity, specializing in the political, social, and cultural dynamics of life under ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern empires. He employs comparative methods to reimagine how the Persian, Hellenistic, and early Roman empires shaped local societies, political cultures, and religious practices—and dismantles inherited boundaries between Judaism and Hellenism. His research draws on a wide range of sources, including Second Temple literature, the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Hellenistic historiography, and epigraphy. Bridging history, philology, and religious studies, his work addresses questions of empire, communication, and intercultural exchange in the ancient world. Rotem received his PhD from the University of Helsinki, where he was a member of the Center of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires. He also studied at Tel Aviv University and the University of Lausanne and held fellowships at Harvard University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in Ancient Judaism in the Program in Jewish Studies at Yale University.