In this article I shall present an in-depth study of the condition of the Jews living in the city of Rome during the Middle and Late Republic. I shall make use mainly of epigraphic and literary sources, such as Appianus, Cicero, Josephus, Philo, Suetonius, and Varro. It seems to me, according to a careful reading of epigraphic data as well as the literary evidence presented by Valerius Maximus, that the first record of a Jewish presence in Rome ought to be dated no earlier than the second half of the second century B.C.E. According to Philo, only by the middle of the first century B.C.E. is there evidence of a much larger Jewish presence in Rome. Most of the Jews arrived as slaves in the wake of Pompey’s conquest of the Hasmonean kingdom in 63 B.C.E. and in the aftermath, during Aulus Gabinius’ consulate in 58 B.C.E. Yet there were also some liberti and a few peregrini, or immigrants. Most of them probably settled in the Subura. A hint of how Judaism and Jews were perceived during the Late Republic is given by the writings of Varro and Cicero. It seems that Varro was very impressed by the lack of images in the Jewish religion, an attitude which suggested a certain similarity to earlier Roman cultic practices. On the other hand, Cicero’s Pro Flacco reflects a negative attitude towards Judaism. Judaism is therefore characterized as a Barbarian superstition, opposed to Rome’s traditional values. It seems that the Jews as a group played a very negligible part, yet they were active in the politics of the Late Republic. A careful reading of Cicero’s Pro Flacco can show that during this period Jews still had no communitarian institutions, although they grouped together. Moreover, they were probably clientes of their conqueror patronus, Pompey, and as such they could create political pressure. Most of the Jews supported Pompey until the battle of Pharsalus. However, another group did form, which supported Aulus Gabinius, who had once been a cliens of Pompey. Later on, when Gabinius transferred his allegiance from Pompey to Julius Caesar during the Civil War, most of the Jews of Rome did the same, and switched their allegiance, following the steps of their leader in Judaea, the High Priest Hyrcanus II. According to a careful reading of a passage of Josephus’ Antiquities, which reports the decree of Publius Servilius Isauricus to the city of Parium, Julius Caesar recognized the Jewish communities, till then informal institutions, as collegia licita through the Lex Iulia.
 

A fragment of the Epicurean account of Diogenes of Oinoanda (2nd century AD), which was found in 1997, revealed a mention of the most superstitious and abominable Jews and Egyptians. The fragment is part of A Treatise on Physics and repeats the Epicurean view that gods do not interfere in people’s lives. The aforementioned peoples serve the exemplification that the world of humans is separated from the world of the gods. Both expressions refer to the stereotypical perception of the Jews and Egyptians that is well-known from Greek-Roman literature. However, it seems that the way both ethne imagined their gods – in the form of animals (the Egyptians’ view) and without any cultic statues (the Jews’ view) – was meaningful for Diogenes, who like other Epicureans attached great importance to the worship of images of gods.
 

This article presents a concise overview of the most relevant information that can be gleaned from the approx. 4000 Jewish inscriptions from antiquity (c. 300 BCE – 700 CE). Special attention is paid to those areas and topics about which inscriptions are our only (or main) source of information because the ancient Jewish literary sources are silent about them. The stones turn out to be especially relevant to the study of the western diaspora in the Roman and early Byzantine periods.
 

At the end of the fourth century and beginning of the fifth century AD, there were numerous acts of violence between Christians and Jews. This background exposes the especially interesting, isolated message of Socrates Scholasticus concerning the events at Inmestar in Syria (HE VII 16), where some drunken Jews murdered a Christian boy. Although many details of Socrates’ narrative seem unclear, it appears that the murder itself did not occur on the occasion of the feast of Purim, as was often assumed in the older literature concerning this topic. Consequently, the event is further proof of the local conflicts between believers of the two religions.
 

This article analyzes the rescue campaign of unemployed Jewish workers in 1898-1899 in the Galician oil industrial area. The professionalization of the oil industry and reforms, connected with new safety requirements in the last decades of the 19th century, led to mass unemployment of unskilled, mainly Jewish workers. The catastrophe of the workers aroused the attention of prominent Vienna political leaders, including Theodore Herzl and Saul Raphael Landau. An analysis of the information campaign in the Galician and Vienna Jewish press shows how its leaders, mainly Vienna philanthropists and intellectuals, used the case of Boryslav’s Jewish workers to support socialist or Zionist theories about the Eastern European Jewry. At the same time, the campaign exposed a lack of understanding of the local Galician context and the inability of local elites to react adequately, which led to utopian and non-effective aid projects.
 

The author attempts to analyze the life and creative work of Joseph Roth within the functioning and crisis of tripartite identity and to construct an oriental ghetto image in his works as a reaction to the social stigmatization of the writer’s Jewish identity.
Tripartite identity, the phenomenon which was investigated by Marsha Rozenblit, was spread among Austrian Jews and designated identity in which the Jews of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy were Austrian by political loyalty, German or Czech or Polish by cultural affiliation and Jewish in an ethnic sense. This means that Joseph Roth, like many other representatives of the middle city class of Jewish population of the empire, felt comfortable as an Austrian, Jew and German at the same time.
Functioning of tripartite identity was possible only in the context of the liberal supranational Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The city of Brody, where the future writer was born, owing to the domination of the Jewish people and their integration in German culture and the Austrian political system, was the last favorable environment in Galicia for the formation of tripartite identity. The growth of nationalism, downfall of the empire, and development of anti-Semitism and Nazism resulted in the fact that Joseph Roth and the other Jews, who identified their civil belonging to the Habsburg monarchy and were representatives of the German culture, felt a crisis of identity. This was characterized by the feeling of connection to a non-existent state – the Austrian empire – as well as the new political system’s denial of the right of a Jew to represent the German culture and, above all, social stigmatization of Jewish religious identity. Religious and ethnic Jewish identity, which had to belong to the private sphere according to the principles of liberalism, was perceived as a central negative characteristic of a person – a stigma.
The nostalgia for the lost world, struggle with Nazism and anti-Semitism and reaction to the Jewish identity as a stigma created the special fictitious oriental world of Joseph Roth’s Volhynian and Galician shtetl. Its main features were isolation, being beyond space and time, the principal “difference” of its residents and their spiritual and intellectual superiority over what were in the terms of everyday conditions more civilized western adherents.

Paper deals with organizations, which were mostly created by the more affluent members of the Jewish community in Lvov for improvement of the hygiene and sanitary conditions of their poorer fellow citizens and medical prevention. The aim of paper is to present their history and characteristics of different forms of assistance, recreation and treatment which the above-mentioned organizations of the Jewish population in Lvov provided in the interwar period (winter and summer camps for children and young people, day camps, the Dębina sanatorium, summer camps for adults, family stays).
 

The initiative of establishing B’nai B’rith in Lvov was put forward by Samuel Horowitz,
a prominent member of the local Jewish community. On 5 October 1899, the statute of the “Leo-polis” Humanitarian Society was registered with a rescript issued by the Lvov Governorship. On 29 October of the same year, the establishing meeting took place. This way, the Order’s presence in what was at the time the capital of Galicia, and after 1918 a provincial city of the Second Republic of Poland, was officially approved.
This analysis offers an image of an organization gathering people of high social trust, excellent educational background, and wealth. The majority of them were people who had built their professional position consistently and laboriously. The abovementioned data justifies the claim that the people gathered in Leopolis were not careerists seeking the chance to make a mark. Membership did not open their careers, but was rather a crowning achievement. The exclusive character of the Order sealed the high social and professional standards of its members. Crossing the threshold of the lodge was viewed as a distinction, and serving a function there was a true honor. In this matter, we can see a similarity between Leopolis and other Polish lodges. Another similarity is related to the range of basic activities undertaken by the Lvov brethren, among which was giving scientific and popular lectures, propagating reading, and caring for the poor and the orphaned. The charity activity of the brethren was mainly aimed at Jews, but Christians became its beneficiaries as well.

Holocaust teaching is a foundation for deepening Jewish identity. Despite the stated goals of the trips to Poland, studies involving participating youngsters indicate that Holocaust education per se does not significantly affect their sense of Jewish identity. Nonetheless, Holocaust teaching through the journey to Poland enhances participants’ self-concept as Israelis, possibly because their Israeliness is associated with emotions such as power, pride, and hope. In view of these findings, the aim of this study is to examine whether and to what degree faith plays a role in the Holocaust teaching that is part of public and public-religious schools’ efforts to reinforce Jewish identity.