Introduction

By focusing on Jews and Judaism in late antiquity, this Handbook fills a gap left by other volumes that deal with early Byzantine Christianity only. Jews interacted and competed with pagans and Christians and experienced a number of significant developments between the third and seventh centuries, which marks this period as a time of transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages: the emergence of synagogues as religious centers of local communities, the increasing significance of rabbinic Judaism and the compilation of rabbinic documents, the consolidation of Jewish Diaspora communities, and the expansion of rabbinic Judaism to Sasanian Persia (Babylonia), which eventually topped Byzantine Palestine in its importance for the development and survival of Judaism.