Krista N. Dalton, "How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity" (Princeton UP, 2025)

New Books in Sociology · May 28, 2025 · 49m

At the turn of the common era, the Jewish communities of Roman Palestine saw the organization of a small group of literate Jewish men who devoted their lives to the interpretation and teaching of their sacred ancestral texts. In How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2025), Krista Dalton shows that these early rabbis were not an insular specialist group but embedded in a landscape of Jewish piety. Drawing on the writings of rabbis in Roman Palestine from the second through fifth centuries CE, Dalton illuminates the…