Recommended by Erich S. Gruen, Professor of History and Classics.
"A modest and little known book. Spina takes on the standard notion that the Bible portrays the Hebrews as an exclusivist sect, “the chosen people,” who held themselves as insiders and held others at arms’ length. His dissection of several key biblical tales established that the “outsider” was in fact often welcomed, embraced, and incorporated, thus providing a very different and productive slant on the subject."
"A sweeping survey of adverse attitudes by Greeks and Romans toward foreigners both east and west. The immense erudition covers the whole of the Mediterranean and beyond, a remarkable work of scholarship. The argument that 'proto-racism' had its origins in antiquity is somewhat one-sided and debatable, but it sets the debate on a wholly new footing."
Recommended by Erich S. Gruen, Professor of History and Classics and author of Rethinking the Other in Antiquity.
"When and how did Greeks develop a sense of their own ethnicity? Hall’s very important work makes deft use of anthropology to investigate the roots and development of Greek conceptualization of both distinctiveness and commonality."
"A groundbreaking study. Hall’s relentless probing of Greek tragedy to expose the ethnocentrism, stereotyping, and distorted images of non-Greeks in the plays fostered a wholesale shift in the reading of this genre and its undercurrents."
"Originally published in French in 1980, this book was instrumental in calling the attention of classicists to the distorted mirror through which historians in antiquity represented the image of the 'Other' in order to enhance their own self-representation."
"This is a book of enormous power and influence. It stands as the classic statement of linkage between colonialism and imperialism that issued in the Eurocentric portrait of the 'Orient' in European literature. Even if the thesis is overstated, the work has, for good or ill, informed everything subsequently written on the subject."
Recommended by Erich S. Gruen, Professor of History and Classics and author of Rethinking the Other in Antiquity.
"A brilliant set of lectures that explored Greek cultural and intellectual encounters with Persians, Jews, Celts, and Romans. Momigliano’s acute and engaging insights into Greek constructs of the alien and the impact of those constructs upon the Greek themselves remain unsurpassed. Although sometimes truncated and elusive, they never fail to stimulate."
Recommended by Erich S. Gruen, Professor of History and Classics and author of Rethinking the Other in Antiquity.
"This profoundly learned work set Tertullian’s famous dictum, 'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?' on its head. Hengel discarded the dichotomy and demonstrated once for all the entangled overlap of Jewish and Hellenic cultures not only in the diaspora but in Palestine itself. The field has never been the same since."
Recommended by Erich S. Gruen, Professor of History and Classics and author of Rethinking the Other in Antiquity.
"Snowden’s book represents a significant breakthrough in understanding Greek and Roman attitudes toward a people they termed 'Ethiopians.' It cogently subverted the idea that blacks were simply denigrated, disparaged or despised. Snowden’s broad-gauged study, gathering all the available literary and archaeological testimony, irrevocably complicated the picture and, for the first time, undermined the notion of racial prejudice toward the blacks."
