Kofsky & Ruzer, Late Antique Jewish and Christian Travelogues (de Gruyter)

NEW BOOK FROM DE GRUYTER:

Late Antique Jewish and Christian Travelogues
Religious Aspects and Cultural Backgrounds

Reuven Kiperwasser , Aryeh Kofsky and Serge Ruzer
Volume 27 in the series Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – Tension, Transmission, Transformation
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111566191

Institutional price £110.00

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
Copyright year: 2025
Audience: Scholars in the field of Jewish Studies, theology, comparative religion, and history of late Antiquity
Pages
Front matter: 6
Main content: 174
Illustrations
Illustrations: 0
Coloured Illustrations: 0
Keywords: Travel Fiction; migrating persona; early Christianity; Rabbinic Judaism.

eBook
Published: December 16, 2024
ISBN: 9783111566191

Hardcover
Published: December 16, 2024
ISBN: 9783111564685

About this book

Focusing on travel narratives as a setting for spelling out both cultural exchanges and identity building, the present volume maps a variety of strategies employed in travelogues by Christians and Jews in the late antique Roman East.
The first part sheds light on the shared cultural background – folkloric or mythic – reflected in late antique Jewish and Christian sea-travel stories, and the various attempts to adapt it to a specific religious agenda. While the comparative analysis of the sources from two textual communities emphasizes their different religious agendas, it also allows for restoring patterns of the broader background with which they converse. The second part highlights Christian perceptions of the Land of Israel in missionary enterprises and in the eschatological visions.
The travelogues offer a window on the interplay between shared inheritance and new agendas within the dialectical development of religious traditions in Late Antiquity.

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