Читать книгу A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East - Группа авторов - Страница 57

C.T. Robert Hayward

Jews were widely dispersed over the Hellenistic and Roman Near East: principal centres of Jewish population, outside the Land of Israel, included Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Babylonia, and Arabia. Evidence of their presence far and wide in the Greco-Roman world is amply attested by inscriptions, papyrus fragments, coins, graffiti, and other literary remains (Williams 1998 and updates). Despite continuing debates about degrees of literacy among Jews (Hezser 2001; Carr 2005), the very considerable literary output of Jews in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek which saw the light of day from the third century BCE, when the Torah of Moses was translated from Hebrew into Greek, up to the sixth–seventh century CE, when the Babylonian Talmud probably reached its final form (Kalmin 2006), cannot be denied.