The relationship of the rabbis of Late Antique Palestine to their non-Jewish neighbors, rulers, and interlocutors was complex and often fraught. Jenny R. Labendz investigates the rabbis' self-perception and their self-fashioning within this non-Jewish social and intellectual world, answering a fundamental question: Was the rabbinic participation in Greco-Roman society a begrudging concession or a principled choice?

Labendz shows that despite the highly insular and self-referential nature of rabbinic Torah study, some rabbis believed that the involvement of non-Jews in rabbinic...