Project description
Rome as a cultural and intellectual epicentre
The Roman Empire, which is most often associated with military conquest and economic success, also created a new language of philosophy, literature, and law, which has largely gone unnoticed even though it shaped Western civilization. Representatives of minority groups, like Jews, Greeks, and Christians arrived in Rome and engaged in lively discourses, shaping both themselves and their provincial audiences. The ERC-funded ROMANA project seeks to uncover these hidden cultural connections by studying a variety of texts in diverse languages, ranging from Latin to Greek and Hebrew/Aramaic. By examining these interactions through philosophical, literary, and legal lenses, ROMANA aims to redraw the traditional map of the Roman Empire.
Objective
ROMANA aims to unveil the ubiquitous presence of Rome in Jewish, Greek-Pagan and Christian texts and to expose the strategies of cultural interaction between imperialist forces and a range of minority groups. It will explore how intellectual discourses that have defined the West, namely those of Greek elites, Christian groups, as well as Hellenistic and rabbinic Judaism, were constructed through a series of contested, hidden, and disavowed interactions with the dominant force of empire. The project will redraw the traditional map of the Roman Empire to challenge its sharp dichotomy between Rome and the provinces and demonstrate the deep entanglements of each group of “provincial” elites despite their claim to cultural purity.
The starting point is first-century Hellenistic Judaism, as its main representatives—Philo and Josephus—became active in Rome as prolific authors writing in Greek, who combined philosophical, literary and legal interests with a keen appeal to Roman audiences. Their modes of acculturation will serve as a compass to unlock similar cultural entanglements in the Second Sophistic, early Christianity and rabbinic literature.
The project objectives entail a focused study of three trajectories, philosophical, literary and legal, to be exposed as doubly entangled, namely with each other and with Roman discourses. The method will be a close, comparative and culturally aware reading of whole corpora of texts in Greek, Hebrew/Aramaic and Latin, based on the available manuscripts, moving through Greek-Christian writing into Rabbinic Judaism and the texts that contest the space between them. We will reach insights of a new order in fields which have thus far been overwhelmingly studied in double isolation or on the limited basis of digital searches of keywords.
The results will be published in 6 monographs, special issues in leading journals, a consultation at an international conference and wide dissemination in Israel, up to changes in school curricula.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities philosophy, ethics and religion religions judaism
- humanities philosophy, ethics and religion religions christianity
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-ADG
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91904 Jerusalem
Israel
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