From Land to Body: Reinterpretations of the Self in Jewish Narratives from the Hellenistic Diaspora

What happens to a society's conception of identity, for the most part defined in relation to a land, when parts of this society leave that land and establish in a world dominated by a totally different sense of self? This is the situation of the Jewish Diaspora during the Hellenistic period, usually situated between the 4th c. BCE and the early 4th c. CE. Diasporic communities had to reinterpret their traditional notion of identity, mostly based on the land of Israel, and inscribe it on to the body. Embodied markers of identity compensated for spatial roots and the holistic Hebrew conception of the self was reinterpreted into Hellenistic categories. Dr. Mirguet proposes that the expression of Jewish identity in embodied terms does not date from the Rabbinic times, as is usually held, but well before, when the Jewish Diaspora encountered Greek culture.