The Hunt for Ancient Israel - Essays in Honour of Diana V. Edelman - Cynthia Shafer-Elliott
Alexander as a Site of Memory in Hellenistic Judah in the Context of Mnemonic Appropriations of ‘High-Value’ Outsiders
The Hunt for Ancient Israel - Essays in Honour of Diana V. Edelman - Cynthia Shafer-Elliott
Ehud Ben Zvi [+]
University of Alberta
View Website
Description
This contribution explores a range of Alexanders of memory of the late Second Temple Judah, as we may reconstruct them based on extant literary texts (e.g., Josephus), and as it does, so it sheds cross-cultural light on a more general issue, namely that of “mnemonic appropriations of ‘high-value’ outsiders” by local, groups engaged in asymmetric power relations with “imperial” courts and settings. This contribution explores, inter alia, how a subaltern community may shape for itself an in-between conceptual area shared by the local community and the ‘foreigner’ symbolically embodied in the figure of the relevant ‘high value’ character, which is important for not only the subaltern construction of and interaction with the Other, but also for the construction of the subaltern Self. To be sure, such processes often go together with the emergence of voices hinting at local hesitations and concerns about foreign rulers, and the whole business of appropriating and thus lionizing the ‘high value’ outsider.