The Talmud Yerushalmi’s Civil Law in Its Ancient Legal Context provides a historical and comparative examination of legal issues that were shared by both rabbis and jurists during the Roman-Byzantine period. The topics covered concern slaves and manumission, women and property, house building and ownership rights, the treatment of laborers, liability for wild animals, and the broader issue of surveillance and accountability of citizens in the Roman world.
The chapters are written by historians of Roman law as well as scholars of rabbinic literature and ancient Judaism. They reveal the shared interest of rabbis and jurists in specific legal issues, their attention to the same details, similarities in legal solutions, and interesting differences that point to social, cultural, and religious concerns. The interdisciplinary volume exemplifies how the inclusion of rabbinic legal traditions in the study of ancient legal systems enables a better understanding not only of Jewish law but also of Roman legal culture and social practice in late antiquity.