This introduction serves as a preface to the volume and provides an overview of the purpose of this Companion, and a paragraph about each essay in the collection.

This chapter moves from the macro-level of social and narrative imagination to the micro-level of speaking and seeing. It continues to consider the interplay of inheritance and originality in these practices: the constitutive underdetermination or equivocity of what we see and say. The chapter illuminates the ways in which even at the smallest levels, we construct the world imaginatively. It then begins to discuss how art and poetry loosen the grasp of automated perception and do not impose an alternative vision but rather grant a double vision of our lives, allowing us to see it from new perspectives or in new ways. The chapter concludes with a consideration of liturgical and biblical renewals of perception.

This chapter offers an account of Jewish diaspora communities throughout the ancient Mediterranean that serves as a provocative correction to the origin story of diaspora itself. It contends that the biblical narratives of Jewish exile, so central to modern conceptions of diaspora as involving a painful loss of homeland, a continuous longing for return, and stark relations of isolation or assimilation while inhabiting alien lands – did not reflect the actual everyday conditions of Jews living under Greek or Roman rule. Working with textual and archaeological evidence from the Greco-Roman world, including Hellenistic Jewish writing, Gruen offers a very different picture of Jewish diasporic experience from the biblical narratives of exile. He shows that the Jewish diaspora experience was largely productive and stable, where Jews negotiated between their minority status and the literary, cultural, political, economic, and social milieu of the cities and states in which they resided and very much considered their home.