Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society Diamond Jubilee celebration
A reception for members to mark the Diamond Jubilee of the Society was held at the British Academy London on 4th May 2022 Wednesday 4 May 2022. The reception included the Richard Barnett Memorial Lecture 2022 given by Professor Martin Goodman FBA on ‘Herod the Great: King of Judaea and King of the Jews’.
Richard Barnett Memorial Lecture 2022 Professor Martin Goodman – Herod the Great: King of Judaea and King of the Jews.
How Jewish was Herod the Great? Appointed King of Judaea by the Roman senate, he transformed the landscape of his realm to reflect the concerns of his Roman friends, particularly Caesar Augustus. Thoroughly Hellenised in his tastes, he was accused already in antiquity of preferring to direct his benefactions to Greek cities rather than to his Jewish subjects. He was accused already in his lifetime of being only half-Jewish, and later Jewish traditions sometimes treated him as gentile.
But Herod’s Roman masters always seem to have thought of Herod as a Jew, and the lecture will explore the extent to which their assumption of his Jewish identity reflected Herod’s own self-perception, his relations with the Jews of his own realm and the diaspora, and his creation of a distinctive role for himself within the new Augustan order in Rome.
Martin Goodman is Emeritus Professor of Jewish Studies in the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, and a former President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He has written extensively on both Jewish and Roman history, including Rome and Jerusalem (2007) and A History of Judaism (2017). He is currently writing a biography of Herod the
Great.
A recording of the entire Diamond Jubilee event is available here. The Richard Barnett Memorial Lecture starts at 25m 30s
The Richard Barnett Memorial Lectures
After the death of Richard Barnett in 1986 at the age of 87, a fund was established to provide for annual lectures to preserve the memory of the remarkable breadth and depth of his scholarly contributions in fields beyond his stellar career as Keeper of Western Asiatic Antiquities in the British Museum. The lectures were originally intended to rotate between three of the institutions to which he had made major contributions: the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society (which he founded), the Jewish Historical Society of England (where he served as President and honorary editor of publications), and the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation (where he served for many years as Honorary Archivist). In more recent years, the lectures have been delivered to the AIAS and the JHSE in alternate years, with the subject of the JHSE lecture often related to the Western Sephardi tradition to which Richard devoted so much scholarly effort. It is to be hoped that the tradition of these lectures will continue to keep alive the memory of a great scholar in perpetuity.