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Title:
The Spartan-Jewish Affiliation and the Creation of Ancient Kinship Traditions

Abstract:
As outlandish as it may seem to the modern observer, it was widely accepted in antiquity that distant peoples might share a common ancestry. The purported kinship between Sparta and the Jews, attested by two letters quoted in First Maccabees and Josephus, is just one example among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such pairings. In this case, as in many others, it became a diplomatic tool, with the presumed kinship originating as a fiction. What is particularly interesting is that we gain a glimpse into how such traditions could be created—a question that, I suggest, is more important and interesting than whether any given document in the series should be regarded as ‘fictitious,’ ‘authentic,’ or ‘constructed’ (that is, a document created to reflect a real tradition though it may itself be made up).