‘From Me, Jerusalem, the Holy City, to You Alexandria in Egypt, my Sister.…’ (Bavli Sanhedrin 107b)
The chapter investigates the role of ancient Jewish letters in promoting a shared identity in a polycentric geopolitical situation. This could not be done by coercion: it required diplomacy and persuasion. Alexander explores how Jews based in Jerusalem used letters for the purpose of asserting leadership, starting with the two festal letters at the beginning of 2 Maccabees that invite the Jews in Egypt to adopt the festival of Hanukkah celebrating the rededication of the Jerusalem temple and thus to acknowledge Jerusalem’s primacy. He also finds reflections of Jewish letter-writing in three passages of the book of Acts and reviews the use of letters as transmitted in rabbinic literature. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the genre of responsa, which began to flourish in the Islamic period, developed from exchanges of letters and participated in their ‘soft’ power structures.