Within the framework of his research project at Princeton University, Piotrkowski examines Jewish papyri discovered at Oxyrhynchus and seeks to test, inter alia, the generally accepted hypothesis that Egyptian Jews and Judaism were completely annihilated as an immediate outcome of the Jewish Diaspora Revolt (115-117 CE). In this lecture, which focuses on the literary papyri (mainly LXX), Piotrkowski scrutinizes what can be learned about the fate of the post-117 CE Hellenized Jewish community of Oxyrhynchus.

Meron M. Piotrkowski (Ph.D. 2015, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is a historian of antiquity, specializing in the Second Temple period. The focus of his research is on the Egyptian-Jewish Diaspora. He is the author of Priests in Exile: The History of the Temple of Onias and Its Community in the Hellenistic Period (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2019) and part of the team of commentators and contributors to the new Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum (vols. IV-VII; ed. by N. Hacham and T. Ilan).
Since August 2021, he is a Visiting Fellow at Princeton’s Department of Religion, working on the history of the Jewish community of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt during the Hellenistic-Roman and Byzantine periods, and was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton (2022). From autumn 2023, he will be Associate Professor of Ancient Jewish History at Oxford University.

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