{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0293282876064333, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004730368968779565, 'mean_word_length': 4.92436974789916, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Catherine Hezser. The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine . Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1997. x, 557 pp.

Baumgarten's insistence that millenarianism need not be the last resort of the dispossessed—he speaks (p. 164) of "the millenarianism of the victors, not the vanquished"—is obviously correct and by now something of a truism among scholars with even the slightest sympathetic acquaintance with sociology. It is less clear why Baumgarten rejects the traditional "relative deprivation" to account for the appeal of millenarianism only to replace it with "cognitive dissonance," which is comparably unspecific and so comparably weak in its explanatory force. How many people, even in most premodern societies, are not relatively dispossessed, or do not suffer from cognitive dissonance, that is, are not happy as they feel they deserve to be? The problems with The Flourishing of Jewish Sects are not trivial, but neither are its accomplishments. Baumgarten's argument may be summarized as follows: the three main sects were essentially mainstream phenomena, populated by the relatively well-to-do, who were mainly, at least early on, responding to the fact that their lives really weren't so bad (though they could have been better), by adopting similar sets of sometimes extreme positions on issues that mattered to all Jews. Though this argument should have been made more explicitly, its cumulative force is considerable. I happen to think it is mainly correct, notwithstanding the problematic details. More significant than the content of his argument is Baumgarten's embrace of comparison as a method, and his openness to social anthropology. Ancient Judaists tacitly and in an untheorized way often regard their subject as unique, operating according to its own rules. Would it be too much to hope that Baumgarten's colleagues might learn from the lesson that he teaches so gently and, in the final analysis, so well, that the best way to begin to make sense of the Jews is to attend not only to their particularities, but also to the ways in which they are a society like any other?