Doron Mendels

Many of his works deal with the encounters between the Jews, Christianity, and Paganism, and relate to the themes of historiography, ancient Jewish nationalism, the history of the Catholic Church, public memory, and communication.

One article deals with the Essenes, comparing the light of their lives with what we know about the Hellenistic utopia, which came into style after the conquests of Alexander the Great.

He distinguishes between the rationalist historiographic writings (historians that deal with cause and effect, writing linear narratives that describe the history of a period month by month and year by year) and historiography that enhances the connections between political and social needs by tying them to different social strands in the population (primarily from the Hellenistic world after the conquests of Alexander the Great).

In it, he attempts to examine the question of how the Church, which developed as an esoteric entity in the Land of Israel, became in less than 300 years a state religion that encompassed the world.

Mendels primarily utilizes Eusebius's book, the Church History (while at times relying on his other works such as The Preparation for the Gospel), to demonstrate that we are dealing with a real communication revolution.

Various chapters deal with different types of historical and public memory, and its expression in literature, in historiography, and to some degree in physical monuments.

For example, in a chapter on The Persians of Aeschylus, Mendels examines a number of alternative narratives of remembrance that were embedded in the population of Athens after the Battle of Salamis.

The idea developed for Mendels in light of his conclusions in the book surveyed above that in reality one should only talk about partial memories of sub-groups within the collective.

The idea launched a conference connected to a group that dealt with communication and the Jewish world in the context of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University in 2005 (some of the participants in the group were Elihu Katz, Menachem Blondheim, Arye Edrei, Tamar Liebes, Shmuel Feiner, Hayim Soloveitchik, Dror Warman).

Among the disciplines connected to memory, articles represented the disciplines of law (Nili Cohen), the brain (from the natural sciences: Idan Segev and Hermona Soreq), anthropology (Yoram Bilu and Moshe Shoked), psychology (Amiya Leiblich and Yonatan Slavin), Hebrew literature (Dan Laor), Israeli society and the holocaust (Arye Edrei) and philosophy (Jeffrey Barash).

Mendels himself wrote the introduction in which he brings a concrete example of the nature of memory from the "public" drawing of the Renaissance period in early Italy.

In addition, he wrote an article on the novella of Günter Grass "Crabwalk", in which he tries to give an example of the fragmentation of memory in contemporary Germany.

This book that Mendels wrote in conjunction with Arye Edrei, a professor of Jewish law at Tel Aviv University, and is published in German by Vandenhoek& Ruprecht in Goettingen, Germany, argues that contrary to the accepted scholarly view, the Rabbis in the first centuries of the common era, did not have control or authority over the western Greek-speaking (and subsequently Latin speaking) Jewish diaspora.

Hence the Jews in Asia Minor, Greece, the Aegean Islands, Italy, France, Spain, and Egypt, who were Greek speaking, were almost completely cut off from rabbinic Judaism that functioned in the Land of Israel and Babylonia because they had no common language of communication.

The book also provides extensive treatment of issues such as linearity, temporality and simultaneity of historical texts, whilst working to examine four core themes.

Thirdly, issues of Hellenization in Palestine – power, honor, peace, gifting, etiquette in general, sovereignty and political theology and their presentation in the main narrative of the Hasmonean period, the 1 Book of Maccabees.

In examining many cases drawn from the history of mankind, Mendels points to repetitions, not of events, but of manners of conduct and behavior of groups.

The book shows how concepts such as liberty, justice, fairness, loyalty, reciprocity, adherence to ancestral laws, compassion, accountability and love of fatherland became meaningful in the relations between nations in the Hellenistic Mediterranean sphere, as well as between ruling empires and their subject states.

Guy Darshan, has for a number of years been actively writing a comprehensive commentary on the Book of 1Maccabees for the series "Hermeneia", published by Fortress Press.

41–54 Mendels argues that there exists a gap between the myth of Hellenization—which has become a metaphor for the struggle of Jewish continuity over the ages – and the actual historic record from the period itself.

In the article “Oral Group Memory- Written Fragmented Memory: A Note on Paul and the Jews,” which appeared in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament 41.1 (2018), pp.

Hence alongside his mission to gentiles Paul addressed Jews in synagogues and other mixed audiences and by such a clever strategy he started the media revolution of early Christianity.

Mendels argues that 2 Maccabees reflects a microcosmos of the socio-economic and cultural reality of the second century B.C in the Hellenistic world, and unfolds an important message in political science concerning a politeia (constitution) and its ideal relationship with the dominant empire.