A comprehensive study of the Mishnah that argues it manifests an implicit theory of what performing rituals accomplishes

Jews are known for having many ritual practices. Many of these come from the Bible, but Jewish ritual practice as we know it today is as much a product of the earliest rabbis who lived in the late-second and early-third centuries. These rabbis created the text known as the Mishnah, which collects, develops, and records in great detail rules about the proper way to carry out traditional rituals, what the text terms mitsvot. Naftali S. Cohn’s book Ritual: An Ancient Jewish Perspective (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026) is a comprehensive study of ritual in the Mishnah, focused especially on the fundamental questions of the nature of ritual, what ritual does or accomplishes, and what motivates people to do rituals, all according to the Mishnah’s authors.

Reading the text of the Mishnah closely and drawing widely from the analytic toolbox of ritual studies, Cohn argues that ritual, in the perspective of the Mishnah’s authors, has multiple effects. Performing mitsvot—and refraining from the mitsvot “not to do”—shapes individual bodies by choreographing a person’s interactions with the objects, spaces, times, and other bodies that form the environment in which they act. It shapes collective bodies by enabling social life and creating group identity, even as it establishes differences between people and social hierarchy. Doing mitsvot also activates cultural ideas, connecting the people of Israel to their God, their past, their place, and each other. Repeated ritual action, further, forges body habits and generates the powerful feelings of obligation and, at times, even joy and love, which move people to continue to carry out these rituals. Mitsvot, according to the Mishnah, have the power to shape Israeliteness, or Jewishness, in its every facet. By focusing so much attention on ritual behavior, Cohn shows how the Mishnah can also be understood as a rumination on the fundamental nature of activity itself, of doing, being, moving, and engaging with the world.

New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review

Naftali Coen is chair of religions and cultures at Concordia University in Montreal

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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After Caesar's assassination, the triumvirs drew up a kill list; one such target, a man named Lucius Plotius Plancus, fled to a villa near Naples and tried hiding behind a curtain. The soldiers found him anyway–thanks to his heavy perfume.

Pliny the Elder, writing a century later, used the perfume to suggest the killing was justified. Historians have often taken that at face value, as proof that Rome despised Eastern luxuries. Jeremy Simmons reads it as a joke—Pliny was calling the man a walking corpse.

In Jeremy’s latest book Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade (Princeton, July 2026) he asks what happened when goods like pepper and perfume arrived at their destinations. The goods took on new lives: perfume became a way of talking about death, pepper a medicine prescribed for its heat, Roman coins turned pendants in South Asia—or how soldiers knew the price of spices even on remote Hadrian’s Wall.

Jeremy is an assistant professor of history and the college at the University of Chicago.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Sea of Treasures. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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How Roman Britain ended is one of the most controversial questions in British history. Unique among former Roman citizens in Western Europe, the Britons established long-lived kingdoms, resisting 'barbarian' political takeover for centuries. Yet so little is known of them from written records that even the names of most of their kings are effectively lost to history.

Packed with the latest discoveries and ground-breaking research, in Tyrants and Traders: Tintagel, Arthur and the Lost Kings (Bloomsbury, 2026) Professor Ken Dark brings the fascinating, but mysterious, world of these rulers and their kingdoms to life. Archaeological evidence, along with re-analysis of the few existing texts, reveals an unexpectedly sophisticated society, connected to a wider international network of trade and cultural contacts than might until recently have seemed imaginable. Professor Dark demonstrates through the latest archaeological discoveries that Tintagel – an eroded coastal stronghold in Cornwall, closely associated with the later legend of King Arthur – was a royal fortress and trading centre of one of the most important British kingdoms of this period.

This is a historical period filled with memorable characters and stories: from the outraged churchman Gildas, attempting to reform the corrupt rulers he thought threatened civilized life itself, to St. Patrick, who played a major part in converting Ireland to Christianity, to no less than King Arthur – whose historical existence Professor Dark shows to be much more likely than usually supposed.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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