This chapter analyzes the nature of an intriguing, if sometimes troubled, community of Port Jews, and its complex and multi-layered image inside and outside of Portsmouth. Ultimately it explores why particular memories of Portsmouth Jewry—as both a part of and apart from the town's dangerous ‘sailortown’ community—were so persistent in the nineteenth century and beyond. As was the case with the Jews of medieval Winchester, the representation of Portsmouth Jewry had, through the workings of place identity, a wider significance beyond the locality in question.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts. British Jewish history has been regarded as being of minor importance, and its provincial experiences even more so. Yet the histories revealed in this book show the richness of previously neglected Jewish communities from the medieval era onwards. They show that the ‘global is everywhere and already, in one way or another, implicated in the local’. Moreover, this study has confirmed Sander Gilman's proposition that when ‘the center/periphery model is suspended, the frontier becomes the space where the complex interaction of the definitions of self and Other are able to be constructed’.

This chapter investigates the Journal's paradoxical commitment to an insistently chronological structure in the service of a faith that found the dissolution of chronological time inherent in the turn to the inward light. It argues that this can be explained through seeing the Journal itself as, in effect, a ‘technology of presence’, a means of ceaselessly demonstrating and performing the continual and multi-temporal irruption of the inward light.

This chapter examines how the inward light figured in the ministry of the First Publishers of Truth – in the convincement of new Friends, and in the condemnation of those who hardened their hearts towards the light. It suggests that the opprobrium levelled at early Friends was not so much owing to the divergence of the forms and strategies of the rhetoric of Quaker ministry, which had much in common with orthodox preaching practice, but much more to do with the Quaker refusal to set limits to the place, time or manner in which that ministry was carried out. The erasure of the boundary between the sacred and the secular entailed the rejection of the notions of consecrated ground, of the ordination of ministers and of formalised acts of worship, so that Quaker preaching could be performed by any Friend experiencing an immediate call to such work, in any place and at any time. Quaker rhetoric thus occupied an unbounded field of operation, and drew on a wide repertoire of linguistic and symbolic modes of preaching, since, by definition, the inward light rendered out of bounds nothing that it touched.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the concept of Hampshire studies. It considers the tradition of defining the essence and integrity of Hampshire, which is seen most clearly through various county magazines in Hampshire, especially after the Second World War. The chapter then discusses how those who have written and presented the Jewish past have perceived the local context and place identity within it. Local Jewish studies, especially in Britain, face a triple marginality. First, there is the antipathy, patronisation, or indifference of those working within ‘mainstream’ British or English history against minority studies. Second, within global Jewish studies similar attitudes towards the ‘local’ can be detected as within British historiography. Third, within British Jewish historiography and memory work more generally, reflecting power politics within the community as a whole, the provinces have been especially sidelined.

Chapter 2 (The Biblical Portrayal of Transgressive Worship): In this chapter, I focus on the texts of the Hebrew Bible. I argue that these texts, when they picture the worship of other gods or the reverence of their icons, consistently assume that such worship is sincere (or, at the very least, do not question its sincerity).

Chapter 1 (Introduction): In this chapter, I argue that scholars have tended to focus on how ancient Jews judged and criticized pagan worship (i.e. on the normative elements of ancient Jewish views). I suggest that, by turning our attention instead to how Jews constructed and imagined the religious devotion of their pagan neighbors (i.e. the descriptive elements of ancient Jewish views), we can open up an entirely new arena of investigation into ancient Jewish thought.

Chapter 6 (Mishnah ‘Abodah Zarah 3:4 and the Bad Faith Argument): In this chapter, I analyze the existing scholarship on the much-discussed narrative of Rabban Gamliel in the Bathhouse of Aphrodite in m. ‘Abodah Zarah 3:4. I then propose that Rabban Gamliel’s response to Proclus within the story is, in fact, best understood as a deployment of the “Bad Faith Argument.”

Chapter 7 (Conclusion): In this chapter, I summarize the major finding of the book – that a transition took place around the third century BCE in the Israelite/Jewish portrayal of pagan worship – and then seek to offer a causal explanation for it. I propose a number of potential causes, but suggest that the most important among them was a major reduction in the Jews’ own attraction to the worship of other gods – a lack of attraction that they then projected onto those engaged in such worship.

Chapter 4 (The Idolatrous Professional and the Bad Faith Argument): In this chapter, I juxtapose pericopes from the Hebrew Bible with thematically similar texts from the mid to late Second Temple and tannaitic periods. In so doing, I demonstrate that, despite the overall resemblance between them, these texts differ dramatically in their portrayal of pagan worship, with the earlier texts assuming the sincerity of such practices and the later texts arguing for their insincerity.