‘A love-hate relationship.’ [1]
Spyros Troianos on Christians and Jews
‘This Jew would be dear to my heart were it not for his abominable religion.’ [2]
Sidonius Apollinaris
‘Don’t kill them! Let their afflictions befit their baseness.’ [3]
Peter of Cluny As the politics of contemporary Jewishness is susceptible to polemic, so its late antique history exhibits similar symptoms. If mentioned in the triumphant marches of Christianity and Islam, centuries of Jewish history are reduced to appendices of persecutions, massacres and ghettoisation, or paeans to cosmopolitanism, with only the consensus that the first crusade (1096) formed a watershed––a normalisation of pogroms and exile––harmonising the two narratives.
Even this accord is suspect, however, given its affinity with the Catherine Nixey-lite narrative which frames Christianity as displaying exceptional intolerance. Pagan rule was hardly kind to the Jews.[4] Had Constantine visited Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem) during his reign he would have paced around a small, emphatically Roman colony and a Temple Mount that housed statues of Hadrian and Jupiter.[5]
Jews were forbidden entrance; it was a settlement almost entirely given over veterans, Hadrian (‘Aelia’ came from his gens), and the cult of the Capitoline Jupiter. Furthermore, the Roman garrison was increased in stages till there were two legions and a comparable number of auxiliaries, and the provincial administrative name was changed from Judaea to Syria Palestine to prioritise the land’s classical identity over its Jewish status as a promised land.[6]
Hadrian’s plan, if correctly reported, to rebuild the Jewish Temple was never fulfilled, and Jerusalem was virtually ignored. Over the course of six centuries only Hadrian and Heraklios bothered to conduct an adventus in the town. During Hadrian’s reign the slave market in Mamre, near Hebron (south of Jerusalem)––in a cruel twist of fate, the location where Abraham is supposed to have entertained three angels, as immortalized in Rublev's Trinity (1411)––sold countless Jewish captives into servitude around the Mediterranean. In fact it was a Christian empress, Eudocia (d. 460), who lifted the Hadrianic ban on the Jews praying at the Temple Mount in 438.[7]
Historiography’s two post-Roman caricatures, cassandran and panglossian, are possible only because, at least in the West, historical Jewish sources fell off a cliff after the Romano-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus died c. AD 100. A hiatus of almost eight centuries followed until ended by the Sefer Josippon, a chronicle of Jewish history from Adam to Titus, was written among the Byzantines of ninth-century southern Italy.[8]
The three main texts attributed to Jews during the eight-century lacuna include the Collatio legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum, a fourth-century comparison of Jewish and Roman law; the Epistola Anne ad Senecam, a treatise against idolatry written in a similar period; and the Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum, a Hebrew knock-off of Philo’s texts that was probably written in Josephus’ lifetime. None provide significant details about Jewish life in late antiquity. Meanwhile, rabbinic texts (Yerushalmi, Bavli etc.) display little interest in the historical genre and are full of inconsistencies and anachronisms.
The western picture is thrown into stark relief by the fact that it was during late antiquity that Judaism morphed into a religion of the book. The Hadrianic dispossession of Jews from Jerusalem forged an opportunity to overhaul Judaism, and Rabbinic literature responded by outlining a Torah-oriented Jewishness with a textual rather than a concrete Jerusalem. In the wake of the Constitutio Antonininia (212), which granted citizenship to all free males in the empire, Jews had access to the Roman courts for the first time. This presented a challenge to the elders, however, who worried about the perils of legal and cultural assimilation. And so, just as Roman law was beaten into some sort of order by the likes of Gaius, the Tyrian Ulpian, and Papinian––mostly in Berytus (Beirut), the leading centre of jurisprudence––the Jews appear to have produced their own legal corpus nearby. This was largely successful in shepherding Jews away from Roman courts, at least in religious matters.
Due to such competition, Rabbinic texts reflected Roman law schools as they gained mass traction only insofar as they interpreted biblical traditions in light of Roman norms concerning the communication of laws and edicts. Rabbinic texts echoed Roman legal reasoning and, as a consequence, tended to constitute both a mimicry of Roman universalism and an expression of opposition to the Roman model. This multivalence drew on deep roots which enabled Roman civilisation, like Hellenism before it, to serve as the underlying substrate, a vehicle for the fullest expression of local culture. Once large rabbinic compilations existed, Judaism could focus on studying the Talmud in the academies of antiquity and the medieval yeshivot. During three centuries of Byzantine rule over Palestine, Jewish literary culture flourished: it was the age of exegetical and homiletical works (Midrash), Aramaic translations of the Bible (Targum), liturgical poetry (Piyyut) etc. In short, rabbinical Judaism can be seen as a response to Christianity. As Alan Segal stated, rabbinical Judaism and Christianity were not father and son but brothers.[9]
The stain of deicide Christian texts on Jews are reducible to an adversus Iudaeos literature which was meant to mount a defence of the right of Christians to use the Old Testament despite not keeping the Law. However, these tended to dive a little too enthusiastically into the slipstream of negative themes, viewing Jews less as a people than a theological pestilence that spread pride, blindness, perfidy, stubbornness and deicide. Even if Jews amounted to ideal neighbours, vices––real or imagined––had to be emphasised to highlight the consequences of abandoning God and therefore abandonment by providence.
The teachings of supersession maintain(ed) that Jews were an accursed anomaly, punished for being so privileged as to witness Christ only to reject and kill the sole incarnation in providence’s designs. Due to their corporate assassination, they were cursed outcasts and rightly enslaved according to John Chrysostom.[10] Such an identity––as essentially the New Testament’s Cain––had physiological outcomes. One of the last western Romans, the hymnographer Venantius (d.609), for example claimed Jews smelled odd.[11] The English polymath Sir Thomas Browne repeated the sentiment over a millennium later when he observed that ‘Jews stink naturally… in their race is an evil savour.’ [12] The belief that Jews exude the foul odour, foetor Judaicus, has survived secularization as a popular trope.
Though easily mocked, perceiving odours as a manifestation of moral identity is a cross-cultural phenomenon which may have its origins in claims that sex can be smelled on others. In Jewish cultural discourse, smell recurs as a strong religious indicator that distinguishes between the good and the corrupt. In Exodus (30:23), for example, God tells Moses to make an anointing oil of myrrh, cinnamon and calamus (myrtle).
Such visceral responses were due to the unique position of Jews vis a vis the Old and New Testaments. On the one hand, Jews, with their shared religious heritage, represented ideal potential converts. On the other hand, if the faith was rejected, they jeopardized the universality of Christian truth, its credibility, vocation and breach with the Old Covenant. Jerome, in his commentary on Amos, accurately reflected Christian general opinion when he observed that the Jews ‘Holding fast to their ancient anger and violence… will their own destruction in eternal fire.’[13] Elsewhere, John Chrysostom wrote that ‘Nothing is more miserable than those people who never failed to attack their own salvation.’[14]
Secular substitutes for religious charges––usury being the obvious example––did not emerge until the first crusade. Up to that point Jews were mostly presented as having failed to assimilate to the divinity-stamped order: rioters, adulterers, poison-mixers, lawbreakers, deceivers, emissaries of satanic temptation, or magicians like the Jew who brought Heliodoros into contact with the devil in the vita of Leon of Catania.[15] Social and theological orders were interwoven, hence the branding of theological deviation and social disturbance as indicative of ‘Judaizing’ tendencies in Byzantine circles.[16]
A major plane of Judeo-Christian conflict––in legal cases at least––was slavery, or more accurately, slaves’ penises. The destruction of a synagogue in Rome––where Jewish numbers fell from 3,000 to 800 between the fifth and sixth centuries––during Cassiodorus’ life (d.585) for example was due to a conflict between Jews and their slaves. Slaves tended to claim that escaping Jewish owners was necessary on account of imminent circumcision.
Such episodes may have been less due to proselytism than ritual necessities as, according to Jewish law, basic activities like wine-making were not permitted to be fulfilled by gentiles. Such a position should be balanced against the forced circumcision pursued by the first Hasmonean king, Aristobulus (d.103 BC), in Galilee and his father John Hyrcanus in Edom, however, where such actions offered a convenient route to enforce loyalty, acting as a fait accompli of sorts.
While such negative images lay latent within Christianity’s earliest stages, they were rapidly articulated by the likes of Ephraem (d.373) and John Chrysostom (d.407)––who may have promoted parrhesia in the knowledge that it trumped accusations of disturbing the public order––and reinforced in hymns. The latter referenced Jewish ‘impudence’ and their ‘gold worshiping’ nature.[17] Hymns to pope Sylvester I in particular did a lot of heavy lifting with one claiming that the pope had managed to ‘destroy the seeds of the Jews,’ alongside their ‘malevolence.’[18] This foisting of anti-Jewish sentiments on Sylvester appears to have been due to the well-known, albeit legendary public debate between the Jews of Rome and the pope in AD 315, which ended rather dramatically with Zambri demonstrating the power of the Jewish god by saying the secret name of Yahweh into the ear of a bull, which immediately died. Sylvester, not to be outdone, proved the superiority of God by invoking the name of Jesus, resurrecting the bull.[19]
Quantity eventually acquired a quality, insults morphed into formulas, ensuring that labels like ‘evil,’ ‘foolish,’ ‘forsaken’ etc. gained use as Jewish epithets throughout the empire. Similarly, disputes with Jews occurred sufficiently frequently for comments such as ‘What will you say, O nation of Jews?’ or ‘Be not deceived, O Jews’ to gain traction as stock phrases.
Hagiography that featured Jews tended to follow themes of blood, betrayal and redemption––pointed repetitions of the crucifixion Jews had failed to correctly interpret the first time round perhaps. In Beirut, for example, when a Jew pierced a cross with a lance it bled and any who touched the blood were healed.[20] A similar story recounted a Jew who slashed an icon of Christ in Hagia Sophia’s St Nicholas chapel.[21] After the image bled he threw it into the public fountain, turning its waters red until he confessed and converted with his family.[22]
Elsewhere, in a text that claims Sicilian Judaism had devolved into polytheism––a fact ascribable either to ignorance or polemic as Islam was often similarly described––the leader of a Jewish community, Samuel, suffered leprosy until baptised, renamed and ordained.[23] Conversion was not necessarily one-way, however. The archbishop of Bari, Andreas, famously absconded to Constantinople in 1066 where he converted to Judaism before settling down in Egypt. Six fragments attributed to the Norman priest John, renamed Obadiah on his own conversion to Judaism, celebrated Andreas as his inspiration.[24]
Furthermore, Christians were capable of recalling real Jews rather merely than invoking their image. Tertullian for instance, referred to customs not written in the Bible such as daily immersion and the veiling of women, and there is a probable reference to a Jewish parody of Jesus’ death in De Spectaculis.[25] The North African took issue with Jews who portrayed the Virgin Mary as a prostitute and suggested that a gardener had moved Christ’s corpse instead of being resurrected, lines of attack that occur in the Bavli and Toledot Yeshu respectively.
Flowers among the weeds
In the East, Jews and Christians continued to live in the same Middle Eastern culture whose foundations were the Hebrew (and Greek) Bible and Hellenism. Besides rejecting Christian biblical interpretations and claims, talmudic texts also show similarities to Christian literary forms such as the Apophthegmata Patrum and parables. The invention of the catena (chain)––not to be confused with Constantius II’s tyrannical official, Paulus Catena––a collection of exegetical passages arranged according to the order of biblical verses, has been attributed to Prokopios of Gaza (d.528). Rabbinic Midrash, such as Genesis Rabbah, also employed the catena method to provide a commentary on the biblical book of Genesis.
Moreover, both sides used similar motifs to express religious convictions, typically sparring in the process and borrowing each other’s books.[26] Semi-entangled sacred topographies developed, often absorbing locations not mentioned in the bible such as Tiberias and Caesarea Maritima. Similar dynamics are observable in art: synagogues, for example, used images that were unmistakably Jewish (menorah, etrog, lulav, shofar or Torah ark) but also favored the aediculae, zodiacs and (only half secularised) pagan pantheon that celebrate a shared milieu. Furthermore, it is often impossible to distinguish between Jewish or Christian amulets, texts and artifacts due to a shared magical culture which employed Jewish names that no longer carried strictly Jewish meanings.
This cooperative stance probably lasted longest in areas where both parties shared dhimmitude beneath the crescent. Under these circumstances the integration between ecclesiastical history and secular Roman history, gelled so brilliantly by Eusebius of Caesarea, began to break down. Though Agapius, a tenth-century Chalcedonian bishop of Manbij (Syriac Mabbug, Greek Hierapolis, and a famous Monophysite centre), wrote a universal History (Kitab al-ʿunwan) later figures split religious and secular dimensions, articulating a breach between Christian and world history that admitted Roman history was no longer the faith’s sole cockpit.
Given Monophysites and Nestorians tended to consider Byzantine defeat in their neighbourhood a divine punishment, Jews were less confined by formerly prevalent narratives––at least in areas that enjoyed an absence of Melkites, who formed the spiritual equivalent of a Roman rump state. Yet this tolerance emerged not so much as a deviation from Christian themes than the realization that Constantinople had lost its monopoly on providence; the New Rome’s stance towards Jews was not the only legitimate one; the Roman state had been relativized and therefore relations with Jews were permitted to become more localized and circumstantial.
The deterioration of the Romano-Jewish settlement
Though Constantinian and Theodosian legislation culturally marginalized and juridically subordinated Jews, discrepancies lurked between the aggressive letter and fluid practice, throwing up a number of questions about the degree of application. Officially, conversion to Judaism was punished, Jews were expelled from public administration and the army, they were not permitted to have Christian slaves, and synagogues were not allowed to be built nor old ones renovated.[27] In return Constantinople promised to protect old synagogues, allow the sabbath to be respected and discourage violence against Jews.
On the one hand, Roman administration adopted the rhetoric of the Church in calling Jews nefaria secta, feralis or superstitio.[28] On the other hand, it took these claims seriously only on a rather erratic, opportunistic basis. For example, the important Marian church of Theotokos Chalkoprateia was built on or near a synagogue in Constantinople.[29] Further afield, Justinian demanded that all African synagogues be converted to churches in 533.[30] There were anti-pagan precedents for such actions. For instance, Constantinople’s decision, after the destruction of the Marneion in Gaza, to disburse large imperial subsidies for the construction of a church––named Eudoxiana after the source of financial benevolence––on the site in 407.
State and Church could clash, as at Callinicum (Al Raqqah, Syria) in 388, where Theodosius demanded a local bishop pay for the reconstruction of a synagogue he had destroyed only to be opposed by Ambrose of Milan who threatened him with unforeseen consequences if he punished the bishop, arguing that such a figure might turn against the Church while still becoming a martyr for ‘[destroying] a place where Christ is denied.’[31] At home, in Milan, Ambrose expressed deep regret that he had not been successful in utterly destroying the synagogue burned down by an ‘act of God.’[32] An ancient tradition also relates that Christians set fire to Aquileia’s synagogue in the presence of Ambrose in 388.[33]
Ultimately, Ambrose associated Jews with heretics and viewed the synagogue as an unacceptable symbol of ‘unbelief’ on the Christian landscape.[34] One of the main strategies the Church deployed against the state was to connect its inner life with the invulnerability of the ascetic and juxtapose it against the vulnerability of royalty, hinting that flocks should choose the holier authority were the Constantinian settlement to unravel.
Bar-Sauma (d.456)––despite his opposition to Chalcedon––might be considered Ambrose’s eastern counterpart on the topic of Judaism, given he was fond of claiming the Roman government colluded with Jews; a ploy that attempted to force the state into providing proof of its hostility. In one episode the monk encouraged his followers to riot on the grounds that the Temple Mount was to be recovered for Jews under imperial auspices imminently.
Violence was reasoned as justice for the persecution Christians suffered at the hands of pagans, Jews and Samaritans before Constantine’s conversion. Such claims had a strong pedigree. Ambrose had highlighted that during Julian's reign countless churches had been destroyed by Jews at Damascus, Alexandria, Gaza, Ascalon, Berytus, and various other cities with impunity.[35] Tertullian characterised synagogues as ‘fontes persecutorum’ and Origen suggested that Jews stood at the forefront of calumnies about ritual murder, cannibalism and promiscuity.[36] Accusations which were later repaid in kind by western Christians who insisted that Jews––after an international council selected annual victims––killed kids for cultic practices such as easter crucifixions, a belief that appears to have had its origins in the theories of an English monk, Thomas of Monmouth.
Perhaps the closest the Roman state got to adopting an explicitly anti-Jewish position was when it was at its most insecure, notably the Sasanian siege of Jerusalem (614) when Jews allegedly joined the invasion force due to hopes that they would be allowed to restore the Temple and a belief that they lived in the ‘travails of the Messiah’ when a Son of David would appear. Several sources record that the Jews collaborated in atrocities, and formed an army that attempted to take Tyre. In 632, having reconquered the city––and perhaps greenlit a massacre in the chaos of 630––Heraklios declared that all Jews in the empire within the empire would convert to Christianity or be forcibly baptised.[37]
Moreover, from Theophanes the Confessor (d.817) onwards, Jewish advisors were invariably blamed for the promulgation of iconoclasm by Leo III––a leader that, like Heraklios and Basil I, initiated bouts of forced baptisms––a movement that appears to have had even more of an impact on Jewish art than its Eastern Roman counterpart. Byzantine historians (sans Malalas and Leo Grammatikos) justified upticks in rancour by grounding it in a longue durée of divine wrath (earthquakes, fires) which punished pro-Jewish schemes such as Julian’s plan to rebuild the Temple.[38] This low–level resentment maintained a mainstream existence as late as the twelfth century when Benjamin of Tuleda observed that Jews were not permitted to live within Constantinople, instead dwelling on the other side of the Golden Horn, an area scorned due to the foul-smelling effluents from the tanneries.[39]
The push-and-pull of ecclesiastical politics
In general, the Church split along lines dictated by bishops, which were influenced by flocks, which in turn often had their own idiosyncratic histories with Jews. Tumult tended to centre on whether bishops believed that Jews should be converted, forcibly or otherwise, or simply ignored. Red lines were not predictable, Gregory the Great for example, who insisted on peaceable preaching, reacted violently when presented with Christians that kept the Jewish sabbath.
The Church did not always assume the most reactionary side. Allowing anti-Jewishness to escalate too far risked lapsing into the Old-Testament-loathing ways of Marcionites and Manichaeans. Augustine of Hippo for instance referred to Jews as ‘chosen’ before Christ and honored them as ‘testes veritatis’ after the resurrection.[40] Pope Gelasius I (d. 496) knew a Jew from Telesia and referred to him in a letter to bishop Quingesius as both a ‘vir clarissimus’ and most deserving friend.[41] Further east, the Orthodox Church celebrated Leon Moungos, a Jewish pupil of the eminent rabbi Tobiah ben Eliezer, who became archbishop of Ochrid and the ‘Teacher of [mostly Ukrainian] Pagans.’
However, due to accusations of deicide it was inevitable that the involvement of Jews in suspect initiatives would be flagged as their presence presented too great or easy a tool of delegitimisation to miss. The participation of a Jewish officer in anti-orthodox machinations at Ravenna for example was flagged as illustrative of the Jewish condition by a chronicle in the Excerpta Velesiani.[42]
The presence of Jews was not always deemed discrediting, however. In Gaul, for example, a trend of claiming Jews attended the funerals of luminaries like Hilary of Arles (d.449) to sing––whether they did attend or whether it constituted a rhetorical wink towards Christian universality is not clear––flourished.[43] This is particularly confusing as the same region, the border of Occitanie and Provence, also launched councils such as Agde (506) which decided Jews had to be catechumens for eight months before conversion and forbade shared meals.[44]
While these measures are conventionally viewed as manifestations of theological hatred, they may have also represented attempts to separate parties in order to forestall hostilities. The decision to loathe rather than tolerate Jews seems to have acquired a critical mass between the fourth and fifth centuries. During the Council of Nicaea, for example, Arius was called the ‘hidden Jew,’ and in a post-conciliar circular letter, Constantine called the Jews ‘God-killers.’[45]
In AD 388, there was legislation against mixed marriages, thenceforth considered adulterous and punishable by death, and Theodosius the Great allowed Jews themselves to marry only according to the Table of Affinity. Arcadius degraded the Jewish patriarch Gamaliel in AD 415 on a flimsy pretext and confiscated his tax, aurum coronarium, disrupting forever the empire-wide organisation of Jewry.
Finally, Theodosius II summarised anti-Jewish legislation, crystalising the orthodoxy of the pious emperors, in Novella III. Many of these laws were embodied in canons by ecclesiastical contemporaries of the imperial legislators and later passed into the West via canon collections. This meant that as cities began to revive in the eleventh centuries Jews tended to form separate and inferior communities that were de facto outside the protection of Christian law. Innocent III’s fourth Lateran Council, for example, compelled Jews to live in ghettos and wear Jewish badges, essentially authorising their mistreatment on an international scale.[46]
Conversely, the impulse to segregate can be traced to a fourth-century Syrian compilation, Apostolic Canons, which forbade the clergy to share in Jewish fasts or feasts, or to receive unleavened bread from Jews.[47] A council of Carthage, probably the fourth, expelled from the Church those that ‘clung to Jewish superstitions and festivals.’[48] In the West, mixed marriages were forbidden in canon 19 of the Second Council of Orleans (533). The same council reminded Jews that they were not permitted to be judges over Christians. Another forbade Jews from attending Easter.
Judaism appears to have consistently attracted interest from the pagans and Christians. Why else would Ambrose have addressed young people, warning them from entering into an intimate bond with Jews, or John Chrysostom complained of the same problem in the East.[49] Material evidence of such interest includes a fifth-century Latin inscription––embellished with lulav, shofar and menorah––on the Via Portuense, which mentions a Jewish couple named Sarah and Sigismundus, the latter clearly a Germanic who converted to Judaism.[50]
Such ties should not blind the fact that plenty of violence occurred between Christians and Jews. At Clermont-Ferrand (576), Auvergne, for example Gregory of Tours noted that at Easter a Jew poured rancid oil over a catechumen of Jewish origin marching in a procession. The Christians rerouted to Clermont’s synagogue, destroyed it, and the local bishop Avitus encouraged the forcible conversion of the Jews.[51]
Following a riot, the Jews acceded and converted en masse with reluctant remnants exiled to Marseilles where they probably fared little better given Gregory the Great’s references to the city’s mobs––alongside other places like Arles––also calling for forcible conversion. While not common, similar outbursts were hardly exceptional either. Uzes, Occitanie, also forcibly converted its Jews, suggesting that locations where the littoral Gaul shaded into less cosmopolitan regions had a particular issue.
In 582, Chilperic I insisted that all Jews in his kingdom be converted, though given this instruction was repeated by Dagobert half a century later, it is unlikely to have been heeded on a meaningful scale. Nevertheless those who interacted with royalty clearly felt its effects. Priscus, a wealthy Jewish merchant for example, resisted conversion and was imprisoned. After acquiring permission to attend his son’s wedding he was killed by Pathir, a former Jew who had converted to Christianity in 581.[52]
Forced conversion, however, was rarely lauded by the Church. Esteemed figures such as Gregory of Nicaea and Maximus the Confessor argued that not only would coerced Jews form a dangerous fifth column, but that giving sacraments to unbelievers betrayed Christ’s mission, and the absence of Jews would ruin authoritative apocalyptic claims that they would remain until the end of time as witnesses of the Last Judgment. Not that such literature was always a boon to Jews. One of the most famous descriptions of the Last Days, from St Andrew the Fool’s vita, prophesied that the Roman emperor would win back Illyria, make Egypt pay its dues, defeat the Germanics and persecute the Jews––a program that appears to have conflated universal salvation with Roman irredentism.[53]
Violence was not one-way. Jews participated in Arab armies for example. Hence Maximos the Confessor’s (d.662) rant in a letter to Peter, governor of Numidia, against the ‘Jewish people’ for their part in ‘the evils which today afflict the world.’[54] Jews appear to have joined Arab armies in serious numbers as attested in later Jewish sources.[55] Positive sentiments about the Arab incursions are captured in a contemporary apocalypse attributed to the second-century rabbi Simon ben Yohay who talks to Metatron [the name Enoch took after his transformation into an angel?] who replied
‘Do not fear, for the Almighty only brings the kingdom of Ishmael (Islam) in order to deliver you from this wicked one (Edom/Rome). He raises up over the Ishmaelites a prophet who conquers. They will restore you to greatness and there will be a great terror between them and the sons of Esau.’[56]
Broad geography, dispersed fates
Complicating Jewish history is the geographical spread that followed multiple diasporas. Jews in Gaul for example were keen to sustain the old Roman consensus: a demi-dhimmitude in which submission and peace was mostly honoured.[57] Though this arrangement should not be over egged, most Alexandrian Jews for instance ended up in Milan after the Egyptian patriarch Cyril burned the synagogue and expelled the Jews in reaction to a Jewish-led massacre of Christians in AD 414. Yet the Franks were not interested in upholding even the appearance of Roman norms. When Jews at Orleans asked Guntrum (d.592) to rebuild their synagogue, for example, he rejected it and attacked them.
The condition of Jews in Spain is particularly conspicuous. Iberian literature of the period is unique in refusing to distinguish between Jews and converted Jews––a custom that may have been grounded in a belief, sometimes shared with the Roman East, that Jews habitually reverted to Judaism via various ploys including marriage to Jews. Hence the otherwise curious Spanish laws which insist that converts ate pork and attended the local bishop during Jewish feasts.
Meanwhile, councils and kings repeatedly called for all Jews to be converted, with the Council of Toledo (694) dramatically calling for the enslavement of all Jews.[58] This is all the more surprising given some of the earliest councils, such as Elvira (304), referred to entangled social relations with Jews blessing Christian fields and sharing meals, though admittedly the council itself also forbade intermarriage and insisted upon rejection of Jewish hospitality.
Hostilities may have developed when oppositional narratives over shared histories were highlighted by sermons or events such as the arrival of relics. In Minorca, for example, the advent of St Stephen’s relics created precisely this scenario in AD 418. Stephen had given a passionate defence of his faith before a Jewish court before being stoned to death in AD 34, and his final words included a prayer of forgiveness for his attackers (Acts 7:60). At Mahon tensions turned into a riot which led to the destruction of the synagogue and the forcible conversion of the Jews.[59]
Split loyalties had the potential to spark into violence in a range of shared historical narratives. Take the fate of James the Just (d.62), who continued the Davidic lineage and succession within the Church of the Circumcision. Violently put to death according to an account left by Hegesippus (via Eusebius), he was thrown from the Temple battlement, stoned while paraphrasing Christ at Luke 23:34, and clubbed by Jews for failing to renounce his faith.[60] Or take Mary’s reputation, which Jews impugned by claiming she was an adulterer with a Roman soldier, Panthera, instead of parthenos, theotokos, panagia, despoina etc.
As contested histories grew pricklier, the Iberian Church secured the seniority of the New Covenant. The Third Council of Toledo (589) for example demanded that children born to mixed marriages be taken from their families to be baptized. Strong regional divergences still materialised, however. At the council of Narbonne (589), for example, Jews were allowed to hold funeral processions but not to sing psalms.[61] As evidenced by confrontations with Arianism, with its choir gangs and so forth, singing constituted a religiously sensitive activity––the bishop of Terracina in Sicily for example expelled the Jews from a synagogue because psalms could be heard from it.[62]
This region may have been exceptionally liberal by Iberian standards, however, due to its aberrational position within the realm. Gallia Narbonensis joined the Visigothic kingdom in 462 and was renamed Septimania after the city of Bezier, known in the Roman period as Colonia Iulia Septimanorum Baeterrae after the settlement of seventh legion veterans. It had a considerable history as a Jewish base, hence the ex-Jewish Julian of Toledo’s characterisation of it as a ‘brothel of blaspheming Jews.’[63]
Rejecting rejection
Given the eccentricity of Judeo-Christian relations during this period, it is worth considering why educated Jews and Christians struggled to remain amicable without analysis resorting to polemical images about the former (as fonts of deicide, pride, stubbornness etc.) or latter (as aggressive, polytheist, ignorant grunts etc.).
Christianity started as a type of Hellenistic Judaism which had to wrestle at an early stage with purely gentile forms of Christianity that could be fruitful (orthodoxy uses Greek diction to express mystery in a particularly refined manner) but also culturally antagonistic.
Several powerful gentile groups preferred to reconcile revelation with their shared philosophical culture, paideia, rather than digest it on its own terms. For example, a major theological principle of paideia concerned the nature of the highest God: He/It was by definition perfect. Although the source of all, this God was not truly a creator, however, a role that would have implicated him too immediately in the imperfections and vicissitudes of time and matter. Such a God fit poorly with the active and personified God of the Testaments, and Jews came to accept most Christians at best as misguided practitioners of their ancestral customs, and at worst as idolators.
In Gnostics and Marcionites, Jews saw the Christian par excellence: types who created mitigated or hierarchical dualisms––mostly involving docetic Christologies and an insistence that salvation was purely spiritual––in order to justify imposing gentile schemes and cultural assumptions on Jesus, paradoxically decontextualising the Messiah in order to subordinate Him to higher truths.[64] In short, setting aside belief in Christ as the Messiah as the main obstacle, Jews saw some of the strongest 'Christian' movements invert their standard precepts and demonise their identity––while being portrayed as incompatible with their own God no less––adding cultural consternation to relations.
Moreover, while Jews knew their own literature, they were confronted by groups that altered the frame of reference by pushing allegorical interpretation as supreme. When events, people and statements were understood correctly––or in the language of these later works, kata pneuma (spiritually)––Jews lost authority over their own texts as Christians pointed to metaphysical truths that superseded their own, and cast Jews as overly literal, given to carnal explanations of sophisticated spiritual matters, and stony-hearted or spiritually barren.[65]
To add weight to this stance, every historical tragedy––from unsuccessful revolts against Rome to the erasure of Jerusalem and a homeless diaspora––was exploited to demonstrate that, just as the Jews had rejected Christ, so they had sealed divine rejection. This image of the Jew metastasised through all genres and, as a theological abstraction, contained immense power, serving by means of absolute contrast to define the desiderata of orthodox identity. This identity perhaps explains the haphazard nature of Jewish persecution: when New Israel was at the vanguard of history's march Jews could be ignored as collateral damage, but when its columns stalled, Old Israel’s shadow caused sufficient existential angst for Christians to feel the need give Jews a range of (encouraging) nudges down the same flume that pagans had gone. With thanks to @Gregoresate for his invaluable input
NOTES [1] Spyros N. Troianos, “A love-hate relationship,” Jews in Byzantium (2012).
[2] Ep. 3.4.
[3] H. Greatz, History of the Jews, Vol. III, 350.
[4] The Jewish position before Constantine was unique with no other group having quite the same roster of rights or obligations. If a Jew did not belong to a synagogue he had to pay the Roman poll tax and sacrifice to the gods. Only a Jew with synagogal associations could escape these munera (civic duties). The synagogues were the Jewish collegia, which themselves had to pay collegiate munera, the Fiscus Judaicus, a didrachm levied on the head of every Jew. The main privilege was that Jews could not be forced to perform any task which violated their religious convictions. This meant that they were exempt from the crushing burden of the decurionate; that responsibility for tax collection which gradually impoverished the middle class. And Jews were neither compelled to celebrate state worship nor forced to attend pagan temples, though they had to perform all other liturgies and tutelae (forced donations) common to all Roman citizens.
[5] On the site of the future Church of the Sepulchre a shrine to Aphrodite was built and, in nearby Bethlehem, Hadrian erected a temple to Adonis over a grotto.
[6] Palestine was settled by Philistines, a people of Greek origin, during the Late Bronze Age collapse in the twelfth century BC. [7] Jan Willem Drijvers, “Barsauma, Eudocia, Jerusalem, and the Temple Mount,” The Wandering Holy Man. The Life of Barsauma, Christian Asceticism, and Religious Conflict in Late Antique Palestine, eds. Johannes Hahn & Volker Menze (2020). [8] Much changed in the interlude, not least language. While Josephus had been content to write in Greek, Jews in Italy had transitioned to Hebrew by the end of the millennium. [9] This is the central thesis of Rebecca’s Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World (1986) [10] See his Fifth and Sixth Homilies against the Jews. [11] Irven Resnick, “Medieval Automata and Later Medieval Judeophobia,” The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures (2022) 48 (1): 1–20. [12] Sir Thomas Browne (1646; 6th ed., 1672) Pseudodoxia Epidemica, IV.x, 236-241. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/pseudodoxia/pseudo410.html. [13] In Amos, I, 11; PL, XXV, 1001. Cf. Gaudentius, Sermo IV, CSEL, 68. [14] Chrysostom, Against the Jews, Homily 1. https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/chrysostom_adversus_judaeos_01_homily1.htm [15] Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil And The Jews The Medieval Conception Of The Jew And Its Modern Antisemitism, (1946) https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.177965/2015.177965.The-Devil-And-The-Jews-The-Medieval-Conception-Of-The-Jew-And-Its-Modern-Antisemitism_djvu.txt [16] These should not be confused with real Judaizing sects within the Eastern Roman empire such as the Hypsistarians who spurned the Trinity, or Melchizedekians who kept the Jewish sabbath. When used in a theologically accurate manner rather than as pejorative term “Judaizing” referred to groups that accepted Jewish customs, recognized apocryphal books, no longer had bishops, professed “new opinions,” or distinguished themselves by other aberrations that were justified via appeals to ultra-conservative norms. [17] Jews in Byzantium: Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures, ed. Robert Bonfil (2011). For a decent monograph, on the topic, see Bogdan Bucur, “Anti-Jewish Rhetoric…” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 61:1 (2017) 39-60. https://www.trinityorthodox.ca/documents/Bucur-AntiJewishRhetoric.pdf [18] Ibid. [19] See Rome's Santi Quattro Coronati on the Caelian Hill for artistic evidence of the episode, which was probably modelled on Old Testament exempla like the confrontation between Elijah and the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18).
[20] “Legend of the Crucifix of Beirut,” Christian Iconography, https://www.christianiconography.info/Edited%20in%202013/Italy/beirutCrossTuscan.html [21] Saint Nicholas had a substantial presence for the majority of Byzantine rule at Hagia Sophia. There was a St Nicholas mosaic in the south tympanum, for example, and the St Nicholas Passage wrapped around the curve of the apse on the outside of the building. The chapel of Saint Nicholas was in the center of the Passage and best known for an icon of Christ. The Passage connected with a door in the Chapel of the Holy Well. Not many are familiar with St Nicholas’ passage or chapel today because in 1320 a survey of the building indicated the north and east sides of the church were in danger of collapse so Andronikos II commissioned repairs. Immense buttresses were erected against the church to stabilise it, destroying the chapel and passage, and massively reducing the amount of light. [22] “The Jew Who Stabbed the Icon” https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110775747-053/pdf?licenseType=open-access [23] Perhaps a warped retelling of the spurious claim circulating in late antiquity that pope Sylvester had converted Constantine after miraculously curing him of leprosy. [24] Youval Rotman, Converts in Byzantine Italy: Local Representations of Jewish-Christian Rivalry (2012). [25] De Spectaculis, 30, 5-6. [26] Jerome borrowed several books from a Jew who had previously borrowed them from a synagogue (see Letters, 36.1). [27] Sensitivity regarding Christian slavery may have been a consequence of the Jewish position on Jewish slavery. Within the Roman empire a Jew could be slave to another for only seven years, and it was a religious duty for Jews to free brothers enslaved by the Gentiles. Therefore it seems probable that there were few Jewish slaves.
[28] Paula Fredriksen, “Roman Christianity and the Post- Roman West: The Social Correlates of the Contra Iudaeos Tradition,” Jews, Christians and the Roman Empire, eds. Dohrman & Reed (2014). [29] Alexander Panayotov, “The Synagogue in the Copper Market of Constantinople. A Note on the Christian Attitudes toward Jews in the Fifth Century,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica (2002), vol. 68, 319-334. [30] A. Urbaniec, “The novella (37) of Justinian of 535 and its anti-Judaic character,” https://apcz.umk.pl/KLIO/article/download/42412/38590/142951
[31] Ambrose, Letter 31.8. [32] Ambrose, Letter 11.8. See also Letter 20, one of the three letters written to Orontianus. [33] Samuel Rocca, “Impact of the Barbarian Invasions on the Jews of Roman Italy,” Scripta Judaica (2016) 41-56. [34] Ambrose, Letter 31.1. [35] James Seaver, Persecution of Jews in the Roman Empire (1953) 43. [36] Paula Friedrikson, “Christian Anti-Judaism,” Cambridge History of Judaism, Vol. 4 (2008). https://www.bu.edu/religion/files/pdf/Christianity-and-Anti-Judaism-in-Late-Antiquity-Polemics-and-Policies-from-the-Second-to-the-Seventh-Centuries.pdf [37] “Maximos the Confessor, Letter 8 (end) (On the forced conversion of Jews and Samaritans)” Trans. Andrew Jacobs. https://andrewjacobs.org/translations/maximos.html
[38] Julian's letters reveal collusion between pagans and Arians, and popular sentiment may have assimilated Jews to the same group via the means of a common belief in the status of Christ as a creature (a denial of Christ’s divinity). [39] Julian's letters reveal collusion between pagans and Arians, and popular sentiment may have assimilated Jews to the same group via the means of a common belief in the status of Christ as a creature (a denial of Christ’s divinity). [40] David Navarro, “Augustine of Hippo’s Doctrine of Jewish Witness, Mirabilia Journal 36 (2023). [41] Isidore Singer, “Telesinus,” Jewish Encyclopedia https://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/14295-telesinus
[42] Excerptum Velesianum II, XIV, 81-82. [43] Honoratus of Marseilles, Life of Hilary of Arles, trans. Henry-John Clay. https://www.academia.edu/12265722/The_Life_of_Saint_Hilary_of_Arles [44] “Council of Agda,” Biblicalcyclopedia https://www.biblicalcyclopedia.com/A/agde-council-of.html
[45] Anthony Alcock, “Review of The Reign of Heraclius, Crisis and Confrontation,” Bryn Mawr Classical Review, July 6, 2003. https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2003/2003.07.06 [46] As Edward I of England did when he despoiled Jews of their property and expelled them from England in 1287, with Philip IV of France following his lead in 1306. Moreover, when the Black Death fell upon Europe in 1348 hapless Jews were the logical suspects in much of the Holy Roman Empire when theories centred on a great poisoning of the wells. Thousands were massacred.
[47] Lev Gillet, Communion in the Messiah: Studies in the Relationship Between Judaism and Christianity (1942) 1.
[48] Mansi, III, 958
[49] Ambrose, Abr. 9, 84; 14, 451; John Chrysostomos, Adv. Jud. 75.
[50] D. Noy, Jewish Inscriptions in Western Europe (1993) 433-434. No. 500.
[51] Ross Kraemer, “9 “In what has been allowed to them, [the Jews] should not sustain any prejudice.” Mediterranean Diaspora… (2020).
[52] Ephraim Steiner, “Revisiting the Murder of the Jew Priscus in Sixth-Century Paris,” Crisrael (2023) https://cris.iucc.ac.il/en/publications/revisiting-the-murder-of-the-jew-priscus-in-sixth-century-paris-2 [53] Vera von Falkenhausen, “In Search Of The Jews In Byzantine Literature,” Europe in the Middle East - The Middle East in Europe (2010).
[54] Epistula 14, Patrologia Graeca 91, 537-41.
[55] See mid-eleventh century letter from the Academy of Jerusalem to the diaspora communities in Egypt, J. Mann, The Jews in Egypt… (1920), 1.44, 1.164-5, 2.189-91.
[56] A. Jellinek ed., Bet ha-Midrasch (1855), 3.78; trans. B. Lewis, “An Apocalyptic Vision of Islamic History,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 13 (1950) 321-2. The apocalypse goes on to depict the caliph as a ‘lover of Israel’ that ‘restores the breaches of the Temple.’
[57] When Ravenna’s synagogue was burned by a mob incited by Christian clergy in 519, for example, Theoderic ordered those responsible to pay compensation or be publicly flogged (Anonymi Valesiani Pars Posterior 14, 81-82).
[58] Daniel G. König, “The Accusation of Jewish Collaboration in the Records of the Seventeenth Council of Toledo,” Transmediterranean History 1.2 (2019), 3. https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/transmed/index.php/tmh/article/download/17/116/127
[59] For more see Severus of Minorca: Letter on the Conversion of the Jews, trans. Scott Bradbury (1996)
[60] https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf201.iii.vii.xxiv.html. Eusebius later used the martyrdom to justify Vespasian’s siege in AD 67 and the gentile dominance of Hadrian.
[61] Solomon Grayzel, “The Beginnings of Exclusion,” Jewish Quarterly Review (1970) 15-26.
[62] Ross Kraemer, “9 “In what has been allowed to them, [the Jews] should not sustain any prejudice.” Mediterranean Diaspora… (2020).
[63] E. A. Thompson, The Goths in Spain (1969) 228.
[64] Despite similar theologies, these two sides (Gnostics and Marcionites) pursued different textual practices that have deeply affected their images. Gnostics, read broadly within the Septuagint and within the expanding and esoteric body of Christian literature, content to retrieve gnosis from a wide range of pagan, Jewish and Christian writing. Conversely, Marcionites assembled a new body of religiously authoritative texts and delimited it sharply, restricting their new canon to a single Gospel and a collection of Paul’s letters. Following the logic of Paul’s arguments against halachic observance by Gentiles-in-Christ, they also concluded that all positive reference to the Torah in the epistles must have been the work of later judaizing interpolators, and edited them to reflect this. [65] Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho offers a prototype of arguments that would later be assembled in adversus literature.
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