Download PDF | (Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 14) Robert Bonfil, Oded Irshai, Guy G. Stroumsa and Rina Talgam (eds), Jews in Byzantium_ Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures-Brill , Leiden, Boston, 2012
1060 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
At the outset of this vast volume of studies we would like to take the opportunity and thank all those who have precipitated and assisted in the fruition of this massive project. First and foremost we extend our deepest thanks to Scholion-Interdisciplinary Research Center in Judaic Studies operating under the auspices of the Mandel Institute for Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University and especially its director Prof. Israel Yuval, who relentlessly accompanied and encouraged our project during our three year period of fellowship at the center and after. Alongside him we would like very much to extend our deepest thanks Mrs. Zohar Marcovich for her continuous care and assistance in the group’s work, our thanks also go to the staff of the Center, especially Merav Kaddar, all of whom made our stay there a happy and memorable period. We would like to extend our thanks to all the scholars from abroad and from Israel who participated in our seminars and concluding conference as well as contributed to our volume and thus to the group’s work and success. Above all we would like to thank Ms. Hannah Landes, our most committed, industrious, and in short excellent editor, whose relentless efforts have finally brought this project to its welcome completion.
INTRODUCTION
For a whole millennium, Jewish communities thrived in the Byzantine Empire. Oddly enough, they have left few traces in scholarship, in striking contradistinction with Jewish communities and their cultural and literary output from both Europe and the Islamic empire. This oddity cries for an explanation; addressing this embarrassing state is an urgent scholarly desideratum.
The negative assessment of Byzantine civilization as fundamentally decadent, which was widely current in Western worldview for more than a millennium, and left its residue in contemporary scholarship (notwithstanding the great work accomplished in the last decades by the valiant scholars who courageously embarked on redressing the trend"), could not help but affect the presence of the Byzantine component within Jewish studies. In fact, the fundamentally disdainful attitude of Jewish scholarship towards Byzantine Jewish culture, which ultimately joined the scornful attitude developed by the European West toward Byzantium, antedated it to a great extent. Rooted in the triumph of the Jewish Babylonian culture over its Palestinian rival, a rivalry which goes back to the period better known as Late Antiquity, it kept alive almost all the spurning elements set up during that wrestling phase by the Babylonian propaganda, some of them to be sure not entirely mendacious. Palestinian culture was altogether straightforwardly dismissed and categorized by their rival Babylonians as 0°27
Taw anim o> devarim betelim u-minhagei shmad (= idle talk and customs of renouncement or abjuration). Indeed the latter statement belongs to a later and “darker” age whereby the Palestinian center succumbed to and surrendered its hegemony to the ascending world of Babylonian Jewry. Up until that period, roughly between the seventh and tenth centuries, Late Antique Jewish Palestine was home to the creative forces of a multi-faceted cultural matrix, comprising a variety of literary genres, artistic works, and eminent institutional presence. It is important to note that when speaking of the above Palestinian Jewish Late Antique scenery, one is essentially referring to the communal concentration in the Galilee (and the Golan), centered around the local houses of learning and synagogues, and benefitting from urban political institutions. However, in other regions of Palestine there was probably much less inter-communal cohesion not to say fragmentation, similar to what is found in the late Greco-Roman Diaspora.’ As to the latter, it is difficult to assess the scale of influence rabbinic Jewish Palestinian institutions and culture (some would argue no earlier than the sixth century) had on the Greek- and Latin-speaking Diaspora.’ Thus, being a minority in an empire rallying its power and consolidating it around a single religious cause, one is tempted to inquire whether and to what extent did the Jewish encounter with Christianity during that period help mold Jewish life and culture, and indeed what the contours of that encounter and its lasting impact were on both parties. Notwithstanding the fact that during the course of the period between the fourth to first half of the seventh century, Jews were being progressively marginalized by the imperial authorities as can be gleaned from the law codes (imperial as well as canon), their status deteriorating from a somewhat tolerated to an oppressed minority (exposed in some instances to active attempts of coerced conversion), Christian culture, in diverse ways, left a significant mark on their lives. Polemics and at times eruptions of violence as well as Jewish inroads into distant societies (Himyar) aside, the ongoing dialogue with Christian culture was maintained if not indeed enhanced.
Shifting our gaze to the later Byzantine scenery‘ (the Byzantines considered themselves to be Romans, descendents of the antique world), it is important to note that the above Babylonian Jewish center claim for supremacy (which carried with it also propagandist overtones) should be understood, among other things, in the context of the waning of the early Byzantine (or Late Roman) power in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean. The rise and meteoric success of Islam in its stead was no doubt instrumental and crucial in making that triumph happen rapidly in the areas brought under Islamic rule. The relative feebleness of theological antagonism between Islam and Judaism,° in comparison with the fervent exclusive claim of Christianity as Verus Israel, favored the rapprochement of Caliphs with Exilarchs and Heads of Babylonian Academies, and enabled the latter to take advantage of their prominent position in Baghdad to develop a cultural system remarkably rich in content and impose their authority over all of these areas. It was inevitable that the soundness of that system, triggered as it was by the challenging efflorescence of contemporary Islamic culture, would spread beyond the Islamic world and gradually impose itself all over the Mediterranean region, roughly defined according to Fernand Braudel’s wide-ranging picture.
Unless some ground-breaking discovery shows up, at the moment it is impossible to guess the amount of more or less intentionally discarded Palestinian material following the rise of Babylonian hegemony, in addition to the inevitable loss caused by time. One does not have to be a follower of postmodern views in order to presume that, as almost always happens, the defeated would be inflicted with the additional humiliation of damnata memoria. The scarcity of sources capable of assessing the vitality of the Palestinian cultural centers thus attached additional support to the verdict that very little was transmitted by them to the treasuries of Jewish culture. Although the recent findings in the Cairo Geniza do suggest that a revision of the image of basic ineptitude of the Palestinian Academies is in order, that image does not seem to have been substituted by a more flattering one. Finally, with the fall of Byzantium in 1453, conspicuous Jewish communities were systematically uprooted according to the typical policy of the Turks vis-a-vis the populations of the conquered territories; and the coup de grace to the still existent foundations of native Jewish culture (the so-called Romaniote tradition) was conclusively given by the massive immigration of Spanish exiles, who definitely supplanted them. The conventional wisdom of Jewish scholarship that Byzantine Jewry did not really have much to offer was thus firmly installed in the minds of cultural historians long before non-Jewish scholarship would adopt the negative image of Byzantium that centuries of Western political propaganda had elaborated.
Once it was taken for granted that the worldview of the Babylonian Talmudists was the true representative of what is currently called Judaism, and the socio-cultural and institutional frameworks of Jewish society were re-structured according to this new paradigm of knowledge, the components of the older one gradually lost strength, and most of them were eventually discarded or fossilized. Valuable expressions of vibrant cultural production, such as aggadah and piyyut, were assigned to the realm of inferior intellectual occupations, according to the axiomatic assumption that halakhah, based upon the study of the Babylonian Talmud, was to be credited with absolute supremacy. Benjamin Klar’s remarks appended to his edition of the Chronicle of Ahima‘az,° composed in 1054 in Southern Italy and for long time considered as a legitimate source of Byzantine history and culture, are typical in this respect:
The halakha flourished in Babylon [... while] in the Land of Israel houses of study were desolate...and the Torah was almost forgotten. In any case, we found that the Babylonian sages cried out loudly that the Jews of the Land of Israel “conduct themselves with relation to the religious commandments not according to the halakah but in the manner of apostates [...]”. In the Land of Israel the [intellectual] powers were sufficient only for aggadah, which took upon itself not only to utter “ blessings and words of comfort” but also to describe the wicked decrees of the kingdom of Edom-Rome Byzantium and to prophesize its imminent downfall. In Babylon the Geonim composed responsa on question of halakah, continuing the activity of the sages of the Babylonian Talmud; in the Land of Israel the payytanim composed yozroth (liturgical compositions) and Kerovoth (a different type of liturgical compositions) and other piyyutim so as to include in them the content of the prayers and homilies they were forbidden to utter.’
It was almost generally agreed that what had survived from Byzantine Jewry, if anything, should in fact be assigned to Byzantine Italy. Leopold Zunz, one of the most influential founding fathers of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, in fact assigned almost every valuable product of medieval homiletic Jewish production to southern Italy. And yet, the rather recent flourishing of Byzantine studies has affected Jewish studies as well. The undeniably scanty amount of works about Byzantine Jewry available up to the middle of the twentieth century*® was gradually enhanced by a number of fresh sources, the bulk of which center on the Late Antique period.’ The revival was undoubtedly gréatly encouraged by the interest aroused by archeological research concerning the Holy Land, strongly boosted by Zionist endeavors related to the foundation of the State of Israel, and notwithstanding the fact that from 638 C.E. onward Palestine was already outside Byzantine rule. The field of Jewish Byzantine studies began to be populated step by step, though admittedly in a very unsystematic way. The dissuading effect upon students of Jewish studies who could not envisage pursuing an academic carrier as Byzantinists, enabled both by the savor of exoticism of Byzantine studies and by the correlative absence of university departments specifically devoted to Byzantine studies started to decrease, while at the same time students of Jewish history and culture began to realize that the void in our knowledge concerning the Byzantine Millennium” would inevitably limit and distort any working hypothesis regarding other areas as well. Indeed, how can one confidently presume to set up a plausible image of historical developments in Western Europe without any knowledge about possible previous utterances carried out and eventually transmitted from the contiguous Byzantine area? A number of suggestions hesitantly put forward in the course of the last two decades appeared to confirm very strongly the feeling that a thorough breakthrough was much to be desired. The challenge was taken up by our research group under the most accommodating auspices of the Scholion-Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University which undertook to “put Byzantium on the map of Jewish studies” as it were, namely to offer a new and extensive platform for a more comprehensive future integration of Jewish Byzantium within the wider orbit of Byzantine studies (of which it so far was quite oblivious), by developing suitable methods permitting a better, more precise understanding of the mechanisms of communication and transmission of knowledge as well as interaction between the Jewish minority and Christian majority cultures.!! We sought to confront the Jewish experience in Byzantium as a case study in the historical sociology of knowledge, in the longue durée. The unique opportunity offered by Scholion encouraged us to hope that the model we sought to build would also help us understand the complex and dialectical cultural relationships between majority and minorities in other cultural contexts, such as Jews and Muslims, and also Jews and Christians in Islamic lands, as well as Orthodox and heterodox Christians in Byzantium. There were obvious implications for the proposed research touching for instance upon a wide area of various different issues like diglossia, translation, literature, representation and (mis)perception of the other, law, religion, science, folklore, art, and architecture. Admittedly, one encounters a slight lack of selfconfidence when approaching this giant undertaking, which is further amplified by an imprecise feeling of uncertainty on how to enter the project efficiently and effectively—efficiently inasmuch as method is concerned, i.e. how are we to address the disciplines recently added to those traditionally held as auxiliary in Jewish studies, to wit psychology and/or anthropology; effectively inasmuch as purpose is con- cerned, i.e. how are we to revisit and reallocate the past within actual and tangible contexts? How are we to carry out an intellectual exercise aimed at discovering in the Byzantine context the dynamics of the dialogic situation confronting the Self and the Other, Jews and Christians, minority and majority? What does the antithetic couplet minority/majority really mean? With these sets of questions we set out on our way to explore the following dialectics of interaction between the minority (Jewish) and majority (Christian) civilizations in Byzantium. The following represents an over-view of the core issues with which our group at Scholion was grappling.
One trait constantly characterizes the Jewish situation in the Diaspora, especially following the ultimate loss of national independence in the Land of Israel with the defeat of Bar Kokhba: notwithstanding some remarkable but nonetheless negligible exceptions, Jews were constantly and everywhere (even in their own land) demographically inferior, that is a minority living in the midst of a demographically superior setting (that is, within a majority of non-Jews), and yet maintaining a remarkable distinction of their own.” This irrefutable fact is obviously explicable, for as a rule the Jews were unquestionably powerless and one has to wonder why the non-Jews refrained from making use of the political and coercive power at their disposal in order to rid themselves of dissenters, which seems to be a universally held human tendency. Indeed, one does not have to endorse radical definitions of the Middle Ages as an Age of Faith and imagine such scenarios as fitting exclusively medieval perceptions of religious belief in cultural superiority and aspirations in order to propagate it among unbelievers. One has to keep in mind that the use of force in order to meet the tremendous challenge represented by the resistance to what sociologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers call acculturation, especially in cases where it may be perceived as endangering the wellbeing of the group, is by no means an exclusively medieval feature, although in our times it may need more sophisticated arguments to justify it. As Heinrich Graetz put it a long time ago, protestant resistance to the acculturating pressures of the surrounding non-Jewish society appears indeed as the pivotal axis around which the entire Jewish history evolved.
Due to the inherent baffling connotation of the term acculturation and the far-reaching implications it may have on our topic, resistance to acculturation as an overall portrayal of the phenomenon may be deeply misleading. As a matter of fact, the term acculturation, which American anthropologists started to utilize during the 1880s, was and still is typical to ethnographic research focusing upon so-called primitive societies, and includes the Christianization of natives in colonized lands. It basically implies colonially biased ethnocentrism, which first of all assumes a value judgment of the parties in terms of superiority and inferiority and secondly suggests that the relationship between the two different cultures has to be viewed in terms of the colonizing power and of the potential use of violence. The gradual reception of Western civilization by the “natives” thus confirms the assumption that Western civilization is indeed superior, that is to say that the cultural values of the powerful are superior vis-a-vis those of the powerless. Acculturation then is ultimately equal with cultural integration of the group holding an inferior culture within the group holding a superior one. From such a standpoint, the consequences of the encounter are consistently represented as the gradual disintegration of the natives’ cultural structure and its subsequent restructuring compatible with that of the colonizers’, amid the more or less intense creation of syncretistic new forms. American sociology even promoted such an approach to the extent of a guiding operational principle according to a very simple formula: integration should conserve cultural differences inasmuch as they help, or at least do not impede achieving the good goal of the consensually agreed wellbeing of the nation; disturbing cultural components should consequently be effaced. Minorities defying or rejecting the efforts of the forces of acculturation applied by the monopolizing majority display confidence in their being on the right side. Thus, unsuccessful accomplishments of one camp appear as the success of the other camp.
From such a perspective, however, the very concepts of majority and minority which are fundamental for our discussion become less selfevident than we may have imagined; as a matter of fact, they lose their demographic connotation. For, if one assumes that successful acculturation means that the culture of the powerful is superior to the culture of the powerless, the result of the encounter between the two can no longer be assumed as a parameter for evaluating the confronting parts in terms of demographic majority or minority. Majority and minority wind up displaying paradoxically inverted meanings: few powerful
colonizers rise as a significant majority, while the overwhelmingly more numerous but powerless natives represent a negligible minority. To mention one example, relevant to the topic of our discussion, the Palestinian Jews, certainly not a negligible demographic minority during the first period of Byzantine rule, would appear from such a perspective as a minority vis-a-vis the less numerous but powerful, who would be viewed as a majority.
Jewish history as a whole represents a most telling example of a successful refusal of acculturation, since a successful one would undoubtedly have caused the Jews to vanish or assimilate, as happened to so many peoples dominated by powerful conquerors. It remains, however, important to acknowledge that at least during the early phase of encounter between Jews and Christians (i.e. Christian Imperial Rome) there were no concerted efforts to acculturate the Jews in the extreme sense of the word, that is to cause them to convert. Late Roman Imperial law strove only, as stated above, to marginalize them in various ways. What significance are we then to assign to the concepts of majority, minority, and acculturation in the case of Jewish history? What does the successful refusal of the powerless Jewish groups to succumb to the acculturating efforts of the overwhelmingly dominant powerful nonJewish groups mean in terms of the supposed connection between cultural superiority and an effectively acculturating power? And how are we to address the acquiescence of the powerful dominant non-Jewish groups to the refusal of the powerless Jewish groups to succumb to their acculturating efforts?
Such remarkable singularity calling for an explanation has in fact been addressed in different ways: according to the traditional apologetic Jewish ideological argument, including its providential varieties, it goes against the belief that political and military power correspond to cultural superiority and rather means that the culture of the powerful, though viewed as majority, has constantly been inferior to the powerless, tiny but nonetheless superior Jewish one.'* According to the traditional Christian argument, it signifies that the Jews have systematically been subjected to diabolic or otherwise irrational conditioning inhibitions that prevent integration. Finally, the flipside of the tradi-
tional (at present deeply problematic) argument implicitly assumes the validity of the image of the powerful as majority and of the powerless as minority, indicating that the gentiles have systematically been following irrational conditioning attitudes based on fundamentalist antiSemitic biases preventing the welcoming of Jews as equals.
When it comes, however, to the application of such simplistic overarching or apologetic explanations to concrete historical contexts, historians are confronted with the perennial question of agency and its incentives in the decision-making processes of the actors themselves. Though it is admittedly impossible to set up a narrative covering the entire array of the constituting elements of human motivation, historians may nonetheless honestly endeavor to draw a reasonable picture and verify its plausibility by means of the customary testing mechanisms of their discipline. Part of such an effort, our work endeavors to follow the evolution and transmutation of the above described paradigm.
Thus, upon the transformation of the Roman Empire into a Christian Empire, Christian rulers found the Jews an integral part of the world they inherited from their pagan predecessors. Their presence naturally raised the question what such an overtly dissident sociocultural body could actually mean in terms of the wellbeing of the Christian body, and what should be done with them. Mutatis mutandis, the question was basically the same for the Jews too: what did the transformation of the pagan empire into a Christian one actually mean in terms of the wellbeing of the Jewish socio-cultural body and how were they to behave in the new situation. Such questions were but one part of the more general question of the definition of the Self vis-a-vis the Other, that is to say how did men and women of both groups conceive of their affiliations and perceive their identities, and how did such conceptions and perceptions affect their perceptions of the other group and their decisions of how to act with them.
What does “definition of the Self vis-a-vis the Other” mean? In psychology one may safely assign to the category of the Other all individuals who are not Oneself, the line of separation clearly demarcated, a corollary of physical individuation. When it comes to collective definitions, it is of course no longer possible to assume delimitations as neat and immediate as in the case of individual personalities. And yet, we may refer to the almost immediate perception of social space as allocating a well defined area to people presenting such strong affini-
ties as to justify the idea that they are united by some distinctive bond according to which they assign specific individuals to one of two distinct categories: us (i.e. people situated inside the group) and them (i.e. people situated outside the group). Such rough demarcation, however, does not exonerate us from addressing more precisely the intricate problem of defining the parameters required in order to be assigned to one category rather than to the other, as well as the equally intricate problem of delineating the borderline separating the two spaces.
Borderlines are associated with a variety of images. At times they are perceived as defensive fences against the intrusion of hostile elements, while at others they rather appear as obstacles to the freedom of movement. Some thus strive to make them definitely impervious, while others strive to make them more permeable, or even to remove them altogether in order to make movement easier. All of these metaphorical images refer to processes of changing definitions of us and them and of constantly restructuring the space that foreigners should consider off limits. Should one wish to visually trace a borderline dividing Christians and Jews in the course of history, one would be faced by a multiplicity of situations hardly fitting one such single line. And yet, inasmuch as assimilating integration or physical elimination was not achieved, that is, inasmuch as distinction was not totally effaced and the presence of them aside us was granted, one has to assume the existence of such a defining line or zone between the two groups. As a matter of fact, physical elimination of the Jews was only exceptionally embraced as a policy, in striking contrast with the approach toward other dissident groups.’ Our question concerning the “definition of the Self vis-a-vis the Other” splits into two separate questions: First, why was this so? In other words, what caused the powerful dominant group to tolerate the presence of the Jews within its socio-cultural space? And second, how did the resulting situation of proximity play out within the Christian and the Jewish Self respectively?
As is well-known, borderlines separating one geopolitical space from another quite often undergo processes of change under the pressure of the stirring forces of history. We may assume the same to hold true for borderlines separating socio-cultural spaces. Just as military or political forces cause changes in geographic borderlines between states, intellectual forces can produce alterations in cultural patterns; cognitive attitudes can trigger modifications in gender or racial configurations, and so on and so forth. Changes are accordingly induced by allocating new parameters in transforming situations and conditions. Suffice it to mention for instance how Muslims had to revise the category of dhimmi in order to include ethnic groups which at first glance should have been assigned to dar-al-harb; or how Jews had to wrestle with the category of Jewishness in order to cope with Karaites or with conversos. Modifications of border lines always provoked the restructuring of identities—who should be considered part of us and who should rather be one of them, whose inclusion should be considered reasonable and who should rather be excluded and considered a foreigner.
Should we be able to assemble answers to complex questions about affects and orientations characteristic of the members of each group, especially of the individuals more influential than others in the shaping of public opinion and in its translation into ruling policy, we would be able to assemble the resulting data of the specific configurations of the worldviews and operational tendencies of both groups. In addressing the above-mentioned fundamental question of the acquiescence of the powerful dominant non-Jewish groups to the refusal of the feeble Jewish groups to succumb to their acculturating efforts, historians have indeed tried to set up such lists of factors. In doing so, they appear to have adopted one of two opposite premises: either to consider Jews and Christians as belonging to basically opposite camps, us and them; or to consider them as belonging to the same camp.
How are we then to represent the mutual perception of Jews and Christians? From both standpoints, both constantly placed themselves in dialogic situations with their neighbors, situations that variously implied challenge and response. In fact both antagonists constantly sought confirmation of their belief; for the Christians such confirmation was eventually hallmarked by the conversion of Jewish adversaries who finally recognized the superiority of vibrant Christianity vis-a-vis fossilized Judaism, while for Jews, successful resistance to the Christian temptation unequivocally implied and proved the superior- ity of Judaism. In all times and places we are thus confronted with two differing entities tightly grasping one another. Although everyday life only exceptionally degenerated into aggressive contest that might jeopardize coexistence, itself a necessary prerequisite for the dialogic encounter to take place, challenge and response was constantly subtly implied, in a variety of both conscious and subconscious perceptions of the surrounding world.
In any case, one cannot underestimate the crucial importance of the findings concerning Jewish attitudes and behavioral tendencies in such situations for the understanding of Christian mentalities. For inasmuch as a given attitude is situated in the areas of common beliefs and perceptions of the surrounding world without causing any substantial problem, one would be justified in assuming that since the religious component of that attitude was not of paramount importance, Jewish attitudes and behavioral tendencies can as a rule function as some kind of litmus test to determine the specific weight of specific religious components in the shaping of worldviews.
The fruits of the joint scholarly effort, that of our group at Scholion alongside the contributions of eminent experts on Byzantium from abroad, are displayed in the volume at hand. Thus, apart from wide ranging historical surveys on Byzantine Jewry together with regional and ethnographic descriptions of important historical chapters and unique aspects pertaining to the Jews of Byzantium, the volume includes a substantial number of chapters concerning the encounters (tensions and dialogues) between Jews and Christians as they manifested themselves in literary sources (Christian and Jewish historiography and chronography) and matters pertaining to real life (Halakha, legal status, and economical livelihood), all natural components in a volume of this kind. Alongside these issues, the volume contains some more salient features. The first concerns the uniqueness of Jewish Byzantium as a meeting point of several languages: Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic and the way in which this convergence of different tongues manifested itself (in the parlance, Piyyut, and the versions of the Bible). The second concerns the abundance and richness of Jewish visual expression (iconography, manuscript illumination, and synagogue decoration) and their impact on Jewish Byzantine culture.
Although the various authors of the essays included in this volume differ naturally in standpoints, focuses, and answers, they nonetheless have one principle in common: they assume that the encounter between Jews and Christians during the lengthy Byzantine era was of a dialogic nature which begs description.
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