This masterful work of history, which analyzes Byzantine legislation against dissidents and its impact on Mediterranean diasporic Jewish communities, has arrived at a critical moment. You will not find the irenic emphasis on the shared milieu or the metaphor of the competitive marketplace of religion in Ross Shephard Kraemer's book; instead, the public space is a scene of violent confrontation, where bodies are vulnerable to death, buildings to destruction or appropriation, and religious minorities are not agents, but often targets in the crosshairs of competing political ideologues and their punitive measures.
As Kraemer explains, in the past scholars have assumed that diasporic Jews were not susceptible to study either because they assumed that these Jews left no evidence of their presence or because scholars subsumed the study of diasporic Jews under rabbinic Judaism (27). Even as the scholarly consensus has come to view rabbinization as a later medieval phenomenon, Diaspora Jewish communities have not received their due. Kraemer shows that there is much textual and archaeological evidence that deserves closer examination. In the introduction, “The Absence of Evidence as the Evidence of Absence,” she observes that not all arguments from silence are the same: when thriving Jewish communities leave inscriptions from multiple generations and then suddenly cease to do so, this absence is likely indicative of a change in the status of a community, one that can be corroborated with other contextual clues.
Chapter 2 foregrounds the story of a mass conversion of Jews found in The Letter of Severus of Minorca on the Conversion of the Jews. Kraemer's gripping and nuanced analysis demonstrates how the historical reality might be reconstructed by reading against the grain of this Christian account.
Chapters 3–5 chronologically survey imperial legislation on the Jews through the decades of the fourth century, a time period in which the Catholic Church's efforts were centered on a project of homogenization and consolidation of Orthodox authority. Kraemer does not discern any targeted anti-Jewish legislation in this century. Over successive chapters, she shows that the study of the suppression of traditional Hellenistic and Roman religions (“traditionalists” as Kraemer terms those usually called pagans) as well as dissident Christian sects is relevant context for the study of the Jews and their fortunes. In Kraemer's deft hands the dry and terse law compendia of late antiquity bear witness to palace intrigue among child-emperors, their guardians, sisters, wives, and bishops, factions that rise and fall, and whose success has implications for the rights and privileges of minorities, Jews among them. After Orthodox bishops succeeded in achieving legislation against nonconforming Christians, they usually turned to legislate against other targets, like traditionalists, Samaritans, and finally, Jews. Kraemer's analysis of the Theodosian and Justinian law codes thus demonstrates that the privileges, rights, and fortunes of Jews, dissident Christians, and traditionalists were bound up with one another other.
These chapters analyzing legal language are dense, and my only criticism of this book is that subsections could help the reader attend to the structure of Kraemer's argument. Still, for anyone wishing to learn how to read Byzantine law codes, Kraemer's analysis is instructive in its rigor; her readings are judicious and skeptical, always in a dialogue with a number of other legal historians, and attentive to issues of enforcement and longevity (or lack thereof).
The Theodosian legislation of 418–438 CE marks a turning point in imperial attitudes to Jews, likely reflecting increased attacks on synagogues by mobs of Christians led by bishops and/or monks. Chapters 6–7 describe the workings of laws excluding Jews (and others) from imperial service, the military, judicial practice, and, finally, from the construction of new sites of worship. Kraemer notes that these laws were designed “to encourage conversion, by imposing legal disabilities on Jews that would be removed if they converted” (270).
Highly placed traditionalists at times seem to have been allies of the Jews, who also sought to impose limits on imperial interventions and the destructive tendencies of mobs of Orthodox Christians. One of the contributions of this book is to highlight that Jews and other minorities of the empire had more shared experiences than other scholars have noted.
Especially poignant is Kraemer's discussion of the challenges to the enforcement of imperial legislation protecting Jews from the burning or “indiscriminate seizure” of their synagogues. Even when Jews achieved some modicum of protection or financial restitution for their losses, Christian leaders protested enforcement of these laws, causing emperors to relent: “An outraged defender of the faith upbraids the emperor in a letter, speaking truth to power, warning that God will shortly punish the offending ruler” (246). Justice to the minority Jews was perceived as an affront to the Catholic Church's dignity.
Chapter 8 is particularly intriguing, bringing together several literary sources, archaeological evidence, Justinian's legal innovations, and a chronicle of the catastrophes of the sixth century, which included earthquakes and the beginning of the late antique Little Ice Age. Justinian's punitive actions against his non-Orthodox constituents also contributed to wars, forced migrations, and instability in this period. Kraemer discusses how Justinian “fused Roman law and orthodox Christianity” in courtrooms with enduring implications to this day in the West (292). In 535 CE the emperor expressed a desire that synagogues be converted into churches and did not reproduce parts of the Theodosian law that protected synagogues from undue seizure (294). Kraemer observes that the decline in inscriptional evidence for Jewish communities in Asia Minor after the mid-sixth century is best explained by the succession of legal setbacks and catastrophes she describes—absence of evidence as evidence of absence. This packed chapter also includes stories featuring athletic events and deadly riots, Samaritan revolts and consequent feigned conversions or enslavement, an examination of Jewish spolia in churches, and Justinian's legislation concerning Hebrew biblical recitation in synagogues.
In chapter 9, Kraemer illuminates the obscure history of Jewish communities in Gothic Italy and Gaul before Justinian's reconquest of this area, delving into accounts of communities in conflict, synagogue burnings, failed coerced conversions, exile, and another story of a mass conversion of Jews.
The succinct concluding chapter draws on the evidence of previous chapters to answer the question of what happened to those diasporic Jews in late antiquity who did not die of plague along with “half the Mediterranean population” in the late sixth century (344). Kraemer summarizes the evidence for each of the following options in turn: some Jews converted, some emigrated, some resisted, some hoped for the messianic restoration, some adapted (e.g., women taking on more leadership roles), some retrenched, heightening boundaries between themselves and others. Though the last subsection is titled “Rabbinization,” Kraemer observes that the rabbis seem to be invisible in the Diaspora before the ninth century.
I happened to read David Nirenberg's Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition and Kraemer's book in succession and couldn't help but compare the two. Both of their approaches (the study of Jews in the imagination of the Other and the study of the Other's impact on Jews) are necessary and complementary: we need to be able to discern when anti-Judaism is not about Jews at all—but about Christian fears and phobias—and what its cost is to real Jews anyway. If we don't read books like this, we cannot grapple with the formation of such hatred in general and with anti-Judaism and hatred of Jews in particular. We can only see these manifestations of hatred as irrational and inexplicable rather than as strategic, effective, and combatable. As I said, this book has arrived not a moment too soon.
