When scholars of rabbinics talk about late antiquity (instead of the problematic “rabbinic period”), they are usually referring to the span of time during which the tannaim, amoraim, and talmudic editors produced their corpora. The “late antiquity” discussed in Alexei Sivertsev's Judaism and Imperial Ideology in Late Antiquity happens mostly later, from the fifth through eighth centuries, and is associated with lesser-known works such as Sefer Zerubavel, Otot ha-Mashiaḥ, and various piyyutim. For those of us who are accustomed to Talmud-centric studies, Sivertsev's work provides a refreshing glimpse of that netherworld lying largely in between the talmudic period and the Geonim, during which emerged the spectacular imperial culture of the Byzantine Christian emperors as well as Islam.
Sivertsev's thesis is succinctly stated: “Jews constituted a distinct, ethnic, religious, and cultural group that nevertheless participated in the symbolic universe of Byzantine culture” (5). Byzantine Jews thoroughly internalized but also ingeniously appropriated the cultural codes of the dominant Christian empire, especially those relating to imperial ideology, Sivertsev's main interest. Readers fluent in the contemporary academy will associate Sivertsev with the subaltern studies fathered by Homi Bhabha featuring such themes as “counter-history,” “counter-narrative,” mimicry, and subversion, though the book does not itself make this connection. The approach is premised on two paradoxes. The first is that insofar as a minority group strives to be unique, it is not unique; and the second is that the group is always doomed to fail at being unique since it can never fully break out of the dominant culture. Siverstev dwells briefly on the first point, comparing Byzantine Jews with Byzantine Ethiopians, Nubians, and Syrians, each of whom “positioned themselves as the Byzantine imperial narrative's sole legitimate heirs” (6). But it is the second point that fuels Sivertsev's study, which proposes that to understand Byzantine Jews, one must look at their Byzantine context.
Judaism and Imperial Ideology consists of five chapters along with a brief introduction and conclusion. The introduction begins with the idea of a “Byzantine Commonwealth” developed by historians to describe the variety of groups that coalesced under Constantinople's umbrella. This idea forms the backbone for Sivertsev's approach to the Jews, whom he sees as actively participating in the dialects of imitation and competition: the Jews offered Jerusalem as the rival to Rome and Constantinople, and imagined the returning Messiah as a replacement for the emperor. General Jewish Studies readers should not be put off by the introduction's rather detailed discussion of Miaphysite competition with Nestorianism, since it is intended as a comparandum for the Jewish case and is quickly left behind.
Chapter 1 lays out the supersessionist narrative of Christian Byzantium, which presented itself, on the one hand, as the true Israel and the rightful heir of God's Old Testament promise and, on the other, as the successor to Augustan Rome and the fulfillment of Roman imperial aspirations. Sivertsev's argument, based on passages from Esther Rabbah and the payytan Yannai, is that Byzantine Jews produced their own matching supersessionist narrative according to which the true Israel was, in fact, still Israel. The cultural politics of this narrative are intricate and handled with subtlety by Sivertsev: the Davidic kingdom became the prototype for the future messianic one, both of which were modeled on Byzantine Christian imperial rule, which was in turn modeled on classical Rome, which was in turn imagined by Byzantine Christians in terms of their own contemporary imperial culture.
Chapter 2 examines the Hebrew apocalyptic text Otot of R. Shimon b. Yohai, part of the genre of Otot ha-Mashiaḥ (“The Signs of the Messiah”), which enumerates the events that usher in the arrival of the Messiah. Sivertsev isolates one moment in the narrative—the last king of Edom enters Jerusalem and places his crown on the foundation stone of the Holy Temple; the crown is then donned by the Messiah—and examines it in light of similar Byzantine Christian apocalyptic traditions featuring the last Roman Emperor placing his crown on the cross on Golgotha. Appropriating the Christian traditions, Otot ha-Mashiaḥ transforms the Messiah into a world imperial ruler and the foundation stone of the Temple into the navel of the earth from which radiates that ruler's power. In one blow, the Jewish narrative subverts sixth- and seventh-century capital city mythology, ousts the Cross as a central symbol, and replaces Hagia Sophia with the Temple, argues Sivertsev. All the while, Otot ha-Mashiaḥ shows itself to have fully absorbed Byzantine imperial ideology.
Chapter 3 turns to Sefer Zerubavel's depiction of Hephzibah, the mother of the Jewish Messiah and protector of Jerusalem. Sivertsev first considers Hephzibah as a Tyche, or personified city, frequently pictured as a woman seated or standing next to the emperor or going out to greet him. Sivertsev's second line of interpretation takes up Martha Himmelfarb's comparison between Hephzibah and the Theotokos (“the one who gives birth to God,” or Mary) to argue that the analogy lies specifically in the Theotokos's role as supernatural female protector of the capital city (Constantinople for Theotokos; Jerusalem for Hephzibah) during the absence of her son the king (Heraclius in the Christian rendition; messiah in the Jewish). Sivertsev's third interpretation compares the Hephzibah legend to the idealized images of Byzantine empresses. Just as empresses were portrayed as guaranteeing continuity between one imperial ruler and the next, so too does Hephzibah transmit power, in her case from the biblical past's priests, prophets, and kings to the future Messiah.
Chapter 4 isolates another moment in the narrative of Otot ha-Mashiaḥ. When the Messiah arrives in Jerusalem, he brings back the Temple vessels that had been hidden in Rome since the time of the Temple's destruction. Drawing on Ra'anan Boustan's recent treatment, Sivertsev looks at the motif in light of the Byzantine habit of incorporating physical artifacts from the “golden age” of the Roman Empire into the building projects of its reborn capital in Constantinople. Otot ha-Mashiaḥ reverses the pattern, transferring the spolia from their place of burial in Rome to act as building blocks for a new Jerusalem. Otot ha-Mashiaḥ, in short, creates a foundation legend for Jerusalem that mimics and rivals the foundation legend for Constantinople. Sivertsev also explores Sefer Zerubavel's account of the rise of the Messiah and its depiction of a character named Armilos, who, Sivertsev argues, functions as a kind of anti-emperor (like the anti-Christ, upon whom he seems to be modeled). The chapter's final section discusses the very strange story told about Armilos's birth: a statue of a beautiful virgin has sexual intercourse with Satan and gives birth to Armilos. To make sense of the story, Sivertsev discusses the magical powers that Byzantines attributed to statues, which confronted them uncomfortably with their pagan past but also eerily mirrored their own growing veneration of images. Statues thus posed fundamental questions to the Byzantine world about its continuities and ruptures with the past. In the Jewish story of Armilos's birth can be found comparable cultural anxieties, suggests Sivertsev.
Chapter 5 examines parallels between the office of the Messiah as it is imagined by Byzantine Jewish texts and the office of the Emperor as it is imagined by Christian ones. Sivertsev interprets a piyyut from the Cairo Genizah that situates David's throne within the Temple as a reflection of the blurring between the imperial palace and God's church within Byzantine culture. He reads a cluster of Jewish traditions about Solomon's throne and the “David apocalypse” describing R. Ishmael's vision of King David to propose that the throne imagery and ceremonial rituals are drawn from those of the Byzantine court. Sivertsev sees the gradual sacralization of the Byzantine emperor mirrored in Pesikta Rabbati's representation of the Messiah, who, Sivertsev argues, is modeled on the “archetypal pious emperor of contemporaneous Byzantine literature” (206).
The conclusion looks at the restorationist ideologies developed within Byzantium to respond to its defeats at the hands of Islam. Constantinople and Rome no longer held out the same hope that they once did, and people turned towards the periphery of empire, to the Franks, Slavs and Ethiopians, for redeemers. The Jews were joined by others for whom the narrative of the Byzantine Commonwealth was losing, had lost, or never had full viability. The Jews became “increasingly inward-looking and self-enclosed,” but as Sivertsev's book strives to show, their introversion is “only part of the story”—the other part is the “ongoing participation of Jews and Judaism in the symbolic and conceptual universe of the empire” (217).
The book's merits are many. Before juxtaposing Jewish texts with contemporaneous Christian ones, Sivertsev consistently considers the prior Jewish texts that shaped them, thus avoiding a reductively externalist approach. Likewise, Sivertsev refrains from creating a false coherence out of his evidence; he continually recognizes diversity and ambiguity. Sivertsev is a master of incorporating mixed media: he refers to the layout of Constantinople (71), imperial coinage (105–106), the Trier Cathedral ivory (112), and the list goes on. Reading Sivertsev makes you want to fly to Istanbul to imagine what it all looked like. His approach to cultural codes is satisfyingly complex: he treats symbols and stories as having multiple meanings. There is also much for the specialist: Sivertsev takes a stand on the dating and relative priority of a number of disputed texts and gives careful readings of them.
The book's organization, however, is haphazard and repetitive, both within and across chapters. Chapter 1 starts with the year 626, moves back to the third and fourth centuries, then further back to the first two centuries, and then forward again, and other chapters make similar jumps in time. Texts are treated out of sequence: the beginning of Sefer Zerubavel does not appear until Chapter 4, while later passages appear in Chapter 3, and Otot ha-Mashiaḥ appears in both Chapters 2 and 4. Themes come up in multiple places (Solomon's throne in Chapters 1 and 5; the staff of Moses in Chapters 1 and 3; tyches in Chapters 3 and 4), and the sub-themes that appear in each chapter frequently feel as though they could appear in any other. The primary texts could have been more conveniently featured either in appendices or in short quotations interspersed through the relevant discussion.
I found myself wishing for some engagement with religious studies. Sivertsev at one point describes a mishnah as “purely religious” rather than “religio-political” (74, 75), making me wonder: what does “purely religious” mean and why does Sivertsev think that Byzantine Jews were politicized in ways that earlier Jews (at least the authors of the Mishnah, in his view) were not? Another missed opportunity is the intriguing gender complexities of Hephzibah, “an allegory in female form of male power” (102); Sivertsev does not draw gender into the broader thesis of the book. Then there is the problem of this book's simply having so broad a thesis, since it is in the end based on a handful of Byzantine Jewish texts. How representative are Otot ha-Mashiaḥ and Sefer Zerubavel, the two main texts he treats? Sivertsev moves from two sixth-century images of Tyche in Palestine to describing the image as “ubiquitous” (90), and concludes from two representations of Hephzibah that it was a “stock motif” (124), whereas in a footnote he dismisses Pesikta Rabbati as the product of an “idiosyncratic Jewish movement” (143). What makes some texts a fair representation of Byzantine culture and others an aberration? Finally, his treatment of classical rabbinic literature cries out for engagement with the large body of scholarship on its dating. Sivertsev says in a footnote that applying source criticism to talmudic messianic materials is a desideratum, so he has a sense of the can of worms he has opened when, for example, he juxtaposes a statement of the early amora Rav with themes in the much later Otot ha-Mashiaḥ (37–38).
Apocalyptic visions can seem bizarre and far from reality. Sivertsev's account brings those visions back to reality by persuasively mapping out the worldly political concerns and cultural experiences that helped to inspire them.
