This volume brings together sixteen papers by scholars of Syriac Christianity and late antique Judaism, covering topics and problems from the early Christian period to Saadia Gaon (d. 942). Some of the work included was originally presented at a 2015 session of the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins focused on Persian perspectives on Judaism and Christianity, which accounts for the volume's refreshing emphasis on East Syriac and the Babylonian Talmud.
In the introduction, the editors outline the field of research by exploring “two broad categories” of source material: cases in which the Other is explicitly referenced (most prominently, Syriac anti-Jewish polemic) and cases in which no Other explicitly appears but may potentially be detected by the scholarly exploration of references, parallels, or shared social and cultural contexts. The editors note that this latter category naturally rests on shakier ground and discuss the vulnerability of such approaches to “parallelomania.” They present the volume as a contribution to developing more methodological and theoretical sophistication in the project of understanding the two communities’ mutual contexts.
The chapters are of consistently high caliber; here I note a few that struck this reviewer as particularly significant or likely to be of general interest. Adam Becker's survey of Syriac anti-Judaism makes a number of productive suggestions about how to understand the role of real and rhetorical Jews in the Syriac corpus. Sidney Griffith's and Simcha Gross's chapters, which treat, respectively, the problem of the “Jewish Christian” origins of Islam and the supposedly uniquely Jewish origins of Syriac Christianity, while they are unlikely to be the last word on these debates, interject a salutary note of skepticism. The burden of proof for any special relationship between either Arabian or Syriac Christianity and Judaism seems clearly to rest with their interlocutors. Ophir Münz-Manor's comparative survey of Syriac, Hebrew, and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic liturgical poetry is a welcome introduction to a neglected body of source material.
The volume is to be commended for its very thorough bibliographic footnotes, which will make it a useful research tool for scholars who may wish to follow in its stimulating interdisciplinary footsteps.
