by Simon Schama
19 1 Macc. 1:26.
20 2 Macc. 5:10.
21 2 Macc. 1:20–2.
22 Shaye Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999), esp. 69–135, locates the self-discovery of ‘Jewishness’ expressly in the Hasmonean period which he calls a ‘redefinition’ and in the equation given in the Books of the Maccabees (especially I assume in 1 Macc.) between differentiating observance (like circumcision) and collective identity. The argument not quite made (for me) in this brilliant interpretation is whether or not the moment of ultra-Hellenistic repression was first and formative in this self-consciousness. A comparable and antecedent differentiation seems to be at work in Ezra and Nehemiah of three centuries earlier. See also on the place of the Maccabean epic in Jewish state formation in Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton, 2001), esp. 32–70.
23 The discomfort would have been most felt by the descendants of Philistine and coast cultures who were mostly uncircumcised, while Itureans and Idumeans of the central hill country and Transjordanian hills and valleys mostly were.
24 2 Macc. 9:10.
25 1 Macc. 2:26.
26 1 Macc. 4:55.
27 1 Macc. 14:8–15.
28 1 Macc. 16:3.
29 Steven Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge and New York, 2005).
30 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 14, 3.
31 Jacob Neusner, The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70 (Leiden, 1971).
32 On this issue see Shaye Cohen, ‘Was Herod Jewish?’, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1999), 13–24.
33 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 1, 33.
34 M. A. Knibb, The Qumran Community (Cambridge, 1987); A. R. C. Leaney, The Rule of Qumran and Its Meaning: Introduction, Translation and Commentary (London, 1966); S. Metzo, The Serekh Texts (London, 2007).
35 The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (trans. and ed. Geza Vermes, revised edn, London and New York, 2004), 234 (hereafter Vermes, DSS).
36 Philo, Legation to Gaius.
37 See Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA, 1997).
38 Josephus, The Jewish War, 2, 12.
39 Ibid., 5, 13, 541.
40 Ibid., 545.
41 The best critical study is Seth Schwartz, Josephus and Judaean Politics (Leiden, 1990).
42 Josephus, Vita, 11.
43 Josephus, The Jewish War, 3, 8, 357.
44 Ibid., 2, 21, 586.
45 Ibid., 4, 9, 560–3.
46 Since Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Protest (Manchester, 1959), historians have analysed ‘brigandage’ and ‘banditry’, and more significantly the popular reputation of their leaders as an expression of social antagonism and insurrectionary action as much as the purely criminal classification imposed by the propertied and the powerful. A similar approach was taken by George Rudé in his studies on the French Revolution and also, in a more nuanced sense (for he believed the crime was real) by my old friend and mentor Richard Cobb.
47 For more of these considerations see especially Martin Goodman: The Ruling Class of Judaea: The Origins of the Jewish Revolt (Cambridge, 1987) and Rome and Jerusalem: A Clash of Ancient Civilisations (London and New York, 2007); Susan Sorek, Jews Against Rome (Hambledon, 2008); Neil Faulkner, Apocalypse: The Great Jewish Revolt Against Rome (Amberley, Glos., 2002).
48 Aryeh Kasher, Jews, Idumaeans and Ancient Arabs (Tübingen, 1988).
49 Josephus, The Jewish War, 4, 305–13.
50 Ibid., 4, 327.
51 Jacob Neusner, A life of Yohanan ben Zakkai (Leiden, 1970).
52 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, Washington, 1982).
53 Josephus, The Jewish War, 6, 2, 108.
54 Ibid., 6, 3, 209–11.
55 Ibid., 6, 6, 306–9.
56 Ibid., 6, 4, 270–1.
57 On Josephus in Rome, see the important essays in J. C. Edmundson, Steven Mason and J. B. Rives, Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome (Oxford, 2005).
58 Josephus, The Jewish War, 7, 5, 150.
59 Fergus Millar, ‘Last Year in Jerusalem: Monuments of the Jewish War in Rome’, in Edmundson et al., Flavius Josephus, 101–128.
60 There is, however, some scholarly disagreement about the dating of the several books of The Jewish War. See the essays by T. D. Barnes and James Rives in Edmundson et al., Flavius Josephus.
61 Josephus, The Jewish War, 7, 8, 323–35.
62 Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora; Silvia Cappelletti, The Jewish Community of Rome from the Second Century BC to Third Century CE (Leiden, 2006).
63 Cappelletti, The Jewish Community of Rome, takes a persuasively more nuanced view.
64 Seneca’s De Superstitione is known to us through Augustine.
65 Tacitus, Histories (trans. Clifford Moore), (Cambridge, MA, 1929), V, v, 183.
66 Josephus, Against Apion, 2, 86.
67 Ibid., 2, 100.
68 Tacitus, Histories, V, v.
69 Josephus, Against Apion, 1, 60.
70 Ibid. 2, 280. See also W. W. Hallo, Origins: The Near Eastern Origins of some Modern Institutions (Leiden, 1996).
71 Josephus, Against Apion, 2, 291.
72 On the Dead Sea Scrolls see as an excellent introduction, Philip R. Davies, George J. Brooke and Phillip Gallaway, The Complete World of The Dead Sea Scrolls (London, 2002); for recent scholarship, Lawrence H. Schiffman, Emmanuel Tov and James Vanderkam (eds), The Dead Sea Scrolls Fifty Years after their Discovery (Jerusalem, 2000). I am still a fan of the translation (and introduction) of Vermes, DSS, but a new translation is offered by Michael Wise, Martin Abegg Jr and Edward Cook, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation (New York, 2005). The anti-Essene thesis of a ‘Jerusalem Library’ is argued by Norman Golb, Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Search for the Secret of Qumran (New York, 1985).
73 Vermes, DSS, 180.
74 Ibid., 166.
75 Ibid., 170.
76 Cassius Dio, Roman History VIII (trans. E. Cary), (Cambridge, 1925), 451.
77 On both the Babatha and bar Kosiba trove of documents see Richard Freund, The Secrets of the Cave of Letters: A Dead Sea Mystery Uncovered (New York, 2004).
78 For the palmate early cross, see my Landscape and Memory (London, 1995), 214–5.
Chapter 5
1 Clark Hopkins, with Bernard Goldman, The Discovery of Dura-Europos (New Haven and London, 1979), 131; Ann-Louise Perkins, The Art of Dura-Europos (Oxford, 1973); Joseph Gutmann (ed.), The Dura-Europos Synagogue: A Re-evaluation (1932–1992), (University of South Florida, 1992), especially the essays by Richard Brilliant, ‘Painting at DuraEuropos and Roman Art’, and Jacob Neusner, ‘Judaism at DuraEuropos’; Annabel Wharton, Reconfiguring the Post-classical city: Dura-Europos, Jerash, Jerusalem and Ravenna (Cambridge, 1995); and more recently Gail R. Brody and Gail Hoffman (eds), Dura-Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity (Boston, Philadelphia, 2011).
2 Mishnah, Abodah Zarah, 3, 4.
3 Levine, The Ancient Synagogue, op. cit., 260–7.
4 Mishnah, Baba Qamma, 1.
5 Ibid., Avot, 4–5.
6 Ibid., Shabbat, 6, 1–3.
7 Ibid., Avot, 5.
8 Ibid., Avodah Zarah, 3, 4, 5.
9 Rachel Hachlili, Ancient Mosaic Pavements, Themes, Issues and Trends: Selected Studies (Leiden, 2009); Ze’ev Weiss and Ehud Netzer, Promise and Redemption: A Synagogue mosaic from Sepphoris (Jerusalem, 1997).
10 Rather extraordinarily, the great art historian Meyer Schapiro took full and early measure of these, in Meyer Schapiro and Michael Avi-Yonah, Israel: Ancient Mosaics (Greenwich, CT, 1960), possibly guided by his co-author, a distinguished historian of late antiquity, though the reading of the mosaics is for Schapiro surprisingly formal and not much engaged with their relationship with the inscriptions or the r
abbinic Judaism of the time.
11 Hachlili, 408.
12 See, most recently, Eric M. Meyers and Mark A. Chauncey, Alexander to Constantine: Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, Vol. 3 (New Haven, 2012), 269–80.
13 Ibid., 277.
14 Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, ‘Israelite Aniconism: developments and origins’, in Karel van der Toorn et al., The Image and the Book, op. cit., 188.
15 Joseph Dan, The Ancient Jewish Mysticism (Tel Aviv, 1993), 9–24.
16 For the dialogue and ‘echo-effect’ between the two simultaneously forming religions see Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2006); Shaye D. Cohen and Edward Kessler, An Introduction to Jewish-Christian Relations (Cambridge, 2010).
17 Gerard Rouwhorst, ‘The cult of the Seven Maccabees and their mother in Christian tradition’, in Joshua Schwartz and Marcel Poorthuis (eds), Saints and Role Models in Judaism and Christianity (Leiden, 2004), 183–204.
18 See Adia Karnikoff, Sarcophagi from the Jewish Catacombs in Ancient Rome: A Catalogue Raisonne (Stuttgart, 1986); Leonard Victor Rutgers: The Jews in Late Ancient Rome: Evidence of Cultural Interaction in the Roman Diaspora (Leiden, 2000), and Subterranean Rome (Leuven, 2000), 146–53.
19 John Chrysostom, Adversus Iudaeos: Eight Homilies against the Jews, I, vi.
20 Ibid., IV, 4, 7.
21 Ibid., II, iii, 5.
22 Acts 13:8.
23 Chrysostom, Adversus Iudaeos, VIII, 7, 6.
24 On Jewish amulets see Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (Cambridge and New York, 2008), 370–6.
25 Chrysostom, Adversus Iudaeos, VIII, 8.
26 On Jews and Christians in Antioch see Christine Kondoleon, Antioch, the Lost Ancient City (Princeton, 2000), especially Bernadette J. Brooten, ‘The Jews of Ancient Antioch’, 29–39; Glanville Downey, A History of Antioch in Syria from Seleucus to the Arab Conflict (Princeton, 1961).
27 Brooten, ‘The Jews of Ancient Antioch’.
28 Hyam Maccoby, Paul and the Invention of Christianity (New York, 1986).
29 Galatians 6:15; Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the politics of Identity (Berkeley, 1997). For a strong view on the irreconcilability of Judaism and Christianity see Jacob Neusner, Jews and Christians: The Myth of a Common Tradition (Philadelphia, 1991); see also the classic account by James Parkes, The Conflict between Church and Synagogue: A Study in Ancient Anti-Semitism (London, 1932); Samuel Krauss, The Jewish Christian Controversy from Ancient Times to 1789 (Tübingen, 1995).
30 Galatians 2:16–21.
31 J. Reynolds and R. F. Tannenbaum, Jews and Godfearers at Aphrodisias: Greek Inscriptions with Commentary. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, Supplement 12 (Cambridge, 1987).
32 Baruch M. Bokser, The Origins of the Seder: The Passover Rite and early Rabbinic Judaism (Berkeley, 1984); Hal Taussig, In the Beginning was the Meal: Social Experimentation and Early Christian Identity (Augsburg, 2009); Yuval, Two Nations, 56–75.
33 Chrysostom, Adversus Iudaeos, III, 4, 6.
34 Additional text, second oration.
35 Chrysostom, Adversus Iudaeos IV, 1.
36 Ibid., I, vii.
37 Ibid., I, 3, vi.
38 Ibid., I, 6, vii.
39 Ibid., VI, 2, x.
40 ‘Itineraria burgdialense’, in P. Geyer, Itineraria hiersosolymitana saeculi III–VIII (Vienna, 1898), 22; Michael Avi-Yonah, The Jews of Palestine (New York, 1976), 164.
41 Ammianus Marcellinus, The Later Roman Empire (trans. Walter Hamilton), (London, 2004), 255.
42 Ibid.
43 Paula Frederiksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defence of Jews and Judaism (New York, 2008), 243–4.
44 Gavin L. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Anti-Semitism (Berkeley, 1990), 71.
45 See William Horbury, Messianism among Jews and Christians (London, 2003), 289–308.
46 Nicholas de Lange, ‘Jews in the age of Justinian’, in Michael Maas (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian (Cambridge, 2005) 419–20.
47 Horbury, Messianism among Jews and Christians, 151.
48 Yaakov Elman, ‘Middle Persian Culture and Babylonian Sages: Accommodation and Resistance in the shaping of Rabbinic Legal Tradition’, in Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Martin S. Jaffee, The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, 2007), 181.
49 Pesachim, 3 (Gemara), Norman Solomon, The Talmud: A Selection (London, 2009), 151.
50 Ibid., 148–9.
51 Elman, ‘Middle Eastern Culture’, 188–9.
52 Shabbat 2, 31 (Solomon, Talmud, 104–5).
53 Gittin, 9, 90 (Solomon, Talmud, 399).
54 Yevamot, 4, 47 (Solomon, Talmud, 306–7).
55 Andrew Sharf, Byzantine Jewry from Justinian to the Fourth Crusade (London, 1971), 53.
56 Christian sources told a quite different story of understandings reached between Umar and the Christian clergy by which Jews would continue to be kept out of the holy sites! Yehoshua Frenkel, ‘The Use of Islamic Materials by non-Islamic Writers’, in Michael M. Laskier and Yaacov Lev, The Convergence of Judaism and Islam: Religious, Scientific and Cultural Dimensions (Gainesville, FL, 2011), 97.
Chapter 6
1 Sharf, Byzantine Jewry, 33.
2 Nigel Groom, Frankincense and Myrrh: A Study of the Arabian Incense Trade (New York, 1981).
3 Gordon Darnell Newby, A History of the Jews of Arabia from Ancient Times until their eclipse under Islam (Columbia, 1988), 40.
4 C. Robin, ‘Le judaisme de Himyar’, in Arabie, revue de sabeologies, I, 97–172. G.W. Bowersock’s Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the eve of Islam (Oxford, 2013) appeared too recently for me to take proper account of its exhaustive scholarship.
5 Newby, A History of the Jews, 61.
6 P. Yule, ‘Zafar, Watershed of Pre-Islamic Culture’, online Propylaeum DOK Digital Repository of Classical Studies (2008); see also Yule, ‘Zafar: The Capital of the Ancient Himyarite Empire Rediscovered’, Jemen Report, 36 (2005), 22–9.
7 On the entanglement of Arab and Jewish cultures before the coming of Islam and in its formative period, see Reuven Firestone, ‘Jewish Culture in the Formative Period of Islam’, in Biale (ed.), Cultures of the Jews (New York, 2002), 267–305.
8 Batsheva Bonne-Tamir, ‘Oriental Jewish Communities and their Relations with South-West Asian Populations’, in Indian Anthropologist, 1985.
9 Reuben Ahroni, Yemenite Jewry: Origins, Culture and Literature (Bloomington, Indiana, 1986).
10 Charles Pellat, ‘Sur quelques femmes hostiles au prophete’, in Vie du prophete Mahome (Colloquium, Strasbourg, 1980), 77–86; see also Amnon Shiloah, ‘Encounters between Jewish and Muslim Musicians throughout the ages’, in Laskier and Lev, The Convergence of Judaism and Islam, 273–4.
11 Fred Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 230.
12 S. D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton, 1973), 141.
13 For ibrisim see S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Cairo Geniza, Vol. I: Economic Foundations (Berkeley, 1967), 60; for lalas Indian silk, Goitein, India Traders of the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2008), 278; for lasin the ‘waste silk’, Goitein, Mediterranean Society, Vol. IV: Daily Life (Berkeley, 1983), 168.
14 Yedida K. Stillman, ‘Costume as Cultural Statement: The Esthetics, Economics and Politics of Islamic Dress’, in Daniel H. Frank (ed.), The Jews of Medieval Islam: Community, Society and Identity (Leiden, 1995), 134.
15 Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, Vol. I, 101.
16 Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, Vol. III: The Community (Berkeley, 1971), 382.
17 Jonathan Bloom, Paper Before Print, The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven, 2010), 42.
18 Joel L. Kraemer, ‘Women Speak for Themselves’, in Stefan C. Reif, The Cambridge Genizah C
ollections: Their Contents and Significance (Cambridge, 2002), 196.
19 Kraemer, ‘Women Speak for Themselves’, 197ff; Goitein, Mediterranean Society, Vol. II 2, 219.
20 Kraemer, ‘Women Speak for Themselves’, 194.
21 Kraemer, ‘Women Speak for Themselves’, 207; Goitein, III, 227.
22 On Wuhsha, Goeitein, III, 346–52.
23 Sara Reguer, ‘Women and the Synagogue in Medieval Cairo’, in Susan Grossman and Rivka Haut, Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue (Philadelphia and Jerusalem, 1992), 55.
24 A copy of Hasdai’s letter is in the Cairo Geniza collection in Cambridge. This translation is from Franz Kobler, Letters of Jews through the Ages, Vol. 1: From Biblical Times to the Renaissance (New York, 1952), 98–101.
25 Ibid., 105.
26 P. B. Golden, ‘The Khazars’, in D. Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (Cambridge, 1990).
27 See Constantine Zuckerman, ‘On the date of the Khazar conversion to Judaism and the chronology of the kings of Rus, Oleg and Igor: A study of the anonymous Khazar letter from the Geniza of Cairo’, Revue des etudes byzantines, 1995, Vol. 53, 237–70.
28 Kevin Alan Brook, The Jews of Khazaria (New York, Toronto and Plymouth, 2006), 80.
29 The sack of Cordoba took place in April 1013, and Shmuel’s poem ‘On leaving Cordoba’ which his son Yehosef, the anthologist of his diwan, says was written contemporaneously with his departure, appears to be set in winter, making it more likely that he left before rather than after the disaster.
30 Ibn al-Khatib, Chronicle of Granada, cited in Ross Brann, Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh and Twelfth Century Islamic Spain (Princeton, 2002), 36–7.
31 Trans. (mostly), Raymond P. Scheindlin, Wine, Women, and Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life (Philadelphia, 1986), 159. There are now many translations of the great canon of medieval Spanish Hebrew poetry all with distinctive flavours. Peter Cole, The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950–1492 (Princeton, 2007) is often the freest of the most recent translations, while the scholar Scheindlin is the most reserved, sometimes a little awkwardly but very tight to the text. Readers, especially Hebrew readers (or rusty recoverers like the present author), might like to compare them with the still more in-your-face colloquial manner of Hillel Halkin, Grand Things to write a Poem On: A Verse Autobiography of Shmuel Hanagid (Jerusalem, 1999). All in their respective ways are excellent and Scheindlin in particular does his best to preserve something of the metre Naghrela took from Arabic models. There is also a more literal and thus slightly more earthbound translation by Leon J. Weinberger, Jewish Prince in Moslem Spain: Selected poems of Samuel ibn Nagrela (Tuscaloosa, 1973), which nonetheless goes to great pains to observe or at least register the rhyming patterns. Weinberger, Scheindlin and Halkin give the Hebrew texts which helps when comparing respective choices of the image, for example the ending of a famous erotic poem in which a cup-bearing ‘fawn’ wakes the dozing writer, wanting him to ‘drink the grape’s blood from between my lips’ while a fading moon still hangs in the early-dawn light right behind the boy, as the recumbent gently aroused versifying drinker lies there. But what is the exact shape of this curved blade-like, possibly new, moon? Naghrela’s Hebrew is simply yod, the ‘y’ letter that hangs like a single apostrophe, or a suspended comma. Cole chooses ‘comma’, Scheindlin ‘C’, and most baffling, Cole opts for a ‘D’ (or the form of a daled), which really can’t be what that most picturing poet Naghrela meant us to see.