Publications | The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity

 Ross Shepard Kraemer, The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity: What Christianity Cost the Jews: OUP 2020.

The central question I wanted to answer when I began work on MDLA was seemingly straightforward: what happened to the Jews of the Mediterranean diaspora in late antiquity? This phrasing carries several implications: that something happened to Jews in the Mediterranean diaspora, and that whatever this was didn’t happen to Jews elsewhere (whether in the homeland, or in the neo-Babylonian diaspora).

The first part of this seemed to me sufficiently self-evident.  At the time of Constantine, the majority of Jewish inhabitants of the Roman Empire appear to have lived outside the homeland, to have spoken Greek (and far less frequently, Latin) as their first, if not only language, to have read their scriptures, and to have venerated their God in those languages. But ultimately, almost none of this would be true. While a tiny minority of Jews appear to have continued to speak Greek, both in their ordinary lives and in liturgical settings, the vast majority of Jews cease to speak, read scripture, or worship in Greek, perhaps as early as a few centuries after Constantine. Questions of Jewish habitation are extremely complex, but it is also unquestionable that in many regions where large populations of Jews once lived, far fewer ultimately do, and the vast majority of Jews eventually come to reside elsewhere, especially in eastern Europe.

Yet the chronology of these changes, and the processes by which they were effected have long eluded us, in part due to the nature of the surviving sources. Non-Jewish writers, both Christian and non-Christian, write occasionally about Jews in the late antique Mediterranean diaspora, and a relatively small number of late Roman laws pertain to Jews. But from Jews themselves we have no identifiable literary accounts in either Greek or Latin dating between the fourth to the seventh centuries CE: we have only material evidence, primarily inscriptions and the remains of ancient synagogues, including a dozen or so actual sites. Although dating this evidence with precision is notoriously difficult, it’s pretty clear that by the fifth century this evidence is considerably diminished. By the sixth century, identifiably Jewish inscriptions in Greek or Latin are even rarer, most notably in regions like Asia Minor, where they were once relatively plentiful. Most identifiable synagogue sites appear to have ceased functioning as synagogues by the 5th century, with none known to have been intact and functioning later than the 6th century. 

Yet the absence of evidence is not inherently evidence of absence, as the title of the introductory chapter of the book signals. Conceivably, Jews continued to live in these regions, and are now invisible to scholarly research for other reasons, including the arbitrariness of archaeological finds and the increasing reluctance of Jews to identify themselves as such under difficult social and historical conditions.

Virtually no other scholars have comprehensively tackled the question of what happened to these Jews, and why. In the book I argue that this is partly because the history of diaspora Jews poses challenges to both Christian and Jewish master narratives that few scholars have wished to confront. In dominant Jewish narratives, the demise of the Second Temple was followed quickly by the supremacy of rabbinism not only in the homeland, but throughout the ancient world, leaving no space for a flourishing non-rabbinic diaspora. (This turns out to be particularly apparent in many overviews of Jewish history, at least from the nineteenth century on.) Replicating modern Jewish debates about the dangers of assimilation, some Jewish accounts simply presume that the majority of diaspora Jews eventually became Christians, perhaps voluntarily, a transformation facilitated by their prior assimilation into the larger Mediterranean culture, especially their fluency in Greek, and the social relations with non-Jews that such fluency facilitated. Some Jewish scholarship may also eschew the study of the late antique Mediterranean diaspora because this history has also recently become implicated in debates about modern Jewish claims to the homeland. If Mediterranean Jewish populations left the homeland voluntarily, and/or came to find their residence outside the homeland acceptable, this could be (and has been) construed as evidence that Jews relinquished their claims to the homeland, and cannot now renege.

The issues of Christian scholars are somewhat different, although the result is the same. In traditional Christian narratives, the persistence of flourishing Jewish populations after the first century ce undercuts Christian claims to fulfill Jewish scriptures and supplant Jewish religion. And although I didn’t raise this issue in the book, some modern Christian scholars have showed considerably more interest in demonstrating that Judaism flourished in the ancient Mediterranean for centuries after the beginnings of Christianity, and much less interest in interrogating the pernicious impact on Jews of the Christianization of the empire.

The arguments I ultimately make in this book are not entirely what I initially anticipated. Years of prior work with Jewish inscriptions, particularly, grounded my expectation that the evidence for Jews dropped off precipitously, probably corresponding in some indeterminate way to actual demographic decline, but I also thought that explanations for that decline in evidence would be difficult to verify. I ended up arguing that at least in some places, the increasing absence of evidence for Jews is evidence for the decline of local Jewish populations, and that there are good plausible explanations for such decline.  Often this was for the same reasons that other populations declined in these same centuries and regions: earthquakes, devastating ecological disasters and epidemics of plague, and frequent warfare, factors I became more aware of as my research progressed (and as the state of scholarship improved, especially on the first three). But from the fourth to the early seventh centuries (the point at which I chose to stop), Jews were also subject to extensive pressure from a Christianizing empire. Christian bishops preached sermons aimed at firing up their Christian parishioners against local Jews. Various Christian sources recount stories of mobs of Christian men who attacked synagogues and sometimes Jews themselves, often under the direction of bishops, or at least with their tacit support. Some of these accounts are more plausible than others, but the reality of such violence is strengthened by the numerous laws which criminalize such attacks (even when the prescribed penalties are relatively toothless). It’s difficult to say how widespread or how frequent such attacks were, although it’s important to keep in mind that occasional violence, or even just the threat of violence, can be deeply damaging to the persons and groups who are its targets. Other laws pertaining to Jews, preserved primarily in the Theodosian and Justinianic legal codes, illuminate additional pressures on Jews: legal disincentives to remaining Jews, including inheritance penalties, burdensome public services, restrictions on occupations, limitations on slaveholding and slave trading, and others. Corresponding incentives to convert included reduced taxes, cash payments, prestigious public appointments, and more.

I didn’t fully anticipate what became a central thesis of the book: that Jews were neither the first, nor the only, nor the greatest targets of these pressures. On the contrary, the pressures on Jews were part of a larger project to transform the entire Roman Empire (if not the entire known world) into a homogeneous orthodox cath­olic polity. The many implementers of this project (Christian bishops and their associates; compliant emperors and their administrations) first con­cerned themselves primarily with the suppression of intra- Christian dif­ference and the eradication of various traditional Mediterranean religions, and only then with the containment (and/or conversion) of Jews and their cultural cousins, Samaritans. Further, and significantly, the laws of Christian emperors, often at the behest of Christian lobbyists, aimed at the total eradication of dissidents and traditionalists, but never at the total elimination of Jews (and perhaps Samaritans, this last being a bit more complicated to assess). Jews retained the legal rights, remedies, and protections they had held earlier in the empire, while traditional practitioners and their cult sites had none, nor did many dissenting Christians. The reasons for this are not entirely clear, but I speculate on several. Jews had a unique place in the Christian cosmology: having initially received and transmitted the scriptures on whose prophecy of Christ Christians relied, Jews were essential guarantors of their truth. At the same time, the conversion of the Jews was essential to Christian eschatological scenarios, particularly as laid out in Paul’s famous Letter to the Romans 9-11. The total elimination of Jews before the eschaton would falsify Paul’s prediction, and remove Jews as the unwitting guarantors of the truth of the divine scriptures that prophesied Christ. These policies appear then theologically coherent: they allowed for the harassment of Jews, and pressures to convert them, but they also prohibit the total eradication of Jews. And at least for some of those in power, the complete conversion of the Jews presaged the imminent end of the world in a manner that many might not have wished to see fulfilled quite yet.

The book begins with an introductory chapter with the usual components (including a defense of my choice to write a book about Jews in the Mediterranean diaspora, rather than just a book about all Jews in late antiquity). I then devote a lengthy chapter to the so-called Letter of Severus of Minorca on the Conversion of the Jews.[1]  It details how, in the space of one week in February, 418, the entire population of Jewish inhabitants on the island of Minorca (540 persons) agreed to become Christians, once a mob of Christians from the western town of Jamona descended on the eastern town of Magona and burnt the synagogue down to its foundations. (The Letter avoids saying explicitly that the Christians burnt the synagogue, but that’s just clever authorial artifice.) It may or may not be the work of an actual bishop named Severus, and some aspects of its account may reflect actual events on Minorca, but as I argue at some length, it is extremely difficult to tell.  Nevertheless, the text encapsulates the issues with which my book wrestles, and I return to it regularly throughout.

Seven chapters detail the pressures put on Jews in the diaspora, beginning with the reign of Constantine, and ending more or less with the death of Gregory the Great at the turn of the seventh century. Most of these are organized around the surviving late antique legislation pertaining to Jews preserved both in the Codex Theodosianus and the Codex Justinianus, and endeavor to place that legislation within whatever we can know of the larger historical contexts for those centuries. The final chapter considers how Jews in the diaspora themselves may have responded to these pressures.

Undoubtedly, these pressures sometimes resulted in conversion, although the direct evidence is quite meager. The totality of the evidence, primarily literary and legal, suggests that some Jews became Christians under serious duress, including actual or threatened violence. Some probably chose to become Christians with little or no sense of compulsion, while many did so under complex circumstances that are now inaccessible to us.

Other Jews appear to have emigrated, perhaps to safer havens, including parts of the disintegrating empire where friendlier governments held power, like that of the Arian Theoderic, based in Ravenna. Various evidence suggests that in some locations (Ravenna, Alexandria), Jews were not just the victims of Christian violence, but players themselves, although the evidence for these contestations inevitably comes from sources we do well to read with seasoned skepticism. Other sources (including a cluster of letters from the rhetor Libanios) hint that Jews leveraged networks of political and social relations to lobby for their own interests, although these networks are largely obscured. On several occasions, Jews may have entertained the possibility of divine intervention.  One such account, set on Crete, ends with the entirely voluntary conversion of Jews to Christianity after they recognize that they have almost been lured to their deaths by a false prophet claiming to be Moses, and friendly Christian fishermen come to their rescue. Another involves a massive gathering of diaspora Jews on the temple mount in Jerusalem on Sukkoth, and ends with their slaughter by hostile heavenly forces (or rampaging Christian monks, depending on which of the competing agents you find more plausible). Far better attested are at least two actual Samaritan revolts against Rome in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, but no comparable Jewish efforts are known.

I argue that although the evidence is thin, the increasing use of Hebrew in later Jewish epitaphs in some regions, especially southern Italy, might suggest that some Jews embraced forms of Jewish practice that constructed tighter social boundaries, including perhaps some interest in the offerings of rabbis traveling occasionally to the western diaspora. I consider the possibility that the prevalence of inscriptions for Jewish women with titles of synagogue office in the fourth and fifth centuries may somehow reflect the stresses on Jewish communities in these years, analogous to other evidence that in times of social stress, women take on communal responsibilities from which they are ordinarily restricted.

And last, I argue that like everyone else in the region, some significant number of Jews died, particularly in the mid-sixth century, not only from widespread war, but particularly from a perfect storm of a world-wide ecological crisis caused by two massive volcanic eruptions, and recurring (and perhaps related) waves of plague epidemic that devastated the region. Just as I was finishing the production of the book, I read an account of the impact of smallpox on the Indian population of Cape Cod and southeastern New England (where I now live) in the seventeenth century that vividly illuminates how such conjoint crises could bring about the demographic collapse of entire communities.[2] Although Jews appear no more likely than Christians to have died from the famines caused by the volcanic eruptions or the subsequent waves of plague, the demographic impact may have been disproportionate in both cases. Many relatively small Jewish populations in any given location may have found it impossible to recover from the death of upwards of 40% of their numbers. I wish I had been able to consider this a little more than I did, although we have no actual demographic evidence on which to draw, and must rely entirely on analogies from comparable events.

Writing this book was a tremendous challenge, mildly unnerving, and deeply pleasurable. (The production of it was a small nightmare, but I’m not going to write about that here.)  To do it, I had to immerse myself in what was in many ways a new discipline for me. I knew the epigraphic and archaeological data well enough, but the late antique literary sources, and especially the legal sources were largely terra incognita when I started. Like most scholars of Jews in the late ancient Mediterranean, I had no formal training in Roman law, late antique or otherwise. I relied heavily (although I like to think not uncritically) on the work of experts in the field, although frustratingly, I often found that few of those scholars really knew much about Jews in late antiquity. Here I had perhaps a small advantage of having lived with a lawyer for almost half a century, starting when he was himself a law student, and to have gained by osmosis, perhaps, at least a basic sense of some useful legal principles.

And the bibliography. Apart from some archaeological and epigraphic studies, there is a relatively thin scholarly literature on Jews in the late antique Mediterranean diaspora, probably because there is no literature known to have been produced by such Jews themselves. But there is an enormous scholarly literature on late antiquity as a whole, endless rabbit-holes down which I could easily disappear. I have spent much of my scholarly career working largely with anonymous and pseudonymous documents that prohibit any real discussion of actual persons, motivations, events, social networks, and so forth.  Suddenly I found myself in a world in which we know more about how Paul Orosius traveled to Minorca with the relics of St. Stephen than we know about the author of the Gospel of John. (Admittedly, we actually know nothing about the author of the Gospel of John, but still.) But everything I read led to yet more things I could read. Well-meaning colleagues and graduate students were forever offering bibliographic suggestions – some of which were invaluable and some of which made me realize that if I went down that particular path, I would simply never finish the book. I worried throughout, and worry still, about what I may have missed that would materially alter my arguments, or adjudicate issues I could not resolve. Inevitably, some reviewers will carp about the various studies I do not cite. But I take considerable comfort in the knowledge that scholarship is cumulative. The studies that follow mine will have the opportunity to remedy all these deficiencies.

The hardest part of this book, though, was not the deficiencies of the sources or the endless bibliography – it was the larger inevitable conclusion to which my work points. The eventual dominance of Nicene/Chalcedonian Christianity came at a tremendous cost to all who did not subscribe to it. And that dominance carried within it the seeds of continuing costs to those who would continue to resist it. This book is not about what happens after the seventh century (and about which I am not qualified to write with any expertise). In the preface, I write that I tried to resist a teleological historical narrative in which the history that I consider here led inexorably to subsequent horrors. Perhaps it might have gone differently. Yet this book makes clearer, I think, the extent to which the spread of Christianity throughout the late antique Mediterranean was not benign for much of the ancient Mediterranean populace, any more than the settlement of Europeans in New England was benign for the native population the Europeans found.

Somewhat to my surprise then, both the developmental editor to whom I gave the final manuscript, and the readers to whom Oxford sent the book for the usual laudatory blurbs came away not with that story, but with a far more uplifting account that I didn’t think I had written: one in which despite the pressures to which they were repeatedly subjected, Jews in the late ancient Mediterranean diaspora survived, adapted and persevered, as, it’s true, the final chapter does explore. But I do know that I wrote this book for them, and I hope that this was, in fact, the case.

[1] I am deeply grateful to Scott L. Bradbury, at Smith College, for his excellent edition, translation, notes and commentary on this work, to which I was first exposed when Oxford University Press fortuitously asked me to review his manuscript for publication. None of this is a secret.  

[2] David J. Silverman, This Land is Their Land: the Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019).