Byzantine Jewry From Justinian To The Fourth Crusade

A survey of Jewish life in the Byzantine Empire during its last 300 years. Ch. 1 (pp. 9-48), "Byzantium and the Jews, " discusses the Jews' political and legal status. Notes that while emperors attempted to use force to create religious unity and eradicate Judaism, the Church objected to forced conversion while pressuring the Jews to convert voluntarily. The anti-Jewish liturgy also encouraged popular antisemitism. Analyzes ecclesiastical rulings, the question of a special tax for Jews, and anti-Jewish polemics. Includes translated excerpts from Jewish and Byzantine official and ecclesiastical documents illustrating the status of the Jews and describing persecutions (pp. 209-332).

The History of the Byzantine Jews explores the Jewish microcosmos in Byzantium. Under the Romans, Jews enjoyed the privileges of knighthood and nobility. Although these luxuries were significantly diminished under Theodosius II- whose wife, Eudoxia, was a judaizing Empress- and the Codex Justinianus, they remained a powerful entity in Byzantium. In comparison to the irredentist Samaritans and Paulicians, the Jews remained areligio licita (permitted religion) that tolerated and even protected by Imperial and Church authority. Their position in society even enabled the Jews to vie for increased power. The Byzantine Jews tried to play the game of power politics through their affiliation with Yemen's Jewish Himyarites, and ill-fated alliance with the Persian Sassanides, and finally through the colossal power of the Jewish Khazar Empire. In this living history of the Byzantine Jews, Author Elli Kohen attempts to revive the spirit of Moses of Crete, Procopius, Eusebius, Theophanes Continuatus, and medieval chroniclers such as Liutbrand, Villehardouin, and Benjamin of Tudela. Intended as a complementary text to other classics on Byzantine Jews, this new work emphasizes multicultural cooperation in the study of this time period. Some of the events and individuals profiled in The History of the Byzantine Jews include: -Byzantine and Jewish polemists- the "Hagiographic Bibliotheca" -Historiography of a Jewish family in Byzantine Apulia -The Jerusalem Karaites finding a safe haven in Byzantium -The rerouting of the fourth Crusade through the Juiverie of Constantinople -The return of the Paleologues -Byzantine-Jewish coexistence under Symeon, Archbishop of Salonica

The first great city to which the Crusaders came in 1089 was not Jerusalem but Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Almost as much as Jerusalem itself, Constantinople was the key to the foundation, survival and ultimate eclipse of the crusading kingdom.

In the ever increasing volume of Byzantine Studies in recent years there seems to be one very apparent void, namely, the history and culture of the Byzantine Jewry, its presence and impact on the surrounding convoluted Byzantine world between Late Antiquity until the conquest of Byzantium (1453). With the now classic but dated studies by Joshua Starr and Andrew Sharf, the collective volume at hand is an attempt to somewhat fill in this void. The articles assembled in this volume are penned by leading scholars in the field. They present bird's eye views of the cultural history of the Jewish Byzantine minority, alongside a wide array of surveys and in-depth studies of various topics. These topics pertain to the dialectics of the religious, literary, economic and visual representation world of this alien minority within its surrounding Byzantine hegemonic world.

Using primary sources, Joshua Holo uncovers the day-to-day workings of the Byzantine-Jewish economy in the middle Byzantine period. Built on a web of exchange systems both exclusive to the Jewish community and integrated in society at large, this economy forces a revision of Jewish history in the region. Paradoxically, the two distinct economic orientations, inward and outward, simultaneously advanced both the integration of the Jews into the larger Byzantine economy and their segregation as a self-contained body economic. Dr Holo finds that the Jews routinely leveraged their internal, even exclusive, systems of law and culture to break into - occasionally to dominate - Byzantine markets. In doing so, they challenge our concept of Diaspora life as a balance between the two competing impulses of integration and segregation. The success of this enterprise, furthermore, qualifies the prevailing claim of Jewish economic decline during the Commercial Revolution.

First published in 1938, Jacob Rader Marcus's The Jews in The Medieval World has remained an indispensable resource for its comprehensive view of Jewish historical experience from late antiquity through the early modern period, viewed through primary source documents in English translation. In this new work based on Marcus's classic source book, Marc Saperstein has recast the volume's focus, now fully centered on Christian Europe, updated the work's organizational format, and added seventy-two new annotated sources. In his compelling introduction, Saperstein supplies a modern and thought-provoking discussion of the changing values that influence our understanding of history, analyzing issues surrounding periodization, organization, and inclusion. Through a vast range of documents written by Jews and Christians, including historical narratives, legal opinions, martyrologies, memoirs, polemics, epitaphs, advertisements, folktales, ethical and pedagogical writings, book prefaces and colophons, commentaries, and communal statutes, The Jews in Christian Europe allows the actors and witnesses of events to speak for themselves.