Roman defeat, Christian response, and the literary construction of the Jew David M. Olster
Publisher: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c1994.
ISBN: 081223152X
DDC: 949.5013
LCC: BR232
Summary:
In the year 600, the Roman Empire was the most powerful political
entity in Europe and the Mediterranean; an Augustus ruled from the
capital at Constantinople, and Latin was the official language of the
empire. Yet within two generations, this order had collapsed. By 650,
the Levant, the Balkans, and Spain were lost; Italy was on the verge
of falling to the Germans, and northern Africa to the Arabs. The
empire consisted of a small territory including Asia Minor,
Constantinople, a section of Thrace, a few Balkan coastal fortresses,
and an ever-shrinking portion of Italy. Greek had replaced Latin as
the official language; papal and Greek orthodoxy clashed; the
empire's richest provinces were gone; and Jerusalem had twice fallen
from Christian rule, first to the Persians in 614, and then again to
the Arabs in 638. Posterity has dubbed this radically reconfigured
empire the Byzantine and has distinguished it from the classical
Roman Empire of the West. But the inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire
never ceased to think of themselves as Romans; their empire remained
the Roman Empire, universal, invincible - God's chosen instrument to
bring order to the world. Nonetheless, seventh-century authors sensed
something was going awry, and they sought to frame a response to the
situation. How could one explain the massive loss of territory and
the defeat of an empire that many believed God had intended to be
eternal? What assurances could seventh-century thinkers give that God
had not abandoned them and that the empire and Christianity would
again be victorious? And why, in the seventh century, was there a
sudden and remarkable proliferation of anti-Jewish texts, most in
dialogue form? These are the questions David M. Olster seeks to
answer in Roman Defeat, Christian Response, and the Literary
Construction of the Jew. Drawing upon the conventions of martyrology,
apocalypse, and Old Testament prophets the seventh century writers
sought to place the empire into a redemptive historical cycle of sin,
punishment, repentance, and restoration. Olster explores Christian
reactions to the catastrophic Persian and Arab invasions, challenging
long-held assumptions that divided "religious" from "secular"
literature and exempted religion from contemporary social, political,
and intellectual discourse. The rhetorical conventions of personal
sin and salvation were transferred to a collective context - and the
explosion of anti-Jewish texts turned out to have little to do with
actual Judeo-Christian social or intellectual conflicts. The
anti-Jewish texts, Olster argues, represent a literary response to
seventh-century disaster, by which Byzantine authors could redirect
the rhetoric of individual salvation into a theoretic of imperial
renewal. If the Jews' role in Christian society had relatively little
to do with their sudden prominence in seventh-century literature, the
imagined Jew represented something for Christian contemporaries that
fit well into a new pattern of apologetic. Seventh-century Christians
did not need a scapegoat, they needed someone whose greater
misfortunes could by comparison mitigate their own. Roman Defeat,
Christian Response, and the Literacy Construction of the Jew will be
of interest to students and scholars of early medieval, Byzantine,
and late Roman history, and religion, literature, and Jewish and
Islamic studies.
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (p. [185]-195) and index.
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