Ross Shepard Kraemer's landmark study of the Mediterranean diaspora (excluding Palestine), which covers the period from the accession of Constantine to the beginning of the seventh century, is predicated upon the view that the Christianisation of the Roman Empire was a pernicious time for Jews. This much would appear to be proven by the ever-diminishing archaeological Jewish footprint, especially by the later fifth and sixth centuries. And yet telling the tale of this apparently declining presence is a complicated task. No Jewish sources in Greek or Latin exist for the period under discussion and what Jewish sources there are, namely the Rabbinic material, are at best tangentially relevant. Other pertinent sources are in the main Christian (there are very few pagan ones) and bring with them many interpretative challenges, caused by their often polemical thrust, or by the fact that they are contained within complex codices of laws. Archaeological evidence such as Jewish inscriptions (not always easy to identify, as Kraemer, an expert on this subject, is only too aware of) or the remains of synagogues are often difficult to date, interpret and even identify. Such difficulties in part explain why there are no monographs on the subject, but Kraemer, always sensitive to the context in which scholarship has taken place, argues that both Jews, with their rabbinocentric vision of post-70 Judaism as well as their attachment to a sometimes Zionist agenda (‘A depiction of Jews as fragmented, disconnected, un-unified groups in different places, speaking the languages of the larger Mediterranean culture and relatively ignorant of the traditional vernacular, undercuts the notion of continuity and identity on which Zionist arguments rely’) and Christians with their supercessionist assumptions, have been ideologically disinclined to make this subject an area of study.
The task, then, facing Kraemer is a formidable one. There is no straightforward narrative to be told (even the well-known Christian historians of the period have little to say about Jews and their fate), simply shards of evidence contained within disputed or ambiguous sources, which the historian should treat with an astringent caution.
The book consists of ten chapters plus an epilogue. After an introductory chapter in which both the aims and the challenges of her task are laid out, Kraemer turns to a close examination of an incident reported in a letter written by Severus of Alexander and dated to 418, which reports the forced conversion of most of the Jews in Majorca and the burning of their synagogue at Magona. Kraemer's decision to begin with an in-depth analysis of this event is predicated upon the fact that it acts as a kind of summary of many of the issues she will be contending with in the book, ranging from conversion, violence against Jews and their property as well as the complex issue of reading tendentious Christian sources. The rest of the book consists of a roughly chronological investigation of the fate of the Jews in the western diaspora. A number of points emerge. There was never, as far as we can tell, any attempt to eradicate Jews, and this contrasts with policies adopted by some Christian emperors towards heretics in particular. By and large Jews were protected by the law, retaining legal rights and remedies from earlier times. This policy derived from an assumption that Jews as the originators of what Christians came to call the Old Testament were guarantors of Christian truth; and there was also a tradition that they would be converted at the endtime, originating in Romans xi. But such protections hardly outweighed the pressures which emerged from the Christianisation of the empire, indirectly encouraged by general attacks upon those who did not conform to orthodox Christianity. Christian bishops preached against Jews, on occasion encouraged their expulsion from cities (Kraemer provides a detailed and slightly sceptical interpretation of Cyril's expulsion of the Jews from Alexandria) and we have reports of attacks upon synagogues, often encouraged by them, and while such accounts might be problematic, they hint at a reality, if difficult to reconstruct. Laws relating to Jews, while in some instances giving evidence of attempts to protect them (here Kraemer thinks that the laws might be reacting to misdeeds against Jews), also imply the existence of pressures placed upon them. Some concerned compelling Jews to fulfil civic duties they had been exempted from. Some excluded them from remunerative professions, such as teaching of the law and the upper echelons of government. Ability to maintain slaves was restricted and they were forbidden from enslaving Christians, a means of diminishing economic capital. These disadvantages, when combined with the advantages of becoming a Christian, incentivised conversion. Kraemer argues for more evidence of such laws from the fifth century, and on the basis of a decrease in archaeological evidence from the same period posits an ongoing decline in Jewish life within the western diaspora. This may not be entirely attributable to the drip, drip effect of Christianising pressures but in part to ecological disasters, especially in the mid-sixth century, though they may have had an unequal effect upon an already small community. In a final chapter, which discusses possible responses of Jews to the phenomena she has discussed, Kraemer posits conversion to Christianity, long a favoured viewpoint, though with some caution, as well as emigration (in this context, inter alia, she engages in a fascinating discussion of the sudden presence of a heavy epigraphic presence of Jews in Venosa in the later fifth century as possibly supporting this view, at least for one Jewish community), sometimes to areas where there were friendlier governments, like that of the Arian Theodoric in Ravenna. Some of the difficulties experienced by Jews led to eschatological expectations, as we find evidenced in an incident when Jews in Crete expected the arrival of a Messiah. More cautiously Kraemer also suggests that there may have been attempts on the part of Jews to adopt practices associated with the Rabbis, here perhaps in an attempt to create a tighter sense of community. But again the evidential base for this is very slim and, as Kraemer notes, it is striking that the Rabbis are never mentioned in the Theodosian code. There is no evidence of violent activity on the part of Jews, as we find for instance among Samaritans.
Kraemer's volume, written from a broadly polemical perspective, to which she admits in her introduction and which is contained within the subtitle of the book, provides any scholar interested in the late antique history of the Jews with a superb launching pad for further research. Few stones are left unturned and each significant piece of evidence is discussed with an admirable sense of caution and detail. Kraemer's major difficulty lies with the lack of sources at her disposal as well as the character of the sources which are available. This can be frustrating as the reader is guided through a series of interpretations of an inscription or a Christian account of an act of violence against the Jews, or a law in the Theodosian or Justinian code. But such frustration would be an unjustified response to an appropriate handling of complicated evidence; and is tempered by Kraemer's willingness to engage with incidental pieces of evidence (the appearance of the remains of synagogues in Christian churches, for instance) to support tentative suggestions. What emerges is not a narrative of troughs and peaks, or of identifiable Wendepunkte, but a tentative story of gradual decline perhaps speeded up in the time of Justinian, woven together through a set of cautious conjectures, in which the Jewish position within the empire is never isolated but always related to that of other groups, such as heretics or Samaritans. Much of the discussion centres on what might be termed issues to do with treatment of Jews and we only rarely gain any insight into their cultural life in this period, perhaps reflecting the sources, though there are helpful discussions of the legal position and influence of the Patriarch, the role of Hebrew in Jewish life (a sceptical discussion), and of the implications of Justinian's Novella 146 as this concerns Jewish religious culture.
Much more could be written about this major publication. However, I shall content myself with two final observations, which could be seen as related. The first concerns the importance of Kraemer's work for ongoing assessments of the relatively plentiful supply of Christian anti-Jewish literature in the period which is the subject of her monograph. The tendency in scholarship, particularly among Christian scholars, is to see the presence of such literature as a sign of the flourishing of Jewish communities in this period. Kraemer refers on occasion to this view and criticises it (there was the reality of oppression and this needs to be acknowledged, she asserts); and in a discussion of her monograph, she argues that Christian scholars are by and large more interested in stressing the fact that Jews flourished in the empire than adumbrating the pernicious influence of Christianity upon Judaism. Certainly in the light of her thesis, the purpose and aim of such literature may need to be reassessed, or at least integrated into her account. The second point relates to the historiographical positioning of Kraemer's work, a point already raised by Steven Fine in a review of this volume in the Review of Biblical Literature xii (2020). In one sense it is right to think of it as a rebellion against what some have called an anti-lachrymose view of Jewish history, associated with Salo Baron and his followers, and which became popular both before and after the Second World War; and Kraemer is explicit on this point (see esp. pp. 38–9). Jewish history in the period under discussion appears as a tale of decline, if there are also some signs of resistance; and Kraemer is clear that the increasing Christianisation of the empire after Constantine was not a good for Jews. Hence, in some senses, her negative remarks about tendencies in scholarship to interpret anti-Jewish literature as a sign of the opposite, of Jewish flourishing. The book makes no claims for any wider visions of Jewish history; but in kicking against the goads of a particular view of ancient Jewish history, in such a detailed and nuanced way, it can be seen as having significance beyond its immediate subject.
