Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - JEWSEAST (Jews and Christians in the East: Strategies of Interaction between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean)

Teaser

The encounters and interactions between Jews and Christians in the Middle East, Ethiopia, India and the Caucasus, which have hitherto been only insufficiently researched, is the subject matter of the project “Jews and Christians in the East: Strategies of Interaction between...

Summary

The encounters and interactions between Jews and Christians in the Middle East, Ethiopia, India and the Caucasus, which have hitherto been only insufficiently researched, is the subject matter of the project “Jews and Christians in the East: Strategies of Interaction between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean” (JewsEast). One of the main premises of JewsEast is that in order to obtain a truly accurate understanding of the dynamics of Jewish-Christian relations in the non-Latin world during the Middle Ages and early modern period, these various regions and traditions must be studied together because they were all profoundly interconnected through the exchange and translation of texts, artistic motifs and techniques, and other goods, via long-distance trade along the “silk road”, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean, which, of course, also entailed the movement and encounter of peoples, Jews and Christians among them. The project explores 4 main questions:

1) What we can know about actual “real-life” interactions between Jews and a variety of Eastern Christian communities in the pre-modern period?;
2) What were the meanings and functions of invented or rhetorical Jewish identities?;
3) What is the significance of Jewish-Christian polemics, both written and visual, in lands or among communities where there were supposedly few to no Jews, or Jewish identity was “invented” vs. communities where Jews and Christians had the opportunity to be in regular contact with one another?;
4) How were Christian stories, laws, biblical interpretations, or motifs in which Jews featured prominently, or Jewish tales and motifs about Christians transformed as they were transported from one cultural milieu to another?

The project is important for understanding how different religious groups interact in general, because it provides a set of “test cases” outside of the European ones, which are already well researched, and which scholars often take as the single model for inter-religious relations in the past. The project also focuses largely on inter-minority relations, whereas most studies of religious plurality focus on majority-minority relations, i.e. the relationship between those in power and those who are not. Yet in pluralistic societies this is only one of many axes of inter-religious relations. This project provides a corrective to this approach within a set of specific, historical circumstances.

Work performed

During the first half of this project we have achieved several milestones. As far as Arabic sources are concerned, we have discovered many more polemical texts written in Arabic by Christians against Judaism than was heretofore known. This change of perspective compels us to critically revise the commonly accepted idea that Jewish-Christian polemic was no longer high on the agenda among Christian intellectuals after the rise of Islam. Nor does the polemical material we have found simply repeat patterns extant in late antiquity, as scholars have suggested in the past. The presence of anti-Jewish material in Christian chronicles and numerous Arabic narratives of miracles of the Virgin Mary, some of which contain anti-Jewish material, also point to the need which Christians in the Middle East felt to create boundaries between themselves and Jews. At the same time, this particular body of literature also indicates the need to examine the dynamics of Christian-Jewish relations and polemic between Western Europe, Byzantium, the Middle East and Ethiopia since some of these Marian texts appear to have been translated into Arabic from Western European texts, and from the Arabic renditions into Ge‘ez. We have begun collecting these anti-Jewish Marian miracles in Arabic, Syriac and Ge‘ez. How this literature functioned in both the Middle East and Ethiopia, and how it connects to the Middle Eastern Toledot Yeshu tales (Jewish accounts of the life of Jesus) is part of our current investigation. Numerous manuscripts in Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew, and Judeo-Persian of the Toledot Yeshu over a wide chronological spread, represent a sustained attack on the New Testament, and on the persons of Jesus, the disciples, the Virgin Mary, and later Christian figures, such as Nestorius or Queen Helen in the Middle East. Jewish polemic also comes in the form of such texts as the Judeo-Arabic anti-Christian treatise, Qiṣṣat Mujādalat al-Usquf, thought to have been composed in the ninth century CE, but it appears that this type of polemic was less popular than the Jewish “anti-gospel” the Toledot Yeshu. We have been working on trying to understand the function of the Toledot Yeshu in Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle East and their impact on Muslim polemic against Judaism and/or Christianity on the one hand, and the movement of the Toledot Yeshu cycle between the Middle East and Europe and its influences, on the other. This material is and will be dealt with in a series of published and forthcoming articles.

We have examined the interplay between “invented” and “real” Jewish-Christian relations in Ethiopia and Armenia quite intensively. Much of the evidence for “real” relations in these regions lie in archaeology, and to that end we have conducted two archaeological surveys of Jewish monastic sites in Ethiopia and compared them with what is known of Christian monasticism in Ethiopia. Written sources are more complex to evaluate. An examination of Ethiopian Christian literature about Jews shows that sometimes Jews were viewed neutrally, but at other times castigated as the enemies of the Christians and compared with heretics, “Pagans” or Muslims. Archaeological evidence is similarly important for understanding Jewish-Christian interactions in Armenia and Georgia. In July 2018 a field survey of various Jewish sites in Georgia will be conducted, while in August 2018 we will complete a “deep impact archaeological survey” of the medieval Jewish cemetery in Armenia that had first been discovered and analyzed by Prof. Michael Stone and his team. As far as Armenian and Georgian written sources are concerned, it appears that polemic and/or dialogue with the Jews was channeled through translated literature. A number of works translated could be characterized as adversus judaeos texts, while others belong to hagiographical or apocalyptic genres, but included reflections on the Jews and Judaism, or anti-Jewish attitudes. On the o

Final results

While even before the project began, we knew that there was more Christian-Jewish polemical material from the Middle East than scholars had indicated up until now, the amount of material we have uncovered has far surpassed our expectations, and we continue to find more manuscripts. We will identify and briefly describe these in the Jewish-Christian Relations from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. A Source History (600-1800). We are also inviting other specialists to write entries on them in our forthcoming volumes. Identifying the texts and pointing to the need for further research on them in our source history lays the groundwork for future research in this area. This is precisely what we foresaw when we proposed the JewsEast project, so in that regard we are satisfied.

The plethora of Marian anti-Jewish texts in Arabic, Syriac, and Ge‘ez and the extent to which it had not been studied, given the abundance of material there (including also iconographic material) surprised us, and is clearly yet another area for future research. We have networked with a number of other scholars also interested in the Marian miracles and we hope to publish on the interplay of such tales with ritual practices, and the Toledot Yeshu texts from the Middle East, thus gaining a better perspective of Jewish-Christian interactions in the Middle East.

Examining Judeo-Arabic texts from the Cairo Geniza related to Indian Ocean trade in conjunction with Indian sources has proven very promising, and strongly suggests that scholars working on just one or the other (Jewish or Indian) sources (which has been the practice heretofore) miss vital information. So far the team has focused primarily on Malayalam and Judeo-Arabic sources, but we are hoping that Persian, Judeo-Persian and Syriac sources will be equally revealing, which is one of our intended foci for the remaining years of the project.

Further exciting finds of the project consist in the identification and mapping of Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jewish) monasteries, settlements, and possibly fortresses. Our research on the Beta Israel monasteries indicates that oral and written traditions are mostly accurate, at least in terms of locating these sites, thus the searches and archaeological surveys of the JewsEast team have been far more successful than we had hoped. We intend to survey these sites as thoroughly as possible, with an eye to identifying the most promising one for proposing a full excavation in the future. This last task is beyond the research aims and financial capacities of the JewsEast project, however, envisioning such an endeavor would not have been possible without the work that we are currently doing. In the meantime, we will continue to analyze the archaeological material we do have in conjunction with the written sources. In general, we have been finding that seeking and incorporating archaeological evidence with the written sources, something we are doing to a lesser extent in the Caucasus and India, have been very fruitful, although, since this is an unanticipated outgrowth of our mostly textual research for JewsEast, the extent to which we may pursue this avenue is limited.

Our proposal to work on Ethiopian-Armenian relations was based in part upon the marked similarity between royal claims of Jewish lineage and symbolism in Armenia, Georgia, and Ethiopia, a few textual references, and some general ‘floating ideas’ that such a connection might have existed in the Middle Ages. Investigating these was initially a very minor part of the proposal for JewsEast. We are still uncertain of the exact nature of the connections between the two regions – something we intend to continue investigating during the remaining years of the project – however, our work so far indicates that this is a much larger research field than expected. Analysis of literary connections, some unique, common topoi found in Armenian and Ge’ez texts, seems to be the most promising path to follow. Su

Website & more info

More info: http://www.jewseast.org.