Salo Baron. Social and Religious History of the Jews

Chapter XVI The Pre-Islamic World. Selections

Withdrawing behind the rampart of talmudic law and religion, the Jewish people of the sixth century continued to pursue its historic career quietly, almost inarticulately. After the brilliant light-and shadows-emerging from the talmudic letters in both Palestine and Babylonia, Jewish life was now suddenly enveloped in a deep mist. The few flashes of light occasionally breaking through from the outside assumed a weird opaqueness from the general coloring of profound hostility in a world torn by sectarian strife and intolerance. Jews now experienced the bitter fate previously reserved for their own sectarian groups, such as the Samaritans or Sadducees; their history during the century and a half before Mohammed can no longer be reconstructed from their own records, but must painfully be pieced together, chiefly from stray data preserved by enemies. That most of these reports are concerned only with a few dramatic incidents and shed light only on either the political relations between Jews and Gentiles, or the laws issued by emperors and kings heaping ever new disabilities on the stubborn minority, lies in the very nature of these sources, in the main written by Christian ecclesiastics or jurists.

Nor could Judaism remain entirely unaffected by the general feeling of despondency and pessimism characteristic of that period of transition from the ancient to the medieval world. Both the Mishnah and the Babylonian Talmud were produced largely in an era of general well-being in Rome and Persia. Although Jews suffered increasingly from administrative oppression, their political and economic life reflected the general prosperity in a certain degree. The two empires began to decline, however, after the tannaitic age in Palestine, and in the generation following that of R. Ashi (died ca. 427) in Babylonia. Intensified discrimination against Jews, coupled with the widespread feeling that the end of the world was impending, likewise contributed to stifle Jewish economic and intellectual endeavor. Already in the second century, we recall, a Latin Spengler had spoken of the senectus of Roman civilization. Under these circumstances, it is truly astonishing that Hellenistic, Roman, and Persian pessimism, pagan and Christian alike, had so slightly affected that inveterate Jewish reliance in a better future which permeates all talmudic literature. When the downfall finally came, the Jews recoiled to await in their sheltered corner those better times which, they still confidently hoped, were soon to come.

Many new forces were at work, however; quietly gathering momentum, these prepared the Jews for the great historic role they were to play in the new era dawning upon mankind. The rapid spread of Islam in the century after its rise, the establishment of an enormous empire reaching from India and central Asia to Morocco and southern France, brought about a marvelous rejuvenation of these decaying countries. A new dynamic force transformed into a vast, flourishing realm most of the provinces of the Byzantine Empire, all of Persia, and many adjoining provinces of India, North Africa, and western Europe. The cultural and economic superiority of the Caliphate over its eastern and western neighbors, including Byzantium, was uncontested. The Jewish people, too, were quickened, and entered another great period of achievement. But first they had to suffer some of their greatest agonies under both Persia and Byzantium, and even amidst the newer civilizations slowly emerging from the smoldering ruins of Western Rome.

For a while it appeared as if the old Roman Empire, hereditary enemy of the Jewish people, were to be reestablished in its former glory. In his vigorous, though often confused and erratic, effort to stem its progressive disintegration and to reunite the long-lost western provinces with the essentially intact eastern half, Justinian encountered the resistance of many religious groups, including Jews. A "barbarian" by birth, a Latin by speech (he is said to have spoken Greek with a foreign accent all his life), and a despot by temperament, the emperor viewed his high office as a God-given trust to introduce order into the prevailing chaos. He sought, particularly, to replace the theretofore tenuous balance between the warring political parties and religious sects by a stable political system and ideology. More than any of his predecessors he combined in his outlook the heritage of ancient Rome's "manifest destiny" with the missionary zeal of the Greek Orthodox Church, and sincerely believed in the divine right of his autocratic caesaropapist regime.

Jews were both a stumbling block to unity and a lightning rod absorbing some raging storms of sectarian controversy. In contemporary letters the term "Jew" often lost its ethnic-religious connotations and became a fighting word freely employed to designate any opposing ideology. It was bandied around, often with even less intrinsic justification than the terms "fascist," "imperialist," or "communist" today. Because he had stressed the human nature of Christ's body, Nestorius and his followers were called "Jews" even by emperors in their official correspondence. Twenty years after the deposition of Nestorius as Patriarch of Constantinople by the third ecumenical Council of Ephesus (431), another great Council, meeting in Chalcedon, tried to restore peace in the Eastern Church by adopting a compromise formula: "We confess one Jesus, Lord, only Son, whom we acknowledge in two natures." After the rejection of a more moderate version, "of two natures," this formula closely resembled that previously advocated by Pope Leo in Rome, and it soon became the official credo of the Greek Orthodox Church as well. The radical spokesmen of Monophysitism, on the other hand, dominant in Egypt and Syria, insisted on the exclusively divine nature of Christ and denounced the doctrine of two natures as an outright Jewish heterodoxy. They circulated a story that the Jews, upon learning of the newly adopted canon, mockingly petitioned Emperor Marcian: "For a long time we were regarded as descendants of those who crucified a God and not a man, but since the Synod of Chalcedon has met and demonstrated that they had crucified a man and not a God we beg that we be forgiven for this offense, and that our synagogues be restored to us." The distinguished Patriarch Severus of Antioch now glibly lumped together Nestorians and Chalcedonians in his denunciation of "Jewish" heresies. When Severus was exiled in 519 his successor, Paul, a Chalcedonian, was generally surnamed "the Jew," and was driven out by his Monophysite flock.

Antioch was, indeed, the storm center of the Empire. Inheriting the role formerly played by Alexandria, it now was the scene of endless street riots between the various religious sects and political parties, often masked behind the cloak of the "Green" and the "Blue" circus factions. Despite the tongue-lashing they had received from Antioch's most renowned "golden-mouthed" preacher, Jews mingled freely with the Christian population and often took part in these controversies. Curiously, they seem more frequently to have taken the side of the "Blues," largely representative of the Orthodox middle classes, than that of the mostly lower-class, pro-Monophysite "Greens." Sometimes they paid a high price for such abandonment of their wonted neutrality. On one occasion, we learn, the Antioch "Greens" destroyed the synagogue in neighboring Daphne, where the Antiochian Jews worshiped after their loss of the city synagogues through mob violence instigated by Simeon Stylites the Elder some two generations earlier (after 423). After this attack Emperor Zeno, who through his Henoticon of 484 had tried to appease the Monophysites and certainly had no desire to appear as a protector of Jews, real or alleged, exclaimed, "Why did they not burn the living Jews with the dead?" There is no way of telling what connection there was between that attack of the "Greens," which occurred in 489-90, and an alleged general uprising of Antiochian Jewry against the imperial power in 486, reported by the generally well-informed Byzantine chronicler, Malalas, writing about sso. Malalas may have confused these events with some riots he himself was to record under the reign of Anastasius in 507. Anastasius (491-518), who once publicly denounced the Nestorian patriarch of Constantinople, Macedonius, as "this Jew who is amongst us," must through some hostile act have provoked the real Jews of Antioch to an overt uprising. Perhaps it was this new bloodletting which so weakened the Antiochian community that it apparently played no role in the Persian raids of 529 and 540. Even the hostile chroniclers of the period fail to record any Jewish "disloyal" acts on these occasions. There is no doubt, however, that the Jewish remnant suffered severely from the city's nearly total devastation in 540, although no Jews are recorded among the captives carried away by the Persians to the New Antioch in Persia.

Embarking upon the reconquest of the West, Justinian found it necessary to side with the "Jewish" Chalcedonians, whose doctrine agreed with that espoused by the Latin Church, even if it meant sacrificing the support of the Monophysite Egyptians and Syrians. He rode roughshod over the sensibilities of Empress Theodora, whose Monophysite sympathies he had allegedly promised before their marriage to respect. Little did he sense how much his policy of violent repression of the Eastern sectarian movements, reinforced by the semiconscious striving of the Egyptians and the Syrians for national self-preservation, was paving the way for the ultimate disintegration of the Eastern Empire. He was much more concerned with the immediate problem of captivating the benevolence of the western Catholics, and with the suppression of the western heresies. Arianism, especially among the North African Vandals, certainly appeared as a major obstacle. Of course, Arianism, teaching Christ's inferiority to God the Father, had long been viewed as a "Jewish" movement. One could readily argue that only complete elimination of professing Jews might remove a permanent source of heterodox infection from these threatened areas.

For this reason the western campaigns of Belisarius, Justinian's famous general, were characterized by outbursts of total intolerance in sharp deviation from the Empire's long-established policies. Remembering the sufferings of their ancestors during the last decades of the Western regime and deeply imbued by their own homilists with a deep distrust of the hereditary "kingdom of evil," Jews evidently joined the most stubborn resisters. Their last-ditch defense of Naples in 536 evoked the grudging admiration of the Byzantine historian, Procopius. They not only fought valiantly in the positions assigned to them, but had in part been responsible for persuading their fellow citizens to reject Belisarius' tempting offers to surrender. Evidently, North African Jews had proved no less intractable two years earlier. Their resistance must have appeared doubly dangerous, as their missionary successes among the Berber tribes secured for them strong allies among these turbulent neighbors, who were repeatedly to overrun the exposed province. Hence came Belisarius' apparently gradual elimination of the Jewish community of the small but strategically important city of Borion, and the conversion into a church of its ancient synagogue, attributed by local legends to the days of King Solomon. More, the general, backed by imperial legislation, tried to impede any form of organized Jewish life in North Africa; he confiscated all synagogues and prohibited Jewish public worship in any form. This abrupt departure from the traditional toleration of synagogues may perhaps be explained by a local tradition. According to a martyrology, apparently composed in the fourth or fifth century, a Christian saint, Marciana, had allegedly been grievously insulted by Jews during Diocletian's persecutions of 304-5. Thereupon the martyr was said to have cursed the offenders, and predicted that their synagogue would burn down and never be rebuilt.

Neither Belisarius nor Justinian, however, seems to have intended this outburst to be followed by any general outlawry of Judaism throughout the Empire. Although the emperor failed to reproduce in his code the significant general affirmation by Theodosius I that "the Jews' sect has not been prohibited by any law," the tenor of his entire legislation and administrative practice clearly reflected basic adherence to this principle. Apart from theological considerations, simple prudence often stayed the hand of persecutors. Many an imperial administrator must have thought along the lines of Emperor Arcadius, when in 400 he refused to permit the bishop of Gaza to destroy a pagan temple. "I know well," the emperor had stated, "that this town is full of idols; but it pays its taxes loyally and contributes much to the Treasury. If, suddenly, we terrorize these people, they will take to flight and we shall lose considerable revenues." Doubtless cognizant of the stream of Jewish refugees to Persia in the preceding centuries, the emperors had the less reason to encourage such a flight, as they must have realized how much the escape of thousands of "Jewish" Nestorians to the Sassanian Empire had strengthened the hand of that hereditary enemy of Rome. Certainly the presence of real Jews was far less threatening to the unity of empire. Even the outlawry of synagogue worship in North Africa was evidently intended as but a temporary punitive measure. To all intents and purposes it was abrogated ten years later by Justinian himself in his Novella 131, in which he merely renewed the old prohibition of erecting new synagogues and by implication allowed the maintenance of all existing structures, including those which may have survived the confiscation in the African province. That is undoubtedly why the earlier Novella was not considered part and parcel of the permanent legislation by later jurists.

We must bear in mind, however, that, once despoiled of their synagogues for any length of time! Jews of any locality found it extremely difficult to replace them by new houses of worship because of the permanent outlawry of new structures. This may well have been the reason why the community of Alexandria, though it had doubtless successfully weathered the mob onslaught led by Cyril in 414 (who, incidentally, had used some of the same demagogic arguments which proved so effective against the local Jews in his subsequent major struggle against the "new Jew," Nestorius) had to get along for several generations without a public place of worship. This is evidently the meaning of the saying attributed by a later chronicler to the Coptic sect of Theodosians who allegedly decided to build a church in the Egyptian capital, "lest they be like the Jews."

Nevertheless, the basic continuity in the Empire's general toleration of Judaism becomes doubly evident when one considers Justinian's contrasting treatment of the Samaritans. We shall see in another context how troublesome these sectarians, after their great religious revival under Baba Rabba, had become to the Byzantine administration. Justinian thought that he could settle the problem by a sleight of hand. By declaring the Samaritans a Christian rather than a Jewish sect, in 529 he removed from under their legal status whatever props had been lent them by their traditional toleration as adherents of the Jewish faith, long recognized as a religio licita. Not only was their temple on Gerizim to be permanently replaced by a church, but their synagogues were to be destroyed everywhere. In the subsequent legislation, too, their faith appears as merely part and parcel of the Christian heretical movements. While heresies were much too widespread throughout the empire and embraced too large and influential segments in the population to be placed under the sanction of capital punishment as they later were in Western laws, the very continuity of existence of the Samaritan denomination was now severely threatened.

As before, the imperial masters were mainly concerned with the protection of the dominant faith against the inroads of Jews and Judaism. For this reason they readily approved of the various anti-Jewish canons adopted by Church councils, often convoked by themselves. Ironically, however, they allowed their general legislation to become deeply permeated with the spirit of canon law. They thus unwittingly injected many Jewish legal concepts into the ancient legal heritage of pagan Rome. Conversion of a Christian to the Jewish faith still was severely prohibited, though characteristically not punishable by death, but merely by exile and confiscation of property. On the other hand, to encourage conversion from Judaism, baptism of children with the consent of either parent was declared valid. The inheritance rights of converts were protected against discriminatory testamentary provisions by angry parents. Outright assaults on Jewish converts actually carried the extreme penalty. Intermarriage still was strictly prohibited, except in cases of previous conversion of the Jewish mate to Christianity. Of course, neither the Byzantine state nor Church was interested in racial origins. Even clerics and their sons could marry converted Jewesses, according to a canon adopted at the Council of Chalcedon.

Jews could not legally erect new synagogues, but, at least outside the province of Africa, they were allowed to maintain their old houses of worship. There probably were innumerable bureaucratic chicaneries which made extremely awkward the maintenance of even older synagogues in a state of good repair. That is perhaps why an earthquake in Laodicaea caused the collapse of all synagogues while all churches survived, if we are to believe a contemporary report which bears the earmarks of a miracle tale. Undoubtedly synagogues suffered from extralegal expropriation at times, although we hear less frequently of mob violence on this score. On the other hand, many disabilities were doubtless mollified by such vested Christian interests as those of the Church of Amida and the usual douceurs offered to highly receptive Byzantine officials.

More important, and in many ways entirely unprecedented, was Justinian's interference in inner Jewish religious and communal affairs. He evidently believed, with Theodosius II, in the therapeutic power of the law "to bring them [the Jews] back to sanity." Himself the author of three controversial tracts, he was a "theological amateur", constantly awake also to the religious controversies among the sectarian groups. Without clearly spelling out the principle, reiterated by later medieval inquisitors, he arrogated to his caesaropapist office the power of defining the proper bounds of heterodoxy within the Jewish community as well. He, therefore, not only passed over in silence the ancient immunities granted by the older Roman laws to synagogue officials, but also futilely tried to safeguard the uniform observance of the orthodox Easter among his Christian subjects by forcing the Jews to postpone their Passover celebration until after the Christian holiday (543). More significantly, he believed that regulation of higher Jewish education might serve his centralizing and ecclesiastical aims equally as well as had his transfer of the famous law school from Beirut to Constantinople and his closing down of the still more renowned philosophic academy in Athens. The latter, incidentally, had included among its latest leading members, two Jews or Samaritans, Domninus and Marinus.

In his much-debated Novella 146 enacted in 553, Justinian laid down the law concerning certain controversial subjects of the Jewish credo and ritual. That he was instigated to this extraordinary measure by the ever turbulent Jewish factions of Constantinople doubtless made imperial intervention doubly effective. Evidently but a small minority in that overcrowded metropolis which increasingly became the heart of the empire, Jews were quite early segregated in a quarter of their own established not by law but by mutual consent. Nevertheless they managed to make their voices heard in imperial circles. When Belisarius brought back from his western campaigns the seven-branched candelabrum and other Roman trophies from the Temple of Jerusalem-he had captured them from the Vandals who had taken them to Africa after their sack of Rome-a Jew predicted that the presence of these relics would bring bad luck to any locality other than Jerusalem. The superstitious emperor required only this hint to decide to transfer the sacred objects back to the Holy City. At times Constantinople Jewry even dared to stage riots of its own.

In the prolix style so characteristic of his Novellae, in contrast to the succinct and pithy formulas taken over from the ancient legislators in his Digest and Code, Justinian informed Areobindas, and, through him, all provincial governors, of the complaints which had reached him from the Jewish community about a controversy raging in its ranks with respect to the reading of Scripture. While the Constantinople elders insisted upon the recitation of the weekly lesson in Hebrew only, a dissident group wished to follow such readings, or possibly even replace them entirely, by the recitation of a Greek version. This limited debate, with either party doubtless invoking older precedents, gave the emperor the opportunity to broaden the scope of his intervention.

Wherever there is a Hebrew congregation [he decreed] those who wish it may, in their synagogues, read the sacred books to those who are present in Greek, or even Latin, or any other tongue.... Those who use Greek shall use the text of the seventy interpreters, which is the most accurate translation, . . . but that we may not seem to be forbidding all other texts we allow the use of that of Aquila, though he was not of their people, ancl his translation differs not slightly from that of the Septuagint.
But the Mishnah, or as they call it the second tradition [deuterosin], we prohibit entirely. For it is not part of the sacred books, nor is it handed down by divine inspiration through the prophets, but the handiwork of man, speaking only of earthly things, and having nothing of the divine in it....
If any among them seek to introduce impious vanities, denying the resurrection and the judgment, or the work of God, or that angels are part of creation, we require them everywhere to be expelled forthwith; that no backslider raise his impious voice to contradict the evident purpose of God. Those who utter such sentiments shall be put to death and thereby the Jewish people shall be purged of the errors which they introduced.

Characteristically, Justinian put only the radical heresies under the sanction of the extreme penalty. Disobedience toward the other provisions of the Novella was to be punished less severely. For example, the Jewish "elders, archipherekitai and presbyters, and those called magistrates" who would dare to prevent the worshipers from reciting Scripture in translation, were threatened only with corporal punishment and the confiscation of their property. Nor did Justinian try to conceal his basically missionary aims. In his preamble he clearly stated that he expected the Jews not to confine themselves to the letter of Scripture, "but they should also devote their attention to those sacred prophecies that are hidden from them, and which announce the mighty Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." So important was this objective that the emperor was prepared to overlook his general diffidence toward translations which made him insist upon the exclusive validity of the official Latin and Greek versions of his Code. It is small wonder then, that, generally distrusting commentaries, the annexing of which to his Code he had forbidden in a special decree, he was doubly opposed to the Jewish "second Torah."

Compared with this far-reaching infringement of Jewish religious autonomy, Justinian's renewal of the maxim that the Jewish community should control the market prices among Jews indicated that, despite the emperor's silence on this score, Judaism still was a religio licita, and that its adherents still enjoyed many rights refused to Christian heretics. Justinian and his legal advisers, headed by Trebonian, evidently exercised considerable restraint in changing the long-established legal status of the Jewish minority. They realized that the modus vivendi established by Theodosius II and his predecessors, which had proved sufficiently acceptable to both sides to obviate the necessity of any major legislation between 439 and 527, could not be disturbed without unbalancing the rather tenuous relationships. That is why they took over more than a score of provisions from the Theodosian Code and incorporated them, with but minor modifications, into the new Corpus. True, even the omission of a single word could have serious juridical connotations. For example, by deleting the word non before ad superstitionem eorum . . . pertinent in the law of 398, Justinian's advisers clearly subjected Jewish religious affairs, too to the jurisdiction of state courts. This intent was fully borne out by the emperor's far-reaching Novella. But such intentional, substantive alterations were relatively rare. If Trebonian and his collaborators omitted some thirty other regulations, the reason was more often technically legalistic (elimination of repetitions or outworn qualifications) than the reflection of intent to establish a new legal status.

Omission of the general principle of Jewish toleration might have had serious consequences if the imperial administration had wished to extend its intolerant decrees from newly conquered Africa to the other provinces. Somewhat later, as we shall see, Byzantine emperors repeatedly made use of their legal prerogative of completely outlawing Judaism in their realm. Under Justinian, however, even the African prohibition extended outside Borion only to the domain of public worship. The emperor and his advisers doubtless knew how tenuous was the Christian faith of the relatively few and more easily controlled Samaritans, who had embraced Christianity under duress. Not long thereafter the author of the Chronicon Paschale bitterly commented that many of them "to the present day profess either religion. When they face strict governors, they publicly behave as Christians in a perfidious and misleading way. But, encouraged by the weakness and indulgence of avaricious governors, the Samaritans turn into as many haters of Christians and pretend as if they knew nothing about Christianity. By bribing the governors, they even consider it permissible to samaritize [publicly]." Clearly, with the vast extension of the Jewish dispersion and the constant changes in local law enforcement agents, close supervision of the orthodoxy of unwilling Jewish converts must have appeared utterly hopeless. That is probably why no Roman lawgiver of the period dared to classify a relapse of a Jewish convert to his ancestral faith as outright apostasy-a legal doctrine which was to play so much havoc with Jewish life under western Christendom. The Byzantine administration continued to encourage voluntary conversion, and, like its predecessors, tried to tempt pagan slaves of Jews to secure freedom through baptism. After the conquest of North Africa it made a special effort to persuade the Arian slaves there to turn Orthodox by promising them freedom, even if their Jewish masters were likewise to become Christian. To secure execution, Justinian exceptionally placed the operation of this law under the direct supervision of ecclesiastical authorities, and threatened lawbreakers with capital punishment. FIsewhere he was satisfied with the imposition of a heavy fine of thirty pounds, doubtless a reminiscence of the slave's valuation at thirty shekels in the Bible.

Despite Justinian's powerful and, on the whole, prosperous regime, the feeling that the end of an era, perhaps of the world, was approaching persisted among the Christians, and even more strongly among the Jews. The fall of Western Rome had left an indelible imprint on the Mediterranean peoples. St. Jerome was not alone in mourning "the mother of nations [which] had also become their tomb" and in viewing the destruction as a realization of the ancient apocalyptic visions of Daniel and the Sibylline poets. The restoration of Byzantine rule over parts of Italy by Belisarius' armies did not completely wipe out that impression. Christian chronology reinforced both the hopes for millennial redemption and the fears of the preceding disasters which, according to the old lore, were to accompany the appearance of the Anti-christ. We shall see that, for reasons nurtured by Jewish messianic speculations, the Christian writers beginning with Julius Africanus (2d cent.) had placed the appearance of Jesus in the middle of the sixth millennium since the world's creation. Riding roughshod over Jewish objections, Christian experts merely argued as to whether the incarnation had taken place in 5490 anno mundi, according to the "Alexandrian," or in 5509 A.M. (since Heraclius 5508 A.M.), according to the "Byzantine" computation. In any case the sixth millennium, and with it the duration of the world corresponding to the six days of Creation, was drawing to a close shortly before, or after, 500 C.E. Even though the crucial reign of Anastasius had passed without any major catastrophies and was soon followed by the "glorious" days of Justinian, neither the fervent messianic hopes, nor the deep apprehensions, had lost their force.

While writers of the sixth century, learning from the mistakes of their predecessors, were less definitive concerning the actual date of the second coming of Christ, popular expectations received new nourishment from an extraordinary series of elementary disasters which befell the Byzantine world during the reign of Justinian. Apart from the appearance of a menacing comet, we are told by Barhebraeus on the basis of older sources, the sun darkened in 537 for eighteen months. During "that year," the Syrian chronicler added, "the fruits did not ripen, and the wine tasted like urine." In 544 there was a severe pestilence all over the empire, and many local inundations endangered especially the coastal areas of Phoenicia and Palestine. Time and again horror-stricken populations fled their houses during the recurrent earthquakes. One allegedly shook Constantinople for forty days. Nor were man-made disasters apt to contribute to the peace of mind of the masses. The picture drawn by the leading contemporary historian, Procopius, that "the whole earth was constantly drenched with human blood shed by both the Romans and practically all the barbarians," must have reinforced the feeling that such conditions could not last for ever.

If the Christian masses viewed these awesome events as messianic portents, how much more prepared were the minds of harassed Jewry to see in them signs of approaching redemption. Certainly those Jews who viewed the remnants of the ancient 105-foot Colossus of Rhodes, further destroyed by an earthquake in the days of Athanasius-one of them allegedly was to acquire these remnants as scrap iron from the Arabs in 653-could readily translate this shameful end of a glorified symbol of Gentile might into a messianic foreboding. That is why large segments of the populace were ready to follow any messianic pretender. It is almost unbelievable how many of these false messiahs, whether genuine ecstatics or ruthless careerists, from Moses of Crete in the fifth to Serenus- Severus in the eighth century, found immediate acceptance among the masses and little overt opposition on the part of the more sophisticated leaders. The contemporary revival of Jewish apocalyptic literature likewise testifies to this sudden upsurge of messianic hopes. We shall see how many of the newly created aggadic midrashim, though speaking in a lofty timeless verbiage, may confidently be dated to that period, shortly before and after the rise of Islam. One such aggadic apocalypse, especially, bearing the name of Elijah (Sefer Eliyahu or Pereq Eliyahu) has plausibly been attributed to the days of the emperors Phokas (602-10) and Heraclius (610-41). Through the haze of their mystic phraseology one can still sense the intensity of their authors' conviction that the great prophet and ultimate harbinger of the Messiah of the house of David would soon appear.

Sudden changes on the international scene added force to these extravagant hopes. Long inured to the idea, expressed by an ancient homilist, that God had divided the world between Christianity and Zoroastrianism (or later between Christianity and Islam) "only in order to preserve Israel," Jews shuddered at the thought of the Persian Empire crumbling before the onslaught of the Byzantine armies, or else becoming dependent on Byzantium In some other way. The sixth century had started with a thirty years' war (502-32) which, despite formal and informal truces lasted through the reign of the "brothers" Justin and Kavadh I and was not terminated until after Kavadh's death in 532. Justinian, to whom Kavadh had written in a characteristic letter, "Kavadh, king of kings and lord of the Eastern sun, to Flavius Justinian Caesar, lord of the Western moon," secured peace by the payment of regular tribute to the Eastern neighbor, so as to obtain a free hand for the reconquest of the Western Empire. However, the uneasy peace was often interrupted by raids of Persians or their Arab vassals, at times extending all the way to Antioch. It was against this background that Patriarch Severus informed Theodosius of Alexandria of his writing the letter "under the fear of the Jews." More significantly, if we are to believe the contemporary chronicler, Malalas, the Samaritans once sent a delegation to the king of Persia (Kavadh, or more likely Khosroe I), urging him to resume the war with Byzantium and allegedly promising to aid him with an auxiliary force.

All such hopes seemed to be dashed when, in 562, Justinian concluded with Persia a peace treaty for fifty years. Although that treaty was broken within ten years by Justin II, who by his refusal to cononue paying the tribute provoked Khosroe I to invade both Armenia and Cappadocia, the Persians were defeated and had to withdraw in 575. Fifteen years later Khosroe II, faced by an internal uprising led by Bahram Tshubin, escaped to Byzantium and, with the aid of Emperor Maurice, his adoptive "father," reconquered his country. Until the end of Maurice's regime (602), the political entente between the two emperors, as well as domestic pressures, made any expectation of Persian help to the suffering Jews of the Byzantine Empire entirely illusory. In fact, when Maurice's relative, Domitian, entered Melitene in Armenia, he forced the Jews and Samaritans of that city, or perhaps the entire province, to accept Christianity. The Egyptian chronicler, John of Nikiu, to whom we owe this information, complained, however, of the insincerity of these new converts, as well as of Domitian's obstinacy in compelling the Christian clergy to admit them to ecclesiastical functions.

By a sudden reversal, however, a new war started almost immediately after the assassination of Maurice in 602. Claiming that he felt obliged to avenge the death of his "father," Khosroe II resumed the hostilities. At first he merely sought to reconquer the territories voluntarily ceded in 592. But, encountering little Byzantine resistance, his armies gradually occupied all of western Asia and ultimately penetrated Egypt. They thus momentarily reestablished the boundaries of the ancient Achaemenid Empire. After the conquest of Chalcedon in 610, and again in 626 when they were aided by an Avar invasion of Byzantium's Balkan possessions from the north, Persian troops seriously threatened Constantinople, whose conquest might have ended Byzantine rule nine centuries before the Turkish occupation. Unused to major naval warfare, however, the Persians neglected to build up maritime support for their invasions. As often happened in history, naval power ultimately won out. Heraclius, who had fought ineffectively since his accession to the imperial throne in 610, transferred a sizable army to the eastern shores of the Black Sea and, with the aid of Caucasian tribes including the Khazars, attacked the Persian armies from their rear. After the loss of Ctesiphon, Khosroe's enlarged empire collapsed more speedily than it had been built up, and eventually (in 628) the king of kings himself lost his life at the hand of Persian assassins.

During that crucial quarter century (604-30) Jews took an active part in abetting the Persian campaigns. Their vivid expectations of the approaching redemption are well illustrated by the aforementioned Elijah Apocalypse. Quoting, as was customary, some of the recognized ancient authorities, the homilist betrayed his messianic objective through transparent allusions to the various names of the "last king of Persia." Apart from the traditional name Armilus, the equivalent of the Antichrist in Christian terminology that monarch was called Cyrus or Artaxerxes, an obvious reference to those Achaemenid kings who had helped rebuild the Second Commonwealth, or, even more specifically and definitively, hakhasra (in one version Khosri), to contemporary readers doubtless a clear enough reference to Khosroe II. That "last king" was to "go up to Rome for three years in succession." He also was to defeat three heroes descending from the sea to meet him-an allusion to the landing of Byzantine troops as long as the sea lanes were controlled by the western Empire, after the severance of land communications with Palestine and following the conquest of Chalcedon and Antioch-including a king "the lowest among kings, son of a slave girl [Phokas]." Of course, we must discount many reports about Jewish "treacheries" and "atrocities" in the Christian chronicles of that or a later period. But we need not doubt that Jews generally welcomed the Iranian invaders as liberators from the hostility and heavy yoke of Justinian's successors. In 610 they staged a sanguinary riot in Antioch, killed the patriarch, and so greatly weakened the city's defenses that it surrendered almost without resistance to the approaching Persians (611). Antiochian Jews thus avenged the patriarch's policy of repression which, ever since his return to the patriarchal see in 593, had also led to the massacre of Monophysites in Edessa and forced conversions of pagans. Jews had an additional score to settle for the humiliating punishment meted out to their entire community for the transgression of a single coreligionist by Emperor Maurice in 592-93. Possibly in reprisal Phokas ordered his prefect Georgios forcibly to convert Jews not only in Antioch, but also in Palestine and Alexandria, though not in the European provinces (610).

In 610, another chronicler reports, the 4,000 Jews inhabiting Tyre staged a rebellion and called to their assistance a Jewish force of 20,000 men assembled from Palestine, Damascus, and Cyprus. The latter island evidently now again embraced a sizable Jewish community in defiance of Trajan's sharp outlawry of Judaism half a millennium earlier, which decree had never been formally revoked. Whatever we think of the accuracy of the chronicler's figures, the city, forewarned, closed its gates and treated the local Jews as hostages. For every church outside its walls destroyed by the Jews, we are told, one hundred Jewish captives were executed, and their heads thrown across the walls to the besiegers. It seems true, in any case, that this strategically located natural fortress, as frequently before in its long and checkered history, withstood the Jewish siege and that its local Jewish community suffered severely.

Palestine, understandably enough, was the main scene of Persian-Jewish collaboration. Far beyond its military and economic importance that province had lovingly been cultivated by Christian emperors ever since Constantine and his mother Helena. Its loss to "infidels" was now deeply mourned throughout the Christian world. Although apparently reduced to but 10-15 percent of the population, Palestinian Jews still were sufficiently numerous and concentrated, particularly in the northern districts, to make their weight felt in the country's affairs. Most of their thirty-one rural and twelve urban settlements recorded in that period were located in Galilee, on the military route leading from Damascus, which the Persians occupied in 611, to Palestine's provincial capital of Caesarea. The Jewish communities were effectively led by the Tiberian elders, whose intellectual prowess, buttressed by the prestige of the Davidic descent of the successors of Mar Zutra III, made up for the lack of imperial recognition since the abolition of the patriarchate. Some Jews had also long defied the imperial prohibition and settled in Jerusalem. They were sufficiently numerous in the Holy City for the local governor to force them to accept baptism en masse in 607, at a time when the storm was slowly gathering momentum.

Like the Persians, the Jews owed their military successes to a large extent to the inner divisions in the Christian population. The old ecclesiastical rivalry between Jerusalem and Caesarea, to be sure, had given way to the former's recognized supremacy. Owing to the machinations of Bishop Juvenal in the era of the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, his see in Jerusalem was raised to a patriarchate, fifth in rank after those of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch. Monophysitism, too, and other sectarian movements were far less widespread in the Holy Land than in Egypt or Syria. Nevertheless, the sharp theological controversies, nurtured by the frequent reversals of imperial policies, sharply divided also the Palestinians. Even the Orthodox of the Holy Land repudiated the new compromise formulas emanating from Constantinople and known in Christian theology as monenergism and monotheletism. Although economically the country benefited greatly from the inpouring of pilgrims and pious donations, Byzantine maladministration created conditions favorable to constant breaches of public order and even to organized highway robbery. Among the local gangsters was Jacob, son of Tanumas (Tanhuma), who, after his forced conversion to Christianity, left behind an interesting controversial tract interspersed with autobiographical data. If we are to believe him, he constantly switched his allegiance from the "Blues" to the "Greens," so long as the internecine struggles between these parties gave him the opportunity of killing Christians.

Hearing of the irresistible march of Persian troops, the Palestinian Jews were perfectly convinced that these were signs of the approaching Messiah. Already in the reign of Maurice a dream of the head of the academy in Tiberias about the Messiah's birth within eight years had found widespread credence. Unfortunately, Persia's military campaign in the Holy Land and the Jewish part therein have been described only on the basis of hostile Christian reports. The only Jewish source which seems to shed some light on the events during that final armed uprising of Palestinian Jewry against their Roman masters, the apocalyptic Book of Zerubbabel, was not only composed after the suppression of that revolt, but, by its very nature, it is too vague and obscure to enable us to reconstruct any significant details.

At any rate it appears that the Jewish communities around Tiberias, led by the wealthy and learned Benjamin, opened the road for the Persian conquest of the administrative capital of Caesarea. When the Persians finally turned toward Jerusalem, the Jews seem to have obtained from them a formal promise that the city would be handed over to Jewish rule. After a twenty-day siege the Holy City surrendered (614). Following their old practice, the Persians deported some 37,000 Christian inhabitants led by Patriarch Zechariah. As a symbol of their great victory they carried away the True Cross to Ctesiphon. The impression this booty made on all of Christendom may easily be gauged from the fact that only a few decades before the Frankish princess, Radegund, had "sent clerics into the East to procure wood of the True Cross." Many more thousand Christian captives were sold to the Jews, who allegedly slew all those who refused to adopt Judaism. More circumspectly, Eutychius spoke of "Jews together with the Persians killing innumerable Christians." That, however, Persians rather than Jews were responsible for the carnage appears evident from their failure to bury the corpses. This neglect, which gave the opportunity to a saintly Christian, Thomas, and his associates to perform their charitable burial in the cemetery of Mamilla, ran counter to accepted Jewish practice, which had long demanded the speedy burial even of executed criminals. But it accorded fully with the Zoroastrian reluctance to "defile" the earth by unclean corpses. So important was this issue even to Persian commanders of conquered provinces that, after his conquest of Armenian Iberia, Kavadh had expressly written a prohibition of burying the dead into the treaty of surrender. The Iberians' ensuing appeal for help in 527 had led, according to Procopius, to the outbreak of the Perso-Byzantine hostilities.

Acting in accordance with a previous agreement, the Persian general, Romizanes, surnamed Shahrabaz (the Shah's wild boar), entrusted the Jews with the administration of the Holy City. An unnamed leader quickly assumed the name of Nehemiah; he seems even to have attempted the restoration of Jewish sacrificial worship. Many Jews undoubtedly saw in these events a repetition of the reestablishment of a Jewish commonwealth by Cyrus and Darius, and behaved as rulers of city and country. After three years the Persians realized, however, that the Jews expected from them more than they were willing to concede. On second thought they also must have felt that the aid extended to them by the small Jewish minority could not in the long run compensate them for the animosity of the Christian majority, sectarian as well as orthodox, whose loyalty toward Byzantium could otherwise be easily undermined. We do not know of the actual incident which led to the breach between the allies, but about 617 the Persians suddenly suppressed the Jewish regime in Jerusalem, forbade Jews to settle within a three-mile radius from the city, and deported a number of obstreperous leaders.

Even more severe were the measures taken by the returning Byzantines in 629-30. Heraclius, to be sure, was statesmanlike enougll to wish to pacify the restless Asiatic provinces, rather than to exacerbate the existing sectarian conflicts. When the Jews of the important fortress of Edessa-continued to resist after the evacuation of the Persian troops, the emperor personally stayed the hand of his brother Theodorus, commander of the besieging army, and proclaimed amnesty for the Jewish resisters (628). Similarly upon arrival in Tiberias, where he was lavishly entertained by Benjamin he solemnly promised the Jews to let bygones be bygones. Doubtless familiar with the atrocity tales circulated by the Church, he considered them but the natural concomitant to the contemporary methods of warfare, this time operating in reverse. After his entry into Jerusalem, however, he yielded to the entreaties of the ecclesiastical leaders, whom he was seeking to placate also by retrieving the True Cross from the Persians. The Church proclaimed a special "fast of Heraclius" (celebrated for centuries thereafter in Coptic churches) to secure for the emperor expiation for the breach of his oath. This reversal opened the gate to formal prosecutions of individual Jews implicated in the previous attacks on Christians, as well as to mass lynchings.

Thus ended the last attempt of Palestinian Jewry to secure political independence, or at least autonomy under Persian suzerainty and perhaps also to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem. The ensuing disillusionment led to the conversion of many Jews, including Benjamin. In the other provinces of the decaying empire, the repercussions seem to have been no less serious. We know very little about Egyptian Jewry of the period. But we get a glimpse of its feeling of frustration and the Christian missionary pressures as early as 622, when we learn that the entire community of 375 Jews of Tumai voluntarily accepted baptism.

More far-reaching was the realization in imperial circles that the long downtrodden and apparently emasculated Jewish minority still was a cohesive and, militarily as well as politically far from negligible entity. When immediately thereafter the Musiim Arabs appeared on the borders of both belligerent countries, sweeping away all organized resistance, Heraclius and his advisers became panicky. In 632-35 they tried to stem the tide by reestablishing religious uniformity throughout the empire by various monenergistic compromise formulas which they forced through in Armenia and Egypt. In collaboration with Pope Honorius, Heraclius even forbade his subjects to discuss theological issues. Only the Jews seemed to remain outside the now united church. At that time (632) the emperor decided to force all Jews, too, to accept baptism.

This was a fateful decision indeed. Ever since Cyril of Alexandria's mob action had forced most Jews out of the Egyptian metropolis, a few local attempts had been made, as we recall, to outlaw Judaism. But that action, or even the more formal legal prohibitions enacted with respect to Borion, Melitene, or Jerusalem, could not compare with such a universal and abrupt breach in the traditional coexistence of the two faiths established by the Christian Empire. This new method of settling the ancient Judeo- Christian controversy was to have immediate and far-reaching repercussions under western Christendom as well. Despite its evident failure in execution, it also served as a dramatic precedent to be followed by Heraclius' successors on the Byzantine throne and many western Christian potentates. It is small wonder, then, that at Heraclius' death in 641, the Jews of Constantinople actively participated in a street riot against his widow and son. According to a later but well-informed chronicler, on that occasion they stormed Christendom's leading cathedral.

From these western countries, whose importance for Jewish history was to unfold in the following centuries, we must return east to the main center of pre-Islamic Jewish life, Sassanian Persia. Although no longer the scene of that great intellectual activity which in the preceding generations had brought forth the monumental achievement of the Babylonian Talmud, the Euphrates Valley and the other provinces of the Sassanian empire still harbored many populous and affluent Jewish settlements, which in the aggregate may possibly have equaled the Jewish population in the rest of the world. Regrettably, however, with the completion of the Talmud, our main sources of information stemming from the Jewish academies themselves are reduced to a few faint echoes preserved in the editorial notes of the final redactors of the Talmud, the so-called Saboraim (Reasoners). We also possess many homiletic utterances of uncertain date and provenance, some of which probably originated in that period. Nor are the Persian sources sufficiently numerous or particularly informative. Even in so far as they are reflected through Byzantine contemporaries (for instance, Agathias Scholasticus, who evidently had at his disposal some Persian archives) or Muslim successors, they rarely mention Jews.

Perhaps this silence may be largely attributed to the fact that, at least externally, there was little change in the status of the Jewish minority. All the fundamental decisions had been made in the first generations after the establishment of the Persian Empire under Ardashir I and Shapur I. These arrangements survived, as we recall, even the major crisis of the transformation of the Roman Empire, Persia's hereditary enemy, into a Christian country, whose expansive religion reinforced its imperial ambitions.

True, the fifth century had ended on a threatening note: the successive execution of two exilarchs. The anti-Jewish riots in Isfahan, under Peroz (459-84), sparked by uncontrolled rumors of the murder of two Zoroastrian priests by Jews, demonstrated from another angle the insecurity of Jewish life in the face of royal or popular whims. On this occasion that ancient Jewish community (the city itself was allegedly founded by Palestinian exiles in the days of Nebukadrezzar), in which, according to a geonic source, Rab had wished to found his academy, suffered severely. Half of the Jewish population, we are told, was executed by the king, and the children forcibly brought up as Zoroastrians (472). Not long thereafter the Mazdakite movement, temporarily enjoying royal support, doubtless affected to some extent the religious minorities, too. However, the general status of the Jews seems to have remained unaltered. Much has been made, in both the almost exclusively anti-Mazdakite sources and modern investigations, of the Mazdakite preachment of the community of women, as well as of goods. However, one must not overlook the Mazdakite insistence on the woman's free consent. In the case of the Zoroastrian majority, this actually meant betterment of status for the women, since, according to the previous laws, any man had been entitled to give away to another his wife for free use, temporary or permanent, without the wife's approval. Probably few Jewish or Christian women assented to such promiscuity which, in their community, would not only expose them to public contumely, but also deprive them of all the legal safeguards for their married state. With their utopian brand of communism, moreover, Zaradusht, the founder, and Mazdak, the main propagator of the movement, hoped to achieve their aims without the use of force. They specifically prohibited killing for religious, or any other reasons, which must have further reduced the pressure on the religious minorities . wishing to ptlrsue their accustomed ways of living. Nor is there any evidence that Kavadh I (488-531), even in the early stages of his support of the Mazdakite movement, had gone beyond the distribution of the property of some of the nobles. Apparently he never tried to enforce the community of women even among the Persians. The large-scale riots of the liberated peasantry and attacks on the noble estates probably affected Jews more by the anarchy they generated than by direct victimization of Jewish landowners.

Whatever difficulties the Jews encountered during the long reign of Kavadh did not arise because of their Jewishness. In fact, we are told that, on one occasion, the king asked his Byzantine foes for a truce in the campaign so as to enable the Jewish combatants freely to observe their Passover festival. The long-established Jewish status evidently remained unimpaired also during the remainder of the Sassanian regime, especially under Khosroe I (who served as coregent from 513, and as sole "king of kings" from until his death in 579), Hormizd IV (579-90), and Khosroe II (590- 628). The first Khosroe, one of the greatest Persian rulers known as Anushirvan (Anoshake-Ravan, or Of the Immortal Soul), was also given the attribute "Just" by a grateful posterity. While often as cruel as any other Persian king in his domestic and foreign conflicts and known, in particular, for his ruthless destruction of Antioch in 540, he was prepared to protect the religious rights of his Jewish and Christian subjects. His fiscal reforms probably also accrued to the ultimate benefit of the religious minorities. By imposing a uniform head and land tax on the entire population, excepting the privileged three upper estates, the king distributed the burden somewhat more equitably. Probably Jews and Christians still contributed more than their proportionate share to the Treasury. But it is likely that the discrepancy was no longer as glaring as when the Zoroastrians, perhaps then fewer in number, were largely exempt from direct payments to the government, though not to their oppressive landlords. By thus broadening greatly the tax base, Khosroe enabled his successors to increase the state's fiscal revenue to some $170 million in 607. By 626 the state's reserve grew to some $460 million, notwithstanding the protracted and long-successful western campaign of Khosroe II along the Mediterranean shores. Rather than increasing the pressure on Christians and Jews, as is often assumed, the fiscal reform of Khosroe I must have limited to some extent the arbitrary methods of tax gathering among the minorities as well.

Evidently, Jews outside the Persian Empire did not consider Khosroe an anti-Jewish monarch. On one occasion, we are told by Theophanes, the Samaritans of Palestine sent to him a delegation trying to persuade him to desist from an intended peace treaty with Justinian. The Samaritans offered, together with the Jews, to furnish a contingent of 50,000 men to the Persian army. Although the date of these negotiations is uncertain and the continuator of Malalas actually ascribed them to Kavadh, the general strategic situation seems to presuppose a sufficient proximity of Persian troops for this Samaritan-Jewish aid to be effective in any way. Only Khosroe's campaign of 540, which had brought Persian troops to northern Syria, seems to have created such an opportunity.

Obviously, the sectarian controversies in the Byzantine Empire contributed to the internecine strife in Persia among the Christian sects, as well as between Christians and Jews. Rather than cooperating in the face of the common danger, these minority groups often neutralized one another's forces by mutual recrimination, even outright hostilities. An Eastern Christian chronicler knew of no greater praise that he could bestow on Bishop Rabbula of Edessa (411-35), than reporting that the bishop had eliminated from his diocese all Jews, Arians, Marcionites, Manichaeans, and various gnostic groups, including one bearing the noteworthy name of Sadduceans.

Contemporary martyrologies were likewise filled with anti-Jewish recriminations. We are told, for example, that Jews joined the Persian magi in trying to reconvert a Persian girl, Shirin, who at the age of eighteen had embraced Christianity-a capital crime under the laws of Persia. In contrast thereto the official Persian policy stood out as a shining example of religious toleration. Khosroe's son and successor, Honnizd, reputedly countered the tirades of his fanatical Zoroastrian councilors with this eloquent declaration:

"Just as our royal throne cannot be supported solely by its front legs without its legs in the rear, so could our government not subsist and remain assured if weprovoked against us the revolt of the Christians and the adherents of other religions who do not share our faith. Stop attacking the Christians, therefore, but rather with great zeal perform good works. In this way the Christians and the adherents of the other religions will observe them. They will praise you and feel attracted toward your faith."

Hormizd's death, followed by a long civil war, and Khostroe II's subsequent reign belong to the stormiest periods of Near Eastern Jewish history. They revealed both the insecurity of Jewish life in a rapidly changing world, and the power and tenacity of the Jewish communities under Persia and Byzantium. To speak of the sixth century as a period of exhaustion of the Jewish people was justified only at a time when Jewish history was equated with the history of Jewish letters, and it was assumed (erroneously) that the so-called Saboraic period was one of nearly complete intellectual stagnation.

From the outset Khosroe II faced strong opposition. After the assassination of Hormizd, apparently accomplished with Khosroe's connivance, the victorious general who had led the revolt, Bahram Tshubin, succeeded in ousting the young king and taking his place. Only the support of a Byzantine army reestablished Khosroe on the throne in Ctesiphon. For about a year (590-91), however, Bahram held sway over all Persian provinces. The Jews had the less reason to oppose him, as they could expect little consideration from a ruler supported by their Byzantine oppressors. Had not, largely for the same reason, the Nestorian catholicos, Ishoyabh, refused to accompany Khosroe into his Byzantine exile, and subsequently to go out to meet him upon his return at the head of the Byzantine troops? Not surprisingly, the Jews had to pay a high price for betting on the wrong pretender. We recall the fate of the Jewish community of Melitene in Armenia, forced to accept baptism by the revengeful conquerors. On arrival at the gates of New Antioch, a suburb of Ctesiphon largely populated by Christian captives of 540, the Persian general Mhebodh appealed to the inhabitants in the name of Christianity and persuaded them to deliver to him Bahram's partisans. On the sixth day, we are informed by the nearly contemporary chronicler, Theophylactus Simocatta, Christians staged a regular anti-Jewish pogrom in Mahoza, another component city of the Persian capital. This massacre inspired the chronicler to a diatribe, characteristic of the prevailing attitude of the Near Eastern Christians toward their Jewish neighbors. Jews had settled in Persian lands, Theophylactus declared, after the burning of their Temple by Vespasian.

"Here they acquired great riches. Hence [!] they were easily disposed to staging seditious movements and inflaming the Persian peoples with the love of innovations. This is namely a perverse nation, cultivating a minimum of loyalty; desirous of tumults, tyrannical and forgetful of friendships; fanatical and envious; because of hatred it condones nothing and is irreconcilable."

In this way the Byzantine conquest and Persian reconquest of Ctesiphon led to the destruction of the ancient Jewish community of Mahoza, which, though sometimes condemned by the ancient rabbis because of its materialism, had for a time served as the seat of an important academy and apparently also of the exilarchate.

As soon as peace was reestablished, however, and Khosroe felt secure on his throne (in 591), he seems to have pursued a policy of pacification. He who outdid even his predecessors in the grandiloquence of his self-praise and called himself "an immortal man among the gods, and an illustrious god among men," did not indulge in petty, useless revenge. At least we possess no record of any further reprisals against the Jews. The academies of Sura and Pumbedita were allowed to continue their activities. After 602 the great Perso-Byzantine war found not only the Persian Jews, but also those of Palestine and other Byzantine provinces allied for a time with the Persian invaders.

We recall how quickly the Jews' messianic hopes were dashed, and how many grievances they had against their Persian allies. Those living in the interior of Persia were less deeply affected by these sudden changes in the fortunes of war. But in the embattled areas, they often felt the heel of the conqueror. After a futile defense of Edessa following its evacuation by Persian troops, the Jewish warriors were saved from bloody vengeance only by the chance appearance of one of their refugees before Heraclius himself. Many Edessene Jews, moreover, seem to have taken a hint from the emperor, and sought refuge among the neighboring Arab tribes. All Persian Jews were also able to observe from close range the influence of Khosroe's favorite Christian wife, Shirin (in a harem reputed to number three thousand wives and concubines), and of his fiscal agent, Yazed. Without suffering from any immediate new disabilities, they, too, must have become seriously concerned about these endless shifts and the general instability in their lives. However, they were not alone in this feeling of despondency over the deterioration in the politi,cal and social life of their country. Even a good Persian like Burzoe, Khosroe's chief medical officer, noted in his autobiography that, "our age, having become old and decrepit, may have a clear appearance, but in reality it is deeply disturbed." While praising the king to the sky, he emphasized that there was a complete reversal of all values, and that "domination has been transferred from the capable to the unfit. It is as if the world, drunken with joy, would say: I have concealed all that is good, and brought forth all that is bad." There was more than mere literary fiourish in these protestations. Evidently large segments of the non-Jewish population, too, looked forward to some major cataclysm which would put an end to that state of uninterrupted crisis.

Such a cataclysmic change was soon to come in the shape of the Arab conquest of Persia. The last king, Yazdegerd III, was assassinated in exile in 651 From that time the new world factor, the Arabs, began to affect deeply the destinies of the whole Jewish people.

In the seventh century Arab-Jewish relations already had a long history behind them. When Mohammed appeared as the prophet of a new religion, he found before him an Arab world, extending from the Yemen to Syria and Mesopotamia, densely interspersed with Jewish settlements, where ancient traditions, reaching back to the times before the separation of t]he Semitic nations, had been kept alive through steady contact. The spread of the Nabatean Arabs into southern and eastern Palestine and Babylonia had made the Arab a familiar figure in the Jewish mass settlements, just as the penetration of Jewish refugees, soldiers, and merchants into the Arabian Peninsula helped to acquaint even the remotest Bedouin tribesmen with "the people of the book."

Even leaving aside the now discredited theory of Midianite influences on the "nomadic ideals" of the Mosaic religion, there is no reason to doubt the immemorial ties which linked the ancient Israelites with their immediate southern neighbors. In fact, the first fully datable event of Israelitic history, the battle of Karkara (853-852 B.C.E.), involved among Aram's allies both King Ahab of Samaria and King Jindibu, the Arabian, with his 1,000 camels. Arab kings, mentioned by Jeremiah, began playing a greater role in the destinies of Palestine during the Second Commonwealth, as their regime had displaced that of Edomites in Petra, and had begun fanning out into Transjordan. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah and the works of Josephus are filled with references to petty Arab rulers, the Jewish historian no longer being able to distinguish them from the ancient Ammonites.

In one of its periodic revivals Transjordan, in particular, entered under Nabatean-Roman domination a period of economic and cultural prosperity, which, despite temporary relapses, was to last to the end of the first millennium. Rome's incorporation of Arabia into the imperial structure shortly after the fall of Jerusalem (105 C.E.) further intensified the contacts between the two peoples. About 358, finally, the entire area between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean was united with Palestine, probably for Christian as well as for administrative reasons, and thenceforth appeared in the records as the province of Palaestina Tertia. No less intensive were the interrelations between the Jews and their Arab neighbors in that vast no man's land which was allowed to persist in the Syrian desert as a buffer between Rome and Persia. Jewish communities existed particularly under the Lakhmids, Arab vassal princes of Sassanian Persia who, from the third century on, dominated a large area close to the great centers of Jewish life and learning in Babylonia. In the very Lakhmid capital, Hira, under King Imru al-Qais (whose extant epitaph dated 328 C.E. is a remarkable specimen of early Arabic epigraphy), R. Hamouna presided over an important Jewish academy of learning.

That the relations were not always friendly, lay in the nature of such expansive movements. In Palestine much energy had to be expended by the local rulers from Jehoram to the Herodians and. in the fourth century, by the Samaritan leader, Babba Raba, to keep off Arab invaders, while the Assyrians, Persians, and Romans used these local animosities to their own advantage. In Babylonia, too, the great city of Nehardea was so frequently exposed to raids by roving Arabs that R. Nahman specifically exempted the local Jews from the prohibition of carrying weapons on Sabbath. When earlier in the third century Palmyra-Tadmor, that Arab jewel of the desert, saved Imperial Rome by checking the triumphant march of Shapur I at a critical juncture, Babylonian Jewry had to part with the high messianic hopes aroused by the first successes of the Persian army. It was only a step from blaming the Palmyrenes for this failure to accusing them of having participated in the destruction of the Second, or even of the First Temple, and to R. Kahana's irate exclamation, "Israel is going to proclaim a festival on the day of Tadmor's destruction".

On the other hand, the Jewish legend ascribing to the sons of that oasis a descent from Solomon's slaves, captive Jewesses or Jewish bastards, reflects Babylonian Jewry's consciousness of the strange blood ties uniting it with this offshoot of the Arabian race. Among these Aramaic-speaking Arabs themselves a legend spread, and was later recorded by Muslim writers, that the city of Tadmor -which incidentally is mentioned in a cuneiform tablet before 1000 B.C.E.-had been built by jinns (demons) for Solomon. This was a hostile version of the biblical report that Solomon had "built Tadmor in the wilderness." Other legends (recorded by Malalas), claimed that Solomon had thus wished to commemorate David's victory over Goliath, and that during his campaign against Jerusalem, Nebukadrezzar first had to destroy Tadmor then occupied by a Jewish garrison. More significant historically is, as we recall, the great role played by Jews in that crossroad of caravan routes during the era of her great commercial prosperity in the second and third centuries. Although the vast majority of Palmyrenes had remained pagans, they dedicated more inscriptions to the "highest" god (Hypsistos) than to any other deity. The city suflered severely after the defeat of her overambitious Queen Zenobia, but many Jews continued to live and prosper there. As late as 1240 a French traveler, Rabbi Jacob, was shown there "a tower of David and very great and wondrous buildings built by the 'Anaqim [biblical giants] and of Pethuel."

Similarly, although Josephus is completely silent on this aspect of the problem, the temporary rise of a Jewish principality in the vicinity of Nehardea under the brothers Asinaeus and Anilaeus in the days of Tiberius, was doubtless facilitated by the disorganized conditions in that area concomitant with the infiltration of wandering Bedouins. In fact, the Jewish historian's consciously romanticizing description of this episode leaves one with the impression that the Parthian administration at that time toyed with the idea of creating, at its western borders a Jewish vassal principality of the kind later entrusted by the Sassanian kings to the Lakhmids. One wished that our sources were also more articulate about the interrelations, if any, between the new Arab arrivals and the converted Jewish dynasty of Adiabene or, later, between the short-lived Jewish state built by Mar Zutra II and its Lakhmid neighbors.

Mixtures of Jewish and Arab strains were still more pronounced in the Arabian mother country. Many centuries before Mohammed, Jews, partly of Jewish and partly of native stock, began to settle all over the Peninsula. We may leave in abeyance the question raised by widespread Arab legends connecting the first Jewish settlers with Moses' alleged banishment of some of his disobedient followers during his war with Amalek (an evident confusion with the subsequent conflict between Samuel and Saul over Agag the Amalekite), and with David's reputed military exploits in the vicinity of Medina. More serious is Torrey's attractive though as yet unproved, theory concerning the settlement of Jews in Teima in the days of Nabonidus. More recently recovered sources have confirmed the fact that the last king of Chaldea, a friend of Jews, had taken up residence in this northern Arabian oasis. From there he sent, for example, an Arab official, Temuda, to collect a large quantity of silver from Erech. The Babylonian Sin (moon) worship had penetrated at that time even into southern Arabia. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the suggestion that Nabonidus may have been preceded in Teima by Jewish refugees from the wars of Nebukadrezzar and by other foot-loose exiles who, as we know, were roaming in those years all over the Near East from Elephantine to Assyria in quest of new forms of Jewish living.

More definite is Josephus' report about Herod's 500 Jewish soldiers accompanying Aelius Gallus' ill-fated expedition to southern Arabia in 25-24 B.C.E. This contingent, like that of the Nabateans, was probably used to facilitate the expedition through its knowledge of roads and its contacts with the local population, rather than merely to augment Roman manpower. Be this as it may, the tombstone inscriptions of a Shubeit "Yehudaya" erected in Al-Hijr in 42 C.E. (or possibly 45 B.C.E.), that of one Simon in 307 (incidentally, the latest Nabatean inscription as yet discovered), and a number of inscribed grafitti are indubitable remnants of pre-Islamic Arab-Jewish life. That afterwards, up to the sixth century, the Jewish tribes altogether dominated Yathrib (Medina), has become clear through more recent investigations. Among some twenty Jewish tribes mentioned in later Arabic literature stand out the Aramaic-sounding Banu Zaghura. More important were the Banu Nadhir, Banu Quraiza and Banu Qainuqa', who, between them, occupied at one time fifty-nine strongholds and practically the entire fertile countryside. It was probably owing to these Jewish settlers that the city's ancient Egyptian name, Yathrib (Athribis), also recorded in Greek sources, was changed to the Hebrew-Aramaic Medina (city). Similarly Khaibar, another focal center of Jewish life in northern Arabia located some 60 miles north of Medina, may have owed its name to an adaptation of the Hebrew term, heber (association, here possibly league of communities), or some derivative of kabir (strong) as intimated by Yaqut. Other Jewish settlements, evidenced by more or less verifiable inscriptions or later traditions, included Dedan, Al-Hijr, Teima, Ablaq, central Arabian Yamama, Ta'if, and, possibly, Mecca. Some Jews, perhaps moving southward from Babylonia, also established themselves along the Arabian shores of the Persian Gulf, particularly Bahrein, famed in recent years for its great oil resources. In short, Werner Caskel is not guilty of an overstatement when he calls the Jews the main representatives of Nabatean culture in Hejaz after 3oo C.E. Citing two Nabatean inscriptions, he declares, "These are the beginnings of the Jewish population, which later occupied all the oases in the northwest including Medinah."

Flourishing settlements of this type irresistibly attracted the Bedouins from all over the Peninsula. Much as the latter glorified their freedom and independence from the sedentary ways of life, sooner or later they began viewing such agriculturally prosperous oases not only as fit objects for raids, but ultimately also as enviable sources of economic security. By slow infiltration several Arab tribes drifted into Medina and its vicinity, and were hospitably received by the Jewish farmers. By the sixth century, these new arrivals, steadily reinforced from the south and unified under an able leader, Malik ibn Ajlan, eventually prevailed over their hosts. Nevertheless, Mohammed still found vigorous Jewish tribes in and around that center of northern Arabia, possibly constituting the majority of the settled population. Of course, they were not all of Jewish extraction. In large part they were descended from Arab proselytes, as indicated, for example, in the remarkable story of the Banu Hishna in Teima. These arrivals "were prevented by the Jews," says Al-Bakri, "from entering their fort as long as they professed another religion, and only when they embraced Judaism were they admitted".

The early history of Jews in the prosperous districts of southern Arabia is likewise shrouded in darkness. Solomon's trade relations with Ophir (Zafar?) and his legendary connections with the Queen of Sheba merely show how far back Jewish acquaintance with the great civilization of Himyara extended. But the first reliable historical record of the entry of Jews into the South seems to be Josephus' narrative of the Jewish soldiers who had shared Aelius Gallus' disaster.

At any rate, we hear afterwards from a Christian writer (Philostorgius) that when the missionary Theophilus arrived in Himyara about the middle of the fourth century, he found there "not a small number of Jews," whose "accustomed fraud and malice" he had to silence. He and his imperial backers obviously resented, for political as well as religious reasons, the extensive Jewish proselytizing. At that time the campaigns of Shapur II had threatened to disrupt all land routes connecting Rome and Constantinople with the Far East. To salvage the empire's life line to India, as well as to build up a system of Roman satellite states as a perma nent threat to Persia's flank, Constantius embarked upon a policy of converting to Christianity the far-flung Arab settlements and their Ethiopian neighbors. More immediately successful in Ethiopia, where Egyptian influences combined with the presence of old Jewish communities had long paved the way for Christianity, his and his successors' missionary efforts led to the conversion of the northern Ghassanids and the establishment of Christian communities in Najran and elsewhere on the Peninsula proper.

Nonetheless, Judaism continued to gain even more ground. In a fifth-century inscription one Sahir, probably a convert, wrote, "Illessed and praised be the name of the Merciful, who is in Heaven, and Israel and its God, the Lord of Judah." Sahir also gave to one of his sons the good Jewish name, Meir. The impact of Judaism is also reflected by the monument erected by a powerful ruler in 449-50 and inscribed to a monotheistic Baal, "the Lord of Heaven and Earth," suggesting vestiges of the ancient Israelitic popular religion. Another inscription, recently recovered, speaks of a dedication to "the Lord, Him of Heaven, the greatest. . Of a dozen other overtly monotheistic inscriptions thus far uncovered, only two refer to Jesus and the Trinity, and both seem to have been left behind by foreign administrators. Absence of pagan formulations, even where such were in order, from numerous other inscriptions, attests at least to a strong negative influence of both Jews and Christians.

.More certain is the full adoption of Judaism by Dhu Nuwas (after 516). This Jewish king may have borne also the name of Marthad-ilan Ahsan and been the son or some other close relative of Ma'd-Karib Ya'fur, who is designated in an inscription of 516 as "King of Saba and Dhu-Raidan, and Hadhramaut, and Yamnat and their Arabs of Taud and Tihanat." The latter, and perhaps some of his ancestors, may already have professed Judaism of sorts. The political background of this conversion, namely the effort of these kings to erect through Judaism a dam against advancing Christianity, as well as Christian Abyssinia's punitive expedition to check this assertion of independence, indicates the complexity of the situation in which these ancestors of Yemenite Jewry found themselves, even before the rise of Islam. We need not take too literally the atrocity stories about Dhu Nuwas' treacherous extermination of the Christian community in Najran. Such stories could well serve as an excuse for Abyssinian intervention, preparations for which had been observed in the Abyssinian capital by Cosmas the Indicopleustes "at the beginning of Justin's reign," that is even before the first rumors of the attack on Najran could possibly have reached Africa. In fact, Dhu Nuwas' attack on the Christians of Najran and other communities seems to have taken place after 523, in the interval between two Abyssinian invasions. He may merely have retaliated for acts of treason committed by local Christians during the first invasion. Atrocity tales could also help to cover up treaty-breaking by the Abyssinians themselves, as well as serving the purposes of Christian mission on a par with other martyrologies. The fact that the various Eastern churches have commemorated the martyrdom of their Najran coreligionists on different dates (October 2, 20, 24, November 22, or December 31) seems to indicate that some probably minor local persecution was exaggerated into a large-scale suppression of all Christianity in the southern kingdom. Much of that martyrology is also written in a traditional, by then almost stereotype vein, as when a nine-year-old Christian girl was reputed to have spat in Dhu Nuwas' face and exclaimed, "May thy mouth be closed, Jew, killer of his Lord."

More significant are the international implications of this clash between the two monotheistic religions. According to Simeon of Beth Arsham, Bishop of the Persians, from whose letter we have iust quoted, "those Jews who are in Tiberias send priests of theirs year by year and season by season to stir up commotion against the Christian people of the Himyarites" (some such connections with Tiberias are, indeed, attested by a remarkable third-century inscription and monogram of a Himyarite Jewish elder, Menahem, discovered in the cemetery of Beth Sheiarim). Simeon also reported that while on a diplomatic mission in Hira, he saw a messenger of the king of Himyara to the Lakhmid king, Mundhir, bearing a letter which ended in the following exhortation:

"These things have we written to your Majesty, that you may rejoice that we have not left a Christian, not one, in this land of ours, and that you also may act likewise, that all the Christians who are in your dominions you may make followers of your religion, as we have done in our dominion; but as for the Jews who are in your dominion that you be their helper in everything, and whatever is needed in your dominion in return for this, send to us that we may dispatch it to you."

Whatever one thinks of the authenticity of this message, there is no doubt about the use Simeon made of this alleged letter to stir up Christian public opinion in Egypt, Syria, Cappadocia, Cilicia, and Edessa. He tried to bring about both Byzantine armed intervention in Himyara and the treatment of imperial Jewry as hostages for the good behavior of its southern coreligionists.

Very likely Dhu Nuwas was the leader of a liberation movement from Abyssinian supremacy. He sought to secure assistance from the related pro-Persian Lakhmids, and possibly from Persia herself. But his entry into the arena of international power politics ended in dismal failure. The Christian Abyssinians and Ghassanids (who often staged raids into the Jewish settlements of northern Arabia) could count on the whole-hearted support of Byzantium. In fact, Justin I, and, at his request, Patriarch Timothy III (IV) of Alexandria, urged the Abyssinian King Elesboas (Kaleb Ella Asbaha) to intervene in Yemen against "the abominable and lawless Jew." The Empire supplied the necessary ships for the transport of the Abyssinian troops to southern Arabia (523-25). At the same time the Jewish king received little more than verbal encouragement from the Sassanian king, Kavadh I. True, Persia had a genuine interest in staving off Christian hegemony over the Arabian Peninsula. But having no expectation of establishing there the Zoroastrian state religion, which had few missionary successes outside the imperial borders, the Persian rulers often wavered between helping the native pagans to maintain their heathen religions and encouraging them to adopt either Judaism or Nestorian Christianity. The latter sect feared the expansion of Orthodox Byzantium almost as much as did the Jews. At that particular moment (523-25), moreover, the Sassanian empire was still recuperating from the internal anarchy generated by the Mazdakite movement, which a quarter century before had induced Kavadh I to call to his assistance the Huns from Central Asia.

Another remarkable Jewish political enterprise thus ended in failure. But its repercussions must have dramatized Jewish teachings and observances before the whole Arab population on the Peninsula and in its border lands. It was associated in the minds of many liberty-loving Himyarites with the idea of resistance to Abyssinian domination, which they succeeded in shaking off after half a century. According to Arab traditions, the leader of the new liberation movement, Saif Dhu Yazan, was a descendant of Dhu Nuwas and likewise a professing Jew. Curiously Saif ventured to appeal to the Byzantine emperor for aid against the Abyssinians-Byzantium had every reason to resent Abyssinia's noncooperation in her recurrent conflicts with Persia-but was rebuked, because "you are Jews, while the Ethiopians are Christians." His appeal to Persia proved more successful, and brought a Persian expeditionary force. But the result was merely the exchange of one foreign oppressor for another. Nor was the involvement of Persian Jewry on the side of Bahram against Khosroe II helpful to its southern coreligionists. Nevertheless, Himyarite Jews, whether of Jewish or Arab extraction, weathered the harsh Abyssinian regime, just as their descendants were to weather many later persecutions down to modern times. As is well known, in recent decades decimated Yemenite Jewry continued to play a significant role in its own country, while greatly contributing to the building up of the Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Jews living among the northern Arabs likewise suffered serious political reverses. Following a Persian occupation of the island of Yotabe in the Gulf of Aqaba in 473, Jewish merchants established there a semiautonomous colony engaged in the Red Sea trade. Their autonomy seems to have been respected by Emperor Anastasius when he recaptured the island in 498, although the Jewish community could not prevent the loan of seven Byzantine merchant vessels stationed in that island for the Abyssinian expedition against their coreligionists of Himyara. Before long Justinian, perhaps finding that his subjects could carry on the island's international trade without the intensive cooperation of Jews, withdrew the latter's autonomous status (about 535). Nor was the Jewish position in the Arab buffer states altogether secure. Especially Nvhen at the end of the century the Lakhmid king, Nu'man III, deeply impressed by Maurice's victorious alliance with Khosroe II, was formally converted to Christianity, the old and important Jewish communities of that entire border area must have felt seriously threatened. This danger passed, however, when Nutman was captured by Khosroe II in 602, at the beginning of the Persian campaign against Byzantium, and his kingdom was converted into a Persian province.

While these dramatic changes were taking place at the two extremes of the Arab ethnological area, Jews living in northern Arabia continued to cultivate their particular blend of Arab-Jewish culture. As in many other areas, they served as leaven to stir up the long-quiescent life of their neighbors. The Jews of Yathrib, Khaibar, and Teima, particularly, seem to have pioneered in introducing advanced methods of irrigation and cultivation of the soil. They also developed new arts and crafts from metal work to dyeing and the production of fine jewelry, and taught the neighboring tribes more advanced methods of exchanging goods and money. Most of the agricultural terms and names of implements recorded in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry or the Qur'an are borrowed from their Aramaic speech. Arab traditions themselves ascribe to them the introduction of the honey bee and many new fruits, including the date. The palm tree, long glorified in Palestinian letters as a symbol of Judaism, now became the object of adulation in Arabic poetry as well. A Jewess was reputed to have brought the first vine to Ta'if near Mecca, an area later proverbial for its fine viticulture.

By their irrigation system, the observance of certain dietary rules, and especially by building their castles on hills rather than in the fever-invested valleys, the Jews pioneered also in fighting the theretofore deadly contagious diseases. So impressed were their neigh- bors that, on one occasion, an Arab woman who had lost several children vowed to bring up as Jews all her future offspring. These castles also helped them to stave off Bedouin razzias (this term for raids is actually a European loan word from the language of Arab nomads), and to introduce constant refinements in the amenities of their life, which appeared as the acme of luxury in their primi- tive environment. Jews must also have significantly contributed to the urban settlements. We need not go the whole length of Sidney Smith's assertion that "there were thriving cities in Arabia, old foundations as civilized as any in Syria or Iraq, and perhaps as large, apart from Antioch and Madaim [Ctesiphon]", and yet admit the presence of a sizable urban population, engaged in trade and industry. In short, during the few generations of Jewish control, the focal northern areas were raised almost to the high level of the southern civilization, which had long earned for Himyara and its vicinity the Roman designation of Arabia Felix. As soon as the Jews were all but eliminated from northern Arabia by Mohammed's sword, the whole countryside relapsed into its former backwardness.

No less significant was Jewish cultural pioneering. Being a "people of the book," as Mohammed was to call them as well as the Christians, the Jews of Yathrib and Khaibar had fairly broad intellectual interests. Along with the art of writing, they consciously or unwittingly communicated to their neighbors certain rudiments of their religious and ethical outlook. Always captivated by effective story telling, Arabs used to foregather in Jewish and Christian inns, and over a glass of wine listen to the recitation of the exploits of one or another biblical hero. These stories need not have clung too closely to the biblical narratives, but were often adorned with all the embroideries of the later Aggadah, or the creations of the story teller's own fertile imagination. In the minds of the Arab listeners and, sometimes, of the Jews themselves, these old and new ingredients soon blended into an indistinguishable whole. Much more than the few merchant-travelers from Mecca or Himyara, the Jewish settlers thus kept alive the links between the ancient Arabian traditions and the more advanced intellectual heritage of the Syro-Palestinian and Babylonian centers.

Besides the Jews there were numerous Christians and, doubtless also, Judeo-Christian sectarians of all kinds. In addition one could find, as Muqaddasi observed, "Manichaeans and atheists among the tribe of Quraish, Mazdakites and Mazdeans [Zoroastrians] among that of Tamim." The Jews themselves were apparently familiar with Scripture and some parts of the midrashic literature, but they had few direct intellectual contacts with the centers of Jewish life in Babylonia and Palestine. The several distinguished poets among them evidently were much more Arabian than Jewish, in so far as can be gleaned from a total of some two hundred stanzas which have come down to us. The Medinese poet, Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf, for instance, son of a Jew and an Arab woman, spent years of his youth among the Bedouin tribes studying the Arabic language, wllere it was at its purest. Another Jewish poet, Samau'al ibn 'Adiyall, sang in his famous poem of liberty, "We are men of the sword, and when we draw it we exterminate our enemies." Such a martial exclamation would have sounded rather strange to most posttalmudic [ews in other countries. Even an ancient Israelitic psalmist would, at least, have praised God as the real victor. But Samau'al, the knightly lord of Al-Ablaq near Teima, whose name soon became proverbial for faithfulness in the whole Arab world, was typical of the warlike, yet economically fairly advanced, Jewish settlers of the Peninsula.

Jewish poets were not limited to the Arab lands or speech. We shall see that, contrary to long-held views, the sixth and seventh centuries belong to the richest period of creativity in the realm of Hebrew liturgical poetry. It was during those four generations between the conclusion of the Babylonian Talmud and the rise of Islam that synagogue services were not only organized with a certain measure of finality, but were also enriched with works of great beauty and inwardness. Bible learning likewise continued to make quiet but significant progress. The recension of the scriptural text in all its smallest minutiae engaged the attention of generation after generation of painstakin,, scholars, and ultimately produced the grandiose structure of Masorah. The Bible was also popularized among the Aramaic-speaking masses by the recension of old, and the addition of new, Aramaic translations of various scriptural books. The homiletical outpourings of rabbis continued unabated, and the sustained effort of compiling and reviewing the ever growing aggadic heritage was now begun in earnest. Several important midrashic collections, as we shall see, have properly been ascribed by their modern investigators to the century before and that after the rise of Islam. Foundations were laid for still other works of this kind, which emerged into the light of day a century or two later. Nor was the halakhic achievement of talmudic Jewry left uncultivated. Apart from the work of the saboraic schools on the text of the Talmud itself, considerable effort was expended on the continued interpretation of the innumerable legal traditions handed down orally at the academies and cultivated locally in many communities under the guise of customs.

Even observers who are inclined to limit the range of Jewish history to the Jewish people's contributions to learning and culture can no longer, therefore, pass over slightingly the so-called saboraic period. They must admit that, however overtly inarticulate, the first posttalmudic generations were effectively continuing the creative work of their forefathers and extended it into ever new areas. They may not have been the ones to reap the full harvest. But they certainly helped to sow fertile seeds, as well as to gather and preserve the harvests of earlier generations in a fashion making them a vital link in the entire history of Jewish culture.

Socially and politically, too, they revealed an astounding vigor. Placed between the crushing millstones of two hostile empires, they showed enough virility and tenacity to defy all external pressures, and even to play a significant role in the unceasing imperial conflicts of the age. However exaggerated may be the reports by antagonistic writers, the fact that, after centuries of oppressive rule and popular hostility, the Jews of Antioch were strong enough to stage repeated revolts and allegedly even to attack the Christian majority, should give pause to any student of human affairs. Similarly, their active participation in the Perso-Byzantine war under Khosroe II, and their seizure of and three-year reign in the Holy City, from which they had been kept out by an imperial decree during the preceding half millennium, could only have come from a people which, in the face of extreme adversity, had preserved its indomitable faith in the future.

At the same time the Jews had begun laying foundations for new communities in lands with a drab and uninviting appearance, but with untold possibilities. In western and central Europe, particularly, these were the centuries of slow germination, out of which was ultimately to emerge the remarkable structure of medieval Western Jewry. Here, too, Jews revealed some unsuspected powers of resistance. After a century of intermittent but vigorous efforts by the combined powers of the Visigothic state and church to suppress the Jewish minority, the latter emerged as a powerful ally of the Moorish invaders. In the Arab heartland, too, Jewry celebrated a great, though short-lived, victory in the conversion of Dhu Nuwas and his tribesmen. For a while it appeared as if the entire Peninsula were to turn Jewish. If, owing to the military intervention of neighboring powers, this largely unconscious and unorganized missionary enterprise came to naught, Jews had injected enough of their restless quest of religious values into the tribes of both the Peninsula and the borderlands between Persia and Byzantium to help prepare the ground for a new effervescence of religious and cultural creativity.