Roman Defeat, Christian Response, and the Literary Construction of the Jew

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

David M. Olster is Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky.