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1 Chapter One u Syria and the Politics of Christian Orthodoxy One spring in Mesopotamia as Passover and Easter approached, Ephrem’s fourth-century church resounded with the anti-Jewish refrain from another of his Syriac hymns: “Glory be to Christ through whose body the unleavened bread of the [Jewish] People became obsolete, together with the [Jewish ] People itself!”1 Ephrem’s renowned choir of Christian women sang to his congregation, warning of the danger that he perceived in the unleavened bread of the Jewish Passover: “The evil [Jewish] People that wants our death, enticing, gives us death in food.”2 Again, after each verse, came the reverberating rhythm of the hymn’s insistent, alliterative refrain (shubhâ la-mshihâ da-byad pagreh btel pattir ˚ammâ ˚ammeh d-˚ammâ). Through their own voices, Ephrem, Christian deacon and poet, charged his church members to “loathe” and “flee from” the unleavened bread.3 In this overlapping liturgical season, he recalled a murderous history of “the [Jewish] People” who “killed the Son” and whose hands were “defiled with the blood of the prophets .”4 With an allusion to Matthew 27: 25, the choir warned, “Do not take, my brothers, that unleavened bread from the [Jewish] People whose hands are covered with blood....... For that blood for which they cried out that it might be upon them is mixed in their festivals and in their Sabbath.”5 The 1. Ephrem, Azym. 19. All translations from these hymns are from the Syriac text in Edmund Beck, ed., Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Paschahymnen, CSCO 248, SS 108 (Louvain, 1964). I profusely thank Lucas Van Rompay for helping me learn to read Ephrem’s Syriac poetry. 2. Ephrem, Azym. 19.5. 3. Ephrem, Azym. 19.11–12. 4. Ephrem, Azym. 19.19, 21. 5. Ephrem, Azym. 19.16, 25. 2 Politics of Christian Orthodoxy hymn’s anti-Jewish rhetoric peaked in the final polemical verses: “The People that does not eat from a pig is a pig that wallows in much blood. Flee and distance yourself from [the People]! Look, it shakes itself off! Do not let the sprinkling of the blood contaminate you!”6 Through this hymn and others like it, Ephrem (ca. 306–373) taught his congregation to distinguish “Jewish” from “Christian” behavior, and claimed that God loved only Christians and rejected the “obsolete” Jews.7 Others of Ephrem’s hymns similarly denounced “Arian” Christians as dangerous heretics who imitated the blind, rejected, murderous Jewish people. Ephrem’s congregants thus left his church services each week prepared to see a world that mirrored the ideals of the Council of Nicaea (325 CE), which ostensibly established Christian orthodoxy for the Roman Empire by rejecting “Arian ” teachings and forbidding Christians to celebrate during the Jewish Passover . Through his hymns, Ephrem trained his church attendees to think of Christians and Jews as binary opposites, to shun the Passover festival, and to fear contemporary Jews and “Arian” heretics, who should be clearly distinct from “true” Christians. Ephrem’s worldview reflects the “orthodoxy” of the Council of Nicaea. The liturgical rhetoric of his hymns, however, suggests that the local religious boundaries in eastern Syria were not so clearly defined . His pleas that his church congregants not partake of the unleavened bread and his suggestions that there were some in his audience persuaded by “Arian” theology imply that Ephrem struggled through his hymns to call into existence a new Syriac Christianity, one that better reflected the outcome of the Council of Nicaea that he understood to define Christian orthodoxy. Ephrem’s poetry participated in empire-wide conversations on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, the definition of Christian orthodoxy , and the theological and political controversies that followed the Council of Nicaea. His writings are, however, strikingly absent from scholarly 6. Ephrem, Azym. 19.27–28. 7. Scholars debate how best to translate the Syriac word madrâshê, which I translate here as “hymns.” In his article “Sind Ephraems Madrâshê Hymnen?” Michael Lattke notes that “hymn” does not sufficiently capture the rich nuances of the Syriac genre of madrâshê, which also served an important teaching function in the liturgy (OC 73 [1989]: 38–43). The present examination of the anti-Jewish language of Ephrem’s madrâshê rests upon the assumption that these texts were pedagogical tools that Ephrem expected would teach his audience not only about Scripture, but also about their community. As the genre of Ephrem’s texts is not here under discussion, I will continue to translate...

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