Judaism and Imperial Ideology in Late Antiquity by Alexei M. Sivertsev (review)

Alexei Sivertsev demonstrates that eschatological Byzantine Jewish literature of the fifth through the early eighth centuries “attempted to build its own ideological master narrative through constant dialogue with the dominant imperial culture,” which “involved the conscious positioning of Judaism as the successor of Rome’s and Constantinople’s universalism” (7). Sivertsev’s close textual analysis is complemented by a solid methodological framework, and his thesis is persuasive and thought-provoking. Although the book’s persistent repetition of its main point is unnecessary, its detailed textual analysis and examination of how the texts under consideration participated in the narrative culture of their time contribute meaningfully to scholarship on Late Antiquity and the history of Judaism.

The book begins from the concept of a Byzantine commonwealth set forth by Dimitri Obolensky and given clearer shape by Garth Fowden, particularly the observation that Constantinople’s claim to be a Second Rome allowed minorities to perpetuate Byzantine culture’s super-sessionist ideal by imagining themselves as Byzantium’s successor, a Third Rome (2). Sivertsev’s goal is to apply this model “to describe the Jewish experience in the Byzantine Empire” (5); Jews integrated and inverted the dominant culture, he argues, by positioning “themselves as the Byzantine imperial narrative’s sole legitimate heirs” (6). Adapting methodological approaches from David Biale and Ra’anan Boustan, Sivertsev interprets the Jewish texts he studies as “examples of ‘counter-historical’ and ‘counter-geographical’ engagement with dominant Byzantine literature” (6).

In chapter 1, Sivertsev examines Christian and Jewish eschatological traditions in Late Antiquity. “By combining Roman imperial universalism with the messianic universalism of the Hebrew Bible as well as early Christian millenarian expectations,” he writes, “late antique Christianity succeeded in producing a comprehensive and coherent ideological framework that tied together the destiny of imperial Rome with that of Christ’s kerygma” (10). Not surprisingly, Byzantine Jews “also developed their own supersessionist narrative that both internalized and inverted a traditional Christian Roman supersessionism,” a narrative that “envisioned Jews as the legitimate heirs of the Roman imperial legacy” (13). Using data from disparate times and places, Sivertsev tries to trace the development of a fairly coherent eschatological expectation regarding a divinely sanctioned Jewish kingdom. He argues that in Byzantine Judaism, this coming kingdom was understood to be at once the restoration of the original Davidic kingdom and the direct successor of Rome (14).

Chapters 2 and 3 are in-depth studies of individual texts, placed within the context of contemporary Byzantine culture and the upheaval caused by the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. Chapter 2 focuses on some texts of the ’Otot ha-Mashiah genre, arguing that they represent “a Jewish reaction to the Heraclean imperial mythology,” such as that found in Ps.-Methodius (76). ’Otot ha-Mashiah, Sivertsev claims, upset apocalyptic Christian Byzantine ideals by depicting Jewish Israel as “both the vindicated true owner of a divinely sanctified kingdom and the legitimate successor to Byzantium” (85). Chapter 3 considers the seventh-century Jewish apocalyptic text Sefer Zerubbabel, with an emphasis on the complex relationship between the text’s female character Hephzibah and the Byzantine icon the Theotokos. Sivertsev argues that Hephzibah’s character incorporates images familiar from Byzantine Christian portrayals of the Theotokos, of Constantine’s mother, Helena, and of the protective female Tyche of Jerusalem (123). “At the end of the day,” he writes, “Hephzibah represents an attempt by Byzantine Jews to read cultural and symbolic codes of contemporaneous Byzantine society through the lenses of Jewish religious tradition. She is a perfect example of the vibrant and creative exchange between Jews and the dominant culture of the empire” (124).

Chapter 4 revisits Sivertsev’s claim that “the foundation mythology proposed for messianic Jerusalem shared a number of common characteristics with the foundation mythology of New Rome,” this time with a focus on the concept of renovatio imperii, which for Byzantine Jews meant the reestablishment of the Davidic kingdom (126). This chapter reiterates with new...