Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds (review)

Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds attempts to offer a comprehensive linear history of Jewish martyrdom, beginning in the Hellenistic period and extending through the European High Middle Ages. Shmuel Shepkaru, following Bowersock and others, argues that the concept of martyrdom is not indigenous to Hellenistic Judaism but is rather a Christian notion germinated in the soil of Roman culture and later transplanted into Judaism. From this account of conceptual origins, Shepkaru structures his chapters around traditional periodization [Hellenistic Judaism (represented by Philo, Josephus, 4 Macc.), the era of the rabbis, and the Byzantine period], coming to focus more intensively in the subsequent chapters on the persecution of Jews during the Crusades and its subsequent commemoration and reception.

This book’s two main contributions reside, first, in its effort to provide a topography of a broad and capacious terrain and, second, in its service as an introduction to the primary sources under discussion. The book is meticulously documented and clearly written so that students who turn to the book for help in orienting themselves to the relevant sources will find a very helpful guide here. In addition, the chapter on Byzantine Jewish sources brings a body of literature to the discussion that has not been extensively explored by other historians of Jewish martyrdom and martyrology.

Some readers will be unsatisfied with dimensions of the work: its insistence on a linear historical narrative, one that sometimes seems to corral unruly elements of the evidence in order to keep the story going in a single straight line, or its apparently tacit acceptance of the received periodization of history, a periodization that may artificially impose boundaries and divisions that obscure rather than illuminate the story. Moreover, specialist readers will likely find other more focused studies of the material Shepkaru covers more rewarding: Daniel Boyarin’s Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Judaism and Christianity (1999), Susan Einbinder’s Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (2002), and Jeremy Cohen’s Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (2004), to name a few.

Perhaps least satisfying in Shepkaru’s attempt to produce a comrehepnsive linear narrative is the rhetorical move he makes in conclusion. Throughout the book, he gestures toward the anxieties and contestations that the concept of martyrdom produces in Jewish law and theology, but closes with a somewhat surprising resignation to the power of the martyrological as inevitably having the last word: “Commemorating centuries of violence and valor has made the story of the powerless too powerful to be vanquished,” he writes. “As martyrs are destined to die, martyrologies are designed to live; martyrs to stand the test of death, martyrologies the test of time. They have” (278). With these closing sentences, Shepkaru leads his readers into a dehistoricized and archetypal world, one immune to the probings of historical investigation and shut off from ethical critique. It is a curious and even troubling move, especially at the end of a very short chapter that moves rather too facilely and unsettlingly from the High Middle Ages to the Holocaust, which is treated in cursory fashion in just a few pages.

Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds does an important service in surveying a broad and complex field, bringing together the scholarly bibliography, and offering a synthesizing overview. Moreover, the integration of the Byzantine materials in chapter 4 makes a very significant contribution. Students of martyrdom will certainly make salutary use of this book as they pursue their ongoing investigations into a topic that continues to be uncannily resonant and distressingly timely.