Aaron Michael Butts and Simcha Gross, eds., Jews and Syriac Christians: Intersections Across the First Millennium
Daniel
Picus
Western Washington University
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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James E. Walters
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2021
Volume 24.2
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https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv24n2prpicus
Daniel Picus
Aaron Michael Butts and Simcha Gross, eds., Jews and Syriac Christians: Intersections Across the First Millennium
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol24/HV24N2PRPicus.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, 2021
vol 24
issue 2
pp 563-566
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
File created by James E. Walters
Aaron Michael Butts and Simcha Gross, eds., Jews and Syriac Christians: Intersections Across the First Millennium
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020). Pp. xii + 350; €149.00.
The innovative contributions and careful methods of this
volume are apparent from the very first page—indeed, they are present in the
subtitle of the volume itself. Reflecting on the use of the term “intersections” to
describe the varied points of connection, convergence, and divergence central to the
studies contained here, the editors say that, “[t]his term is purposefully general
so as to allow room for various modes of contact, interaction, etc., without biasing
the conversation with terminol-ogical preconceptions from the outset” (Butts and
Gross, p. 1). This careful framing has paid dividends for the editors. The studies
of this volume are richly varied, both in terms of subject matter and methodology;
they range from critical reflections on historiographical and literary trends
(Gross, pp. 121–144; Münz-Manor, pp. 231–254) to narrower studies of particular
authors and texts, set in richly understood, and in some cases newly redescribed,
contexts (Cohen, pp. 89–102; Young, pp. 321–326). This variation provides a valuable
snapshot into an academic question of long standing (just how much did Jews and Syriac Christians interact?), revealing a terrain of answers
whose variety tells the reader as much about the history and background of the field
as it does about the current multiplicity of methods and disciplines.
While the studies themselves are arranged alphabetically by
author, the editors indicate that there are two main types of interaction present in
the contacts between Jews and Syriac Christians studied here, and that these help us
to categorize the studies. These are explicit and implicit interactions: texts where
“others” are named explicitly, and texts where they are merely suggested (Butts and
Gross, p. 2). Even with this distinction named, however, the lines between them lay
blurred: the editors point out that figures like Ephrem are the subject of studies
which attempt to find his implicit, unnamed connections to Judaism (such as in his
exegesis), as well as analyses of his more explicit attacks against Jews. A
comprehensive study of Ephrem and his relationship to Judaism, then, involves both.
Explicit references to Jews are much rarer than materials which
suggest an implicit connection. Becker (47–66), Cohen (89–102), Moss (207–229),
Rubenstein (256–279), and Walters (291–319) mostly work with these sorts of texts in
the present volume. In order to study these texts in context, of course, all of
these authors are attentive to implicit assumptions and language connecting authors
and their others: in a way, this volume is a testament to just how critical it is to
consider questions of othering, identity, and influence holistically, and from a
variety of angles. The broader, more methodologically focused pieces, which treat a
variety of sources at once, are some of the most successful examples of this:
Becker, Gross, Herman, Kalmin, Koltun-Fromm, Münz-Manor, and Ruben-stein all display
deft hands and insightful readings of sources that are read together rarely, and
equally rarely with such care.
The two types of connections that the editors delineate
reflect, in their isolated expressions, two different sets of historical assumptions
and historiographical trends. These can heuristically be seen as attempting to
reconstruct a historical reality, on the one hand, and as analyzing rhetoric, on the
other. Another strength of the pieces herein, however, is that they all combine
these methods, to some degree. They foreground the rhetoric of the sources, trying
first to understand the work that the written material itself is trying to
accomplish, and only then to turn a lens onto the world that might be reconstructed,
posited, and formed outside of the text itself. These techniques are certainly not
unique to Syriac studies, or even the question of connection between Jews and Syriac
Christians, but the way they appear in this edited volume provides a constructive
terrain for analysis.
Michal Bar Asher-Siegal, for example, follows an argument by
Shlomo Naeh that a uniquely Syriac understanding of the word herutā can help us make sense of a particular narrative in rabbinic
literature. While none of the materials she examines explicitly name, describe, or
engage a religious other, by bringing different sources together, Bar Asher-Siegal
writes a textured account of how narratives and tropes from Christian monastic
literature might be incorporated in rabbinic texts. Sergey Minov asks a similar set
of questions in “Staring Down a Laundress,” while Christian Stadel introduces an
entirely new category of shared texts between Jewish and Syriac worlds: that of
Judaeo-Syriac itself. Simcha Gross troubles some of these categories even further,
calling into question the generally accepted orthodoxy of the Jewish origins of
Syriac Christianity, an argument whose ramifications will be felt for years to come.
We gain insight into boundaries both porous and rigid, and the great variety of
manners in which power and knowledge might flow between them.
One of this volume’s great strengths, in addition to the
breadth and variety visible in the individual contributions, is the effective
combination of more programmatic, theoretically oriented pieces, and more sharply
focused analyses. Rather than simply a map of the “way forward,” or a series of
studies that claim to use new and better methods, Jews and Syriac
Christians is both the map, and the terrain represented therein. It is
undoubtedly rare for a volume to achieve this so successfully, but by including, for
example, Becker’s “Syriac Anti-Judaism: Polemic and Internal Critique” alongside
Walters’ “Anti-Jewish Rhetoric and Christian Identity in Aphrahat’s Demonstrations,” readers gain understanding of not only the
particular problems, issues, and questions surrounding individ-ual authors, but also
the broader stakes and perspectives in how we frame and ask our questions. Walters
places Aphrahat’s anti-Judaism into the broader context of Syriac Christian
anti-Judaism more generally; at the same time, Becker differentiates the presence of
anti-Judaism as internal critique from the more violent legacies of medieval Europe.
The two together suggest that there are real, material legacies of late ancient
group formation; and, additionally, they show that the lines that demarcate “self”
and “other” are, even in ancient polemical texts, much more difficult to navigate
than we often assume. This is but one example of how the volume successfully
sharpens the study of interactions between Jews and Syriac Christians, and expands
the questions scholars ask.
While some of the questions asked in Jews and
Syriac Christians have a long history in scholarship, and some of the texts
analyzed are well known, taken as a whole, this volume marks out new terrain, and
even begins investigating it. While it was not intended as an introductory volume to
the interactions between Jews and Syriac Christians in late antiquity, it would
serve that purpose admirably, and any serious scholar of either field would be well
served to engage the arguments herein.