“Common Culture”: The Complex Social Mosaic of Late Antiquity
by Laura S. Lieber
Mosaic Floor in Synagogue at Hammat Tiberias. Photo credit: Praisethelorne (CC BY-SA 3.0).
In keeping with twentieth century trends that favored complexity over simplicity and regarded received wisdom with skepticism (the same general intellectual disposition that created an opening for Dabru Emet), scholars of religion in Late Antiquity began to reevaluate the conventional understandings and periodization. Polemics were read more critically and the idea of a “common Late Antique culture” found more fulsome articulation. Although the traumas of the twentieth century were not often explicitly addressed, the study of Jewish and Christian relationships in antiquity could not help but be transformed in the shadow of the Holocaust and the subsequent reckoning of Vatican II. The traditional narratives of the past no longer suited the moment and, indeed, seemed lethal.
The recognition of a “common culture” in the past suggested to Jewish and Christian scholars an ability to coexist fruitfully in the present. Perhaps the most evocative expressions of “common culture” in antiquity come from the arts: the evidence that the same artists created mosaics in churches and synagogues from the same pattern books; and the appearance, throughout the Empire, of liturgical poetry—works which, for all their overt differences in language and theology, display aesthetic, structural, and performative similarities. Houses of worship, then, in both their visual program and their liturgical experience, displayed substantial affinities. For all the differences these works articulate at length—the triumph of Christ, the centrality of Torah, the language of Scripture and God—they were mutually legible. Jews and Christians, even in their houses of worship, were, culturally as well as religiously, akin to rival siblings. These two communities, with all their individual diversity and for all their fractiousness and even disavowal of each other, shared a striking and not-coincidental familial resemblance, and it was not one they outgrew, but one they grew into.
In the 1980s, scholars began to reevaluate the received narratives about “the parting of the ways.” The overly simplistic image of a (single) fork in the road failed to describe the complex and ongoing entanglement between Christians and Jews. Images of enmeshment and recursive, complicated encounters—intellectual as well as physical, social and economic as well as philosophical and ritual—served both to underscore the continued dynamic development of Judaism and the mutual, reciprocal influence of Christians and Jews upon each other. The change in nomenclature from the pre-War language of “Late Judaism (Spätjudentum)” to describe Hellenistic Jewish culture, which presumably ceased to be interesting or worthy of study with the advent of Christianity, to the category of “Early Judaism” for the Greco-Roman period, signals the scale of this shift.
A crucial part of this reconsideration of the interrelationship and mutuality of influence between Jews and Christians—from the social elites and their academies to the general masses encountering each other in the marketplace, theaters, and streets—has been the study of polemics: how members of one community sought to delegitimize the claims of the other. Scholars turned their attention to a variety of difficult texts and offered subtle new readings of works ranging from the Jewish mock-Gospel of Toledot Yeshu to the vicious anti-Judaism of the Good Friday liturgy. The vituperation of these works remains startling even centuries after their composition, but their theological assumptions, technical language, relationship to historical events, and reception histories—including episodes of violence against people and property—acquired nuance, complexity, and significance upon fresh scrutiny.
Polemics appeal to us as readers, whether we stumble upon them in an ancient manuscript or choose to go deep in an online “comments” section. A good polemic may be colorful, cutting, or call us to arms. Polemical language and ideas arouse passions and appeal to emotions as much as intellect; we can thrill to the verbal punch and the literary counterpunch. When we read Late Antique polemics through the lens of later history—the Crusades and the Holocaust, especially—we may be tempted to focus on the influence such powerful, dangerous words would come to have in later centuries; they are the seeds of toxic blossoms, foreshadowing impending harm. At the same time, over-emphasis on historical polemic can distort our picture of the past and amplify the sense of constant strife and conflict when, in fact, such episodes, while real, were episodic rather than constant. We may, in addition, be so eager to discover the spice of bias that we read general critiques of others as targeted attacks on specific groups; what seems to us as unambiguous anti-Judaism in a hymn by Ephrem may be a critique of the Christian heresy of Arianism, and language that Christians found offensive may have originally mocked Babylonian idols, not Christian icons. Polemics are better seen as stones in a complicated social mosaic—bright, glittery, eye-catching tesserae—but not the sum total of the image.
A disputation between Jewish and Christian scholars (1483). Public Domain.
The truths asserted in Dabru Emet would not have been universally self-evident to Jews and Christians in antiquity. The God and scripture that the two communities held in common were topics of dispute and exclusive claims: the Jewish God, lacking the element of incarnation, could not be the full truth of the Christian deity; and the Old Testament, read through the lens of the New Testament, shared words but not meanings with the Bible of the Jews as read by the Rabbis. The distinctive practices of one community (circumcision and kashrut, reverence for icons and relics) might be acknowledged by members of the other group, but hardly celebrated. Nor can we separate violence from religion; while outbursts were highly localized, assaults, riots, and pogroms occurred in Late Antiquity, and religion was one factor that stoked tensions between communities. But an over-emphasis on conflict causes us to overlook the significant day-to-day, week-in and week-out, decade-to-decade interactions among Christians and Jews as participants in a common, shared Late Antique society.
We, too, may see in a text not only what words say, but what meaning we bring to them, and the lenses through which we see not just our world but the past. For centuries, Jews and Christians coexisted in peaceful practicality but, in the abstract, their antipathy was mutual. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the antisemitism of Christian writings and Christian censorship seemed prophetic. But the words of Dabru Emet remind us that such interpretations are not fixed, and the dynamic, creative, or simply pragmatic paths of the past can be just as compellingly visionary.
Laura S. Lieber, Ph.D., is Professor of Religious Studies and Classical Studies at Duke University, where she directs the Center for Jewish Studies.