This chapter will explore the monotheisation of Khazaria, from the first seventh-century mentions of Khazaria in the textual sources, through the adoption of Judaism allegedly occurring in the eighth to ninth centuries, up to the tenth-century Khazarian texts. There are many disagreements within the field of Khazar studies: when, where, why and how did the khağan convert to Judaism - and did it even happen in the first place? Perhaps more controversially, is there incontrovertible evidence linking modern Ashkenazi Jews to ninth- to tenth-century Khazarian Jews? Furthermore, can the process of monotheisation be linked to the process of sedentarisation? And finally, can the process of Khazarian monotheisation shed light on other monotheisation processes in Pontic-Caspian Eurasia?

I use the term ‘monotheisation’ because the khağans’ conversion to Judaism was neither inevitable, nor a consensus: rather, Islam or Christianity could have won out, and the map of the world could now look very different. In other words, had the khağans adopted Islam or Christianity, the term ‘monotheisation’ would still apply. I use the term ‘sedentarisation’ to refer to the adoption of a settled, agrarian and urbanised regime. These two processes may have at times been correlated, but were not necessarily mutually causal (cum hoc ergo propter hoc).

This study begins with Khazaria because although it disappeared politically, its lessons are essential to avoiding teleological interpretations of the subsequent history of Pontic-Caspian Eurasia.

Khazaria functions as an initial ‘Petri dish’ for examining the processes surrounding monotheisation in eighth- to thirteenth-century Pontic-Caspian Eurasia. Contextualised between the Islamic Caliphate and Christian Rome (Byzantium), this chapter will address the three most heated debates about Khazaria: (1) the dating of conversion, (2) the extent of conversion and (3) the location of Itīl’, the ‘Jewish’ Khazar capital. As for the original reason for adopting Judaism, most historians agree that the reason was to avoid being politically subjugated to Islam or Christianity, and I see no reason to disagree.

In recent years the medieval Mediterranean has been the focus of research concerning cultural contacts, convivencia and multiculturalism. Often evoked, these concepts have become almost banalities. However, they speak volumes about the way in which historians interact with contemporary issues such as religious coexistence and pluralistic societies in the Mediterranean. The current pervasive discourse of tolerance, cultural exchange, minorities and contacts does not necessarily influence the historical approach, but promotes the focus on these arguments.

Most often, the cultural groups of the Mediterranean world have been studied from a religious viewpoint, inserted into the political framework: that is to say that each religious sphere (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) is the object of a state-focused study divided into subgroups (the Arab world, the Ottoman world, the Persian world, the Byzantine world, the Latin world, and so forth). Then the focus becomes more finely differentiated (Mozarabic Christians in Al-Andalus, Christian minorities in Islamic Sicily, Jewish communities in Islamic Persia, etc.) in order to conduct comparative analyses: what it meant to be Jewish in Capetian France, in the Byzantine Empire or in Islamic Syria. Dynamics of coexistence and cohabitation in daily life, peaceful or not, harmonious or not, are also compared (the famous convivencia theme2), and even if the word ‘tolerance’ has now become almost taboo and is rarely used in academic discourse, the story of ‘living together’ is, in fact, seen through this logic: tolerance or no tolerance, that is the question. To address this issue, two main directions have recently been taken: juridical studies and anthropological input in the field of cultural contacts.

Since the frontiers and the content of minorities and communities are fortunately less and less described in terms of ethnicity, historians increasingly privilege medieval criteria such as law. Indeed, in the Middle Ages, lex was used for both ‘law’ and ‘religion’ (lex Iudeorum, lex Christi, lex Mahometi, etc.). Whatever the debate on personal or territorial law could be, the medieval documentation often defines the people by their law. Consequently, numerous scholarly works and research programmes have focused on the legal regimes of minorities, in particular in the medieval Mediterranean.

In 1957, nineteen rolled metal amulets were found in the apse of a late antique synagogue near Kibbutz Nirim in southern Israel, near the border with Gaza. Of these nineteen amulets, three have been unrolled and the texts on them read. The best preserved is a bronze amulet that can be read nearly in its entirety:

Written in a combination of Aramaic and Hebrew, the amulet identifies Esther as the person for whom it was made. It also includes the name of her mother and the conditions from which Esther sought protection. The extant portion of the amulet concludes with a quotation from Exod 15 that promises God’s protection against disease. Each of these components are common on amulets from Palestine, and especially among the amulets that will be considered in Chapter 2. One of the things that makes this Nirim amulet particularly noteworthy, however, was its discovery in a secure archaeological context. Its deposition in a synagogue, together with its use of Aramaic, means that we can be reasonably certain that the user considered herself a Jew. The vast majority of amulets from Roman and late antique Palestine lack archaeological context, which means that, unlike the Nirim amulets, it is difficult to interrogate the religious or ethnic self-understanding of the practitioner who crafted the object and the person who originally used it. This is particularly true for the amulets with the inscription heis theos (“one god”) or its extended form heis theos ho nikōn ta kaka (“one god who conquers evil”). As I will argue below, the heis theos acclamation could have appealed to members of disparate communities.

The purpose of this chapter is twofold.

Political ideology in its various manifestations in the East Roman or Byzantine Empire has been the focus of excellent studies by eminent Byzantinists such as H. Hunger, H.-G. Beck, H. Ahrweiler and G. Dagron, to name but a few. In this study, I will focus on a specific group of literary works, namely homilies, which have largely remained outside or in the margins of relevant investigations, since the existence of a political message in these religious texts par excellence is not self-evident. In particular, I will deal with middle Byzantine homilies, here defined as those produced between shortly before Iconoclasm began and the year 1204, in order to investigate to what extent, in what ways and for which purposes they transmitted elements of political ideology. I am not, however, going to present an exhaustive study of the chosen topic, or even a detailed list of passages related to ideology, since this is a vast subject indeed. Necessarily, the current presentation will be restricted to a few cases, such as Germanos I, Photios, Leo VI, Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos, Philagathos Kerameus and Theodosios Goudeles, that underline the significance of this genre for ideological issues on the basis of the information provided therein.

Contrary to research on the early Byzantine period, where political views in patristic homilies have been explored in more detail, so far the literature concerning the middle period has been limited. For example, in my book on the homilies of Emperor Leo VI, published in 1997, I included a chapter on the political ideology expressed in those texts. In an article that appeared in the same year, Antonio Garzya examined a homily by Philagathos Kerameus in relation to terms denoting political ideology. There are also scattered notes concerning individual works, but no systematic study of the topic has appeared. Nevertheless, a number of studies on the ideology of other religious texts have seen the light of day, with ideological issues in hagiography – a genre closely related to homiletics – being more familiar in scholarly literature, as in the cases of the Synaxarion of Constantinople and certain Lives of saints. It is noteworthy that the importance of homiletics as a source of ideology has become apparent in studies of western medieval Europe, for example in relation to the promotion of the Crusades.

What do we mean when we talk about amnesty? In the modern world, amnesty is understood as an initiative to reconcile two or more sides in a political conflict, where vindictive action for offences dating from an internal conflict is forbidden below a certain level. Since the Second World War, such conceptions of amnesty have been witnessed in West Germany, post-Apartheid South Africa and in the former Soviet satellite countries after the end of the Cold War. In all those examples, there was an injunction to make litigation against past offences inadmissible, excepting the most notorious and egregious crimes. In recent times, classical scholars have asked whether the modern paradigm finds a comparable example in Greek antiquity. The purpose of this study is to show that it does. In 404 bce, the Athenian democracy was abolished and replaced by an oligarchy which ruled for eight months, leading to civil war and the eventual reassertion of democracy in 403. To reconcile the two warring sides, legal measures were required to ensure that Athens did not relapse into civil war, or stasis. The Treaty of Amnesty successfully banished civil war and ensured that the losing side would not be subject to recrimination at the hands of the victor. Recent efforts to deny that Athens measured up to the standards of amnesty which the modern world holds essential have, by that estimation, been flawed. The present study argues that the Athenian example of 403 was the paradigm not only for later amnesties in the ancient world, but also for modern amnesty agreements.

This study is the product of over ten years of separate, freestanding publications on the Athenian Reconciliation of 403. Most of my earlier articles addressed technical matters of legal and semantic interpretation. This study aims to understand events of that vital year in a broader historical setting. It begins with the circumstances which led to the overthrow of democracy in 404 and moves, in turn, to the oligarchy, the democratic resurgence of 403, the legal measures which put an end to civil conflict, and the trials which ensued.

If the 1960s witnessed the entry of the SNP into the Scottish political mainstream after more than three decades on the fringes, then it was in the early 1970s that the potential threat that the party could pose to the established political and constitutional order became fully apparent. As any account of twentieth-century Scotland will narrate, the advances achieved by the SNP at the two general elections of 1974, when the party had seven and then eleven MPs returned to Westminster and, perhaps more significantly, polled twenty-two and then thirty per cent of the vote, transformed Scottish politics permanently. At the October 1974 contest the SNP overtook the Conservatives to finish in second place in terms of popular support; beyond the eleven constituency victories, the party had finished second in an additional forty-two seats. Scottish developments were granted further significance at Westminster as a result of the precarious parliamentary position faced by the Labour government after October 1974: the government’s majority in the Commons was just three, and would evaporate by 1977, granting the new SNP contingent added weight and influence. And while support for the SNP would ebb in the late 1970s and 1980s, the party would never again return to the irrelevance it had previously endured.

The striking upsurge in support for the SNP evident in the early 1970s can perhaps be explained by the political atmosphere in which the 1974 elections were held. The Royal Commission on the Constitution established by the Labour government in 1968 as a response to the SNP victory at Hamilton, now led by Lord Kilbrandon after the death of the original Chair Lord Crowther, published its final reports in October 1973, with a majority of the Commissioners supporting legislative devolution for Scotland, returning questions of constitutional reform to political prominence. Continued concerns over the state of the Scottish economy, and the initial rejection by the Heath administration of calls for government assistance for struggling industrial concerns, generated further discontent with the UK government among Scottish voters. Important here was the ‘work-in’ at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) in 1971–2.

Sidonius greets his dear Domitius

• 1. You complain of my being in the countryside, though if anything I could complain that you are now held back in the city. Already spring gives way to summer and the sun, at the highest point of its course, stretches out with wandering ray to the distant Scythian pole. What shall I say here about the climate of our region? Divine workmanship arranged our area so that we are more exposed to the warmth of the western world. What more to say? The world has heated up, the ice in the Alps is disappearing and the earth is inscribed with gaping and curving dry furrows. The gravel is parched in the fords, the mud on the banks, the dust in the fields. All the waters that normally flow continuously now dribble weakly and the liquid is not just hot, but boiling.

• 2. And now, while one man sweats in linen and another in silk, you are wearing a woollen cloak on the outside and underneath you are wrapped with bands. Moreover, cramped in a curved chair of wicker from Ameria and yawning, you start commenting on the verse ‘A Samian was my mother’ to students who are pale from the heat no less than from fear. Why not rather, if you care for your health, save yourself quickly from the suffocating constrictions of the city and eagerly join my company, defying the Dog Star's inclemency in the most clement of retreats?

• 3. Anyway, if you’d like to know the situation of the estate to which you are invited, listen. We are at Avitacum: this is the name of the estate, which, because it is my wife’s, is dearer to me than my father’s. Under God's protection – unless you suspect it to be witchcraft – I live there with my family in harmony. A steep mountain, though covered in earth, lies in the west. It rolls out into smaller hills, as though in two branches, which extend away from it to a breadth of about four iugera. But up to the point where there is a wide space big enough for an entrance-court for my domicile, the hillsides follow the valley in the middle in straight lines until they come to the border of my villa. Its fronts face north and south.

• 4. The bath clings in the south-west to the bottom of a wooded rock, so when the wood which is ready for felling is cut on the ridge above, it is cast down into the mouth of the oven in tumbling heaps as if it had itself decided to fall. Here rises the room with hot water, which is the same size as the following anointing room except for a spacious tub shaped in a semicircle, where a powerful hot stream enclosed by the bends of the pliant lead-piping gurgles through the pierced wall. Inside the room, which is heated from below, there is full daylight and, indeed, so much light that it forces modest people to think that they are more than naked.

Sidonius greets his dear Desideratus

• 1. It is with the greatest sadness that I inform you of the following. Three days ago the lady Filimatia died and all business was suspended in mourning for her. She was an accommodating wife, a merciful mistress, a helpful mother, a dutiful daughter, who was due the obedience of younger persons inside the house and outside, the respect of her seniors and love of her peers. Even though she was the only child of a mother long gone, with her various forms of kindness she easily ensured that her father, still young, did not feel the lack of a child of the other sex. With her sudden death, though, she gave her husband the pain of singleness and her father of childlessness. In addition, the mother of five children turned her fertility into misfortune through her early death. If these young children had lost their already feeble father while their mother had been unharmed, they would seem less orphaned.

• 2. But at least – if we do not honour the bodies of dead in vain – she was not buried by the portentous services of undertakers and corpse-bearers. Instead, while everyone, even outsiders, were crying and trying to touch the bier, to hold it back and even to kiss it, she was carried by the hands of the priests and her relatives and, looking more as if she were asleep, was laid to rest in her last bed. After this I wrote a funerary dirge at her bereaved father's request, not in elegiac distiches, but in verses of eleven syllables, which was engraved on marble while grief was still raw. If you do not wholly disapprove, the hired scribe will take it to add to the other volumes of my poems; if you think otherwise, it is enough that the stony poem is set in stone.

• 3. This is my epitaph:

  She was seized by a sudden cruel death

  from her five children, her father and husband

  and the hands of her weeping homeland put

  the matron Filimatia in this grave.

  O you, glory of your whole family, your husband's ornament,

  prudent, chaste, decent, severe, sweet

  and a model even for elders,

  characteristics generally thought contradictory

  you combined through your amiability of character.

  For accompanying you in your good life

  were dignified freedom of speech and eloquent modesty.

It was on the small screen of the television set rather than the big screen of the cinema that the most significant dramatisations of Pontius Pilate would next appear in the twentieth century. The success of DeMille’s 1927 blockbuster King of Kings had precluded the production of another big-budget offering on the topic until Nicholas Ray’s 1961 remake, although a listless 16mm colour version of a stage drama, The Pilgrimage Play, written by Pittsburgh heiress Christine Wetherill Stevenson, would be released for church screenings in 1949. With the end of the Depression and the victorious conclusion of the Second World War, the circumstances of life for many in America had changed, as had their modes of leisure-time activity. Whereas, at one time, an evening of on-screen entertainment had meant a trip to the movie theatre, most living rooms in Middle America now possessed a TV set. Hollywood continued to turn out pricey epic films on the Old Testament and other ancient topics through the 1930s and 1940s, but it was through the new medium of television that the New Testament would come to the masses in the post-war period. Just as in the early days of cinema Reverend Herbert Jump and others had urged fellow clergy to embrace film as a tool for religious use, so when the new medium first began to emerge, a similar movement arose to make and distribute works about the Gospels for the small screen. By and large, the shows that found their way onto the airwaves in TV’s early years for the at-home, family-centred Christian market were made with low budgets and high aims. Equally high-minded and better-funded network programming would likewise turn to the story of Pilate in the 1950s, as was seen in the discussion of Robert Sherwood’s The Trial of Pontius Pilate in the Prologue.

Introduction

Summary

While in Ep. 2.2 Sidonius describes his own villa, in Ep. 2.9 he describes two adjoining villas: Prusianum, owned by Tonantius Ferreolus, and Vorocingus, owned by Apollinaris. Whereas in Ep. 2.2 Sidonius concentrated on the architecture of his villa and the surrounding landscape, here he focuses on the different activities in the countryside and the question of how to spend one's otium with friends. Like Pliny, Sidonius thus integrates various villa letters in his collection to highlight the different aspects of otium in the countryside. Sidonius frames his second villa letter in response to Donidius’ question as to why it took him so long to travel to Nemausus, present-day Nîmes. The reason is that he had a pleasant stay at the estates of his uncles Tonantius Ferreolus and Apollinaris, who outbid each other to entertain him and to make him feel at home. Not only did they have messengers ambush him on the road to lead him to their homes, but they also arranged a contest every morning to see who could feed him. Sidonius describes a series of activities that fill his day: ball games, dice games, reading books, scholarly conversations and an excursion to the well stocked library at one of the villas. These activities are interrupted only by the cook, who calls for lunch, during which entertaining and educational stories are told. Lunch is followed by a siesta and then a bath together. As Tonantius Ferreolus and Apollinaris, unlike Sidonius, do not have functioning baths, Sidonius devotes two sections to the makeshift facilities in which he bathes with his hosts. At the end of the letter, as in his first long letter, 2.2, about his own villa, he apologises for the length of the letter and announces to Donidius that he will tell him about the dinners he enjoyed with Tonantius Ferreolus and Apollinaris at the meal he and Donidius will have together as soon as they finally meet.

Addressee

As Giannotti (2016) 37 shows, there are many parallels between Books 2 and 3, including the addressees of the letters; see the introductions to Ep. 2.1 and 2.3. The addressee of Ep. 2.9, Donidius, is also subject in Ep. 3.5.1 and mentioned as a vir spectabilis there (and as venerabilis in Ep. 6.5.1); on the honorary titles, see the commentary on Ep. 2.4.1 Vir clarissimus Proiectus….

Imagine, if you will, a woman living in Caesarea in the early fourth century ce. Caesarea is a bustling metropolis, the provincial capital. It is home to a cross section of Palestine’s inhabitants: Roman officials, Greek-speaking polytheists, Jews, Samaritans, and Christians. This woman has a young son who regularly gets sick. One day he will be shivering uncontrollably, and the next his body will be consumed with fever. Bad headaches and vomiting complicate the child’s situation. The woman’s husband is a skilled artisan, and so they have a little money to spend on physicians, but none of the prescribed remedies have had any lasting effect. He seems to get better, only to have the symptoms return with a vengeance sometime later. Our mother is desperate. She fears that her son does not have the strength to survive another episode. Only divine intervention will save him.

This woman’s son has malaria, a disease that was endemic throughout the region. Illnesses and injuries of all sorts were ubiquitous in the ancient Mediterranean world. Manual labor resulted in traumatic injuries. Poor hygiene and sanitation led to outbreaks, and contagious diseases spread rapidly. Put simply, physical infirmities of one sort or another were inescapable. People lived under continuous threat of severe bodily harm and were well acquainted with death from a young age. The same impulse that drives people to the Internet today to research symptoms and find possible treatments would have also motivated those in the ancient world to look for answers. Casual conversations at wells, along roads, and in markets would have inevitably turned to the health and well-being of one’s family. One woman might be tired because she had been up all night caring for an elderly relative, while another might question a friend as to why they had not seen a particular neighbor recently. And we can imagine that our woman from Caesarea would talk about little but her fears for her ailing son. In each of these situations, responses would have contained a mixture of sympathy and advice: Have you tried this herb? My cousin visited a holy man who cured him. Did you hear about my brother’s son who was healed after wearing an amulet? I know a poultice that will work. You should bathe in the hot springs.