THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYAD 553) prescribed the languages that should be used for synagogue readings,
preferring the Septuagint translation for Greek, though commending that of
Aquila on the grounds that it was the work of a gentile; the law makes clear
that Judaism is in error and needs ‘correction’. The broader context here is
that of a return to the use of Hebrew among Jews in the sixth century, both
in the diaspora and in Palestine, as well as an actual variety of Jewish language
practice across the empire.^40 As the Christian empire became more repressive,
Jews were classed alongside heretics and pagans in legislation, and even more
forcefully in a mass of Christian writing. This trend led eventually to an enact-
ment by Heraclius in the seventh century requiring all Jews to be baptised; this
was repeated by Leo III in the eighth and Basil I in the ninth century, though it
was a product of heightened animosity and resentment at the time and could
hardly have been enforced (Chapter 9).
The Samaritans, with their centre on Mt Gerizim, where the Emperor Zeno
built a church of the Theotokos on the site of their sacred precinct, were also
subject to imperial repression, and rose up repeatedly in the fi fth and sixth
centuries; the uprisings were harshly put down, and Procopius claims that Jus-
tinian ‘converted the Samaritans for the most part to a more pious way of life
and has made them Christians’.^41 Jews had been the subject of hostility, and
Judaism the target of stylized refutation in Christian apologetic writing, since
as early as the second century, and were often depicted as malevolent and
dangerous in saints’ lives and other kinds of Christian writing. This tendency
intensifi ed as time went on, and reached a peak in the period of the Persian
and Arab invasions, when Christian writers blamed the Jews of Palestine for
helping the invaders and participating in the killing of Christians.^42
Yet this increasing Christian pressure coincided with an effl orescence of
Jewish life and, it would seem, of Jewish self-confi dence, especially in Pal-
estine. Jews appropriated many aspects of imperial Christianity and made it
their own. Fifth-century Palestine was transformed by the building not only
of large numbers of churches but also of synagogues, their decoration show-
ing close parallels with Christian art (Chapter 7). Those who built them and
worshipped in them ignored imperial prohibitions on building synagogues
and clearly did not expect to suffer as a result.^43 Nor did they seem to have
qualms about representational art, though this was to change. The fl ourish-
ing Jewish life of Palestine was part of what Glen Bowersock calls the ‘kind
of miracle’ of the late antique Near East, the Sepphoris synagogue a ‘polyglot
marvel, with inscriptions in Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek’^44 – though it was
indeed a linguistic variety shared in many quite different and non-Jewish con-
texts. As we saw, late antiquity was also the period when the Palestinian and
Babylonian Talmuds reached their fi nal stages. However, the infl uence of the
rabbis on everyday Jewish life, assumed in past scholarship, now seems much
less evident (the parallelism with revisionist views of the actual impact of late
Roman imperial legislation is obvious); Jews wanted to be distinctive, but they
were also willing to adopt cultural expressions from wider society.^45 This did
not protect them from occasional outbreaks of active Christian hostility, as