THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYPersian invaders and even briefly entertained hopes of recovering the Temple
Mount. Strategius’ claim that Christians perished after being crammed by
Jews into the Mamilla cistern in Jerusalem has been connected, plausibly or
not, with physical evidence for burials.^22 Jewish apocalyptic flourished in this
atmosphere, as did the recent genre of Hebrew liturgical poetry known as
piyyutim (Chapter 8). Religious differences came to a head with the prospect
of a change in the control of Jerusalem,^23 and in 632, after the restoration of
the True Cross to Jerusalem, Heraclius decreed that all Jews must convert, a
measure which came to little if anything, given its date, but which indicated
and encouraged Christian anti-Jewish feeling. The genre of Christian apolo-
getic dialogues between Christians and Jews, reviewing and refuting standard
Jewish arguments against Christianity and invariably leading to the triumph
of the Christian debaters, also flourished in the seventh and eighth centuries.
In the anonymous Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem, perhaps of the early eighth
century, Christians are given arguments to use against Jews, or to reassure
themselves, on topics such as the direction of prayer, circumcision, the ven-
eration of created objects, the status of Christ, the destruction of the Jewish
Temple and the superiority of Christianity.^24 A particularly striking, though
not typical because less formulaic, example of the anti-Jewish dialogues is the
so-called Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati of the 630s, telling of a converted Jew,
which unusually contains much apparently circumstantial detail about Jewish
communities in the eastern Mediterranean and Jacob’s own involvement in
factional disturbances.^25 A vivid impression of factional violence in various
cities in the last days of Phocas is given by the Egyptian chronicler John of
Nikiu (for whose work we depend on an extremely late Ethiopic translation
from a lost Arabic paraphrase of the probably Coptic original), and while
this is a difficult source on which to rely, many others confirm this picture of
urban disturbances all round the Mediterranean, in which the factions joined
in or sometimes took the lead (Chapter 7 above). Inscriptions at Ephesus,
Oxyrhynchus and Alexandria confirm their importance and their bestowal of
political support, and Phocas seems to have alienated the powerful Greens.
The Doctrina also reflects this tense atmosphere when recounting the exploits
of Jacob in his youth, before his conversion:
[In the reign of Phocas], when the Greens, at the command of Kroukis,
burned the Mese [in Constantinople] and had a bad time [cf. Chron. Pasch.,
695–6], I roughed up the Christians and fought them as incendiaries and
Manichaeans. And when Bonosus at Antioch punished the Greens and
slaughtered them [609], I went to Antioch ... and, being a Blue and on the
emperor’s side, I beat up the Christians as Greens and called them traitors.
(Doctrina Jacobi I.40)The fall of Jerusalem and the capture of the empire’s most precious relic, the True
Cross, were matters of deep mourning for Christians and, as we saw, Sophronius,
later patriarch of Jerusalem himself, composed poetic lamentations in the