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CHAPTER 19
Religious Diversity
Samuel Cohen*Introduction: Religious Diversity
Ostrogothic Italy was comprised of different religious communities, the most
prominent of which were Catholic Christians, Jews, and the Ostrogoths them-
selves who have typically been labeled as ‘Arians’ in secondary literature.
Although these terms suggest that each community possessed a relatively
stable set of beliefs and practices, the religious identities presupposed by ‘Jew’,
‘Catholic’, and ‘Arian’ were not self-evident or static; rather they were fluid,
gradually emerging together through a process of self-definition and exclusion.1
A crucial tool in this process was the discourse of heresy and orthodoxy, which
served to differentiate Christian from non-Christian and to distinguish the
‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kind of Christian.2 Thus, the religious labels that appear in
our sources were not merely descriptive; especially in the case of Christian
heretics, they were proscriptive and polemical. Arianism in particular was a
flexible heresiological epithet that despite its association with Theoderic was
generally not employed to describe the Goths or their faith during the early
phase of the Ostrogothic kingdom. It was only in the later years of Theoderic’s
reign and subsequently with Justinian’s reconquest of Italy on the horizon that
Catholic authors commonly equated Arriani and Gothi.
With these qualifications in mind it is the intention of this chapter to first
describe the two major players on our diverse stage, the Jews and the Goths,
especially in terms of their relationship with each other and with Italian
Catholic religious authorities such as the bishop of Rome. As we shall see, these
communities did not exist in isolation from one another. Jews, Catholics, and
- I would like to thank Kristina Sessa and Jonathan Arnold for their comments, suggestions,
and advice in preparing this chapter.
1 Sandwell, Religious Identity, p. 4. Iricinschi/Zellentin, “Making Selves and Marking Others”,
pp. 11–21. See also Lieu, Christian Identity; Rebillard, Christians and their Many Identities; and
on the overlap of Christian and Jewish identities in Late Antiquity: Boyarin, Border Lines and
Dying for God.
2 Le Boulluec, La notion d’hérésie, vol. 1, pp. 11–20; Boyarin, Border Lines, pp. 2–4; Burrus, Making
of a Heretic, pp. 15–18.