SIX

CHRISTIANIZATION

I

N THIS PART of the book I attempt to describe some aspects of the novel
and distinctive Jewish culture that emerged in late antiquity (c. 350–640)
as the integrative ideology of the Jews. In this chapter I will argue that
one of the main causes of the rejudaization of the Jews was the christianization
of the Roman Empire. This process (and it must be emphasized that christian-
ization was a process, not a moment, which cannot be regarded as in any
sense complete before the reign of Justinian [527–565], if then)^1 affected the
Jews in two ways. First, it tended tomarginalizethem. As religion assumed
ever more importance in social relations in late antiquity, Jews were gradually
excluded from the networks of patronage that held the empire together.^2 The
Jews had two possible ways of responding: continued integration at the cost of
conversion to Christianity or continued adherence to Judaism (its component
communities increasingly inward turning and possessing their own discrete
social structures) at the cost of withdrawal.
Second, christianization, and what is in social-historical terms its sibling,
the emergence of religion as a discrete category of human experience—reli-
gion’sdisembedding—had a direct impact on the Jewish culture of late antiq-
uity because the Jewish communitiesappropriatedmuch from the Christian
society around them. That is, quite a lot of the distinctive Jewish culture was,
to be vulgar about it, repackaged Christianity. Much more importantly, the
dominant forms of Jewish social organization and patterns of expenditure in
late antiquity, the local community and the synagogue (its chief material man-
ifestation), were constituted by appropriative participation by Jews in the com-
mon late antique culture. This point will be argued in detail later in this
section.
Before proceeding with these arguments, I will pause very briefly to con-
sider in a bit more detail what it is I am trying to explain. The remains of
northern Palestine in late antiquity are very different from those of the second
and third centuries. Most prominent among the late antique remains are syna-

(^1) See, e.g., Averil Cameron,The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity,AD 395–600(Lon-
don: Routledge, 1993), pp. 57–80; P. R. L. Brown,The World o fLate Antiquity(London:
Thames & Hudson, 1971), passim. This point requires special emphasis as a corrective to much
of Jacob Neusner’s work on the Palestinian Talmud and themidreshei aggadah—to take just one
example,Judaism in Society.
(^2) For this sense of marginalization, see the fundamentally important first chapter of A. Avidov,
“Processes of Marginalisation in the Roman Empire” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1995).