CHRISTIANIZATION 181here. Since the days of Heinrich Graetz it has been common to view the
history of the Jews in late antiquity as one of inexorable decline, from the
flourishing postrevolt revival of the Jewish polity under the Severan emperors
to the horrors of the Middle Ages, a decline that had, however, only a superfi-
cial effect on the inner constitution of Jewish society.^4 The old characteriza-
tion of the Severan period is no longer tenable. Nor would many historians
nowadays be willing to view the Middle Ages in Graetz’s terms, at least not
without serious qualification. But the traditional view of Jewish life under the
Christian emperors is undeniably powerful. No one could reasonably deny
that the state and its various retainers sometimes displayed hostility to the Jews
in the first through third centuries: the writings of pagan intellectuals are rife
with it, and the brutality of the suppression of the three Jewish revolts goes
without saying. But hostility to Jews and Judaism certainly reached an unprec-
edentedly high pitch in late imperial Christian writing, and this hostility was
increasingly reflected in imperial legislation, as well as in an ever increasing
number of local acts of persecution and violence.
On the Jewish side, there is, despite this slight sense of embattledness in
literature thought to have been written or compiled in the fourth and fifth
centuries, the Palestinian Talmud and themidrashimGenesis and Leviticus
Rabbah (perhaps literature from the Diaspora, if we had any, would convey a
different impression).^5 But later midrashim and the early piyyut, mainly prod-
ucts of the sixth century, are suffused with defensiveness and aggressive opposi-
tion to Christianity and the state that supported it, indeed, with a strong sense
of gloom. Some Jews had unhappily internalized Christian triumphalism and
believed, as the payyetan Yannai put it, that the lamps of Edom (Rome, i.e.,
Byzantium) burned brightly while those of Zion were about to flicker out.^6
So it is unsurprising that in the sixth and seventh centuries the historical
apocalypse apparently experienced a revival in some Jewish circles (although
the surviving Hebrew apocalypses are probably later; at the very least, they
were heavily reworked in the Islamic period).^7
Even before the theory of decline was systematically attacked, starting in
the 1970s, it received occasional criticism. Most interesting is the characteristi-
(^4) See the discussion in J. Cohen, “Roman Imperial Policy toward the Jews from Constantine
until the End of the Palestinian Patriarchate,”Byzantine Studies/e ́tudes Byzantines3 (1976): 1–
29.
(^5) Perhaps theCollatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarumis such a work, but its schematic
character makes it difficult to interpret; see Rutgers,Hidden Heritage, pp. 235–84.
(^6) Z. M. Rabinovitz,The Liturgical Poems o fRabbi Yannai(Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1987),
2: 37. On Yannai’s gloom and hostility to Byzantium and to Christianity, see H. Schirmann,
“Yannai Ha-payyetan: Shirato Ve-hashqafat Olamo,”Keshet23 (1964): 56–59.
(^7) See Y. Even-Shmuel,Midreshei Ge’ulah: Pirqei Ha-apoqalipsah Hayehudit Mehatimat Ha-
talmud Habavli Ve’ad Reshit Ha’ele fHashelishi(Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1953), for these texts.