230 A History of Judaism
established their own Christian societies (albeit not always of the same
type of Christianity as the Roman emperors). The old religions did not
disappear everywhere immediately, but most inhabitants of Europe
through the Dark Ages to the high medieval period lived in Christian
societies of one kind or another.^2
Of all the great empires faced by Rome during its rise to power, only
the Parthian dynasty in Mesopotamia never succumbed fully to Roman
might, but in the 220s ce the Parthian state was taken over from within
by an Iranian dynasty. The Sasanians claimed a spurious continuity
with the Achaemenids, such as Cyrus and Xerxes, of half a millennium
earlier and, already in the third century ce, championed Zoroastrian-
ism as a state religion. The Greek- speaking Roman empire in the eastern
Mediterranean and Syria, based from the early fourth century ce in
Constantine’s second capital in Byzantium (now renamed ‘Constantin-
ople’), found itself in frequent conflict with the Sasanian Persian state,
which harboured expansionary ambitions as great as those of Rome,
until the Sasanians were swept away, quite suddenly, in the seventh cen-
tury by the rise of Islam – a political movement which, founded in the
Arabian peninsula, led to conquests as rapid as those of Alexander a
millennium earlier. Palestine fell under Muslim control, as did Egypt
and, a little later, the Mediterranean coast of North Africa. Byzantium
itself held out as the centre of a rump of Greek Christianity to 1453, but
for the most part Christian political influence in the Levant was limited
to periodic attempts at the reconquest of Palestine by Crusaders from
the Latin west from the late eleventh century to the thirteenth. At the
other end of the Mediterranean, parts of Spain remained under Muslim
rule from the Umayyad conquest in the eighth century to 1491, when
the emir of Granada relinquished the last Muslim- controlled city in the
peninsula to the Christian monarchs of Castile and Aragon.
Jews – already widely scattered before 70 ce with diaspora settle-
ments in many coastal regions of the eastern Mediterranean as well as
established in large numbers in Egypt, Babylonia and the city of Rome,
and even more dispersed after the devastation of the homeland – were
affected by all these changes in the wider world. Within the Roman
empire, Jewish settlement is attested between the second and fifth cen-
turies ce as far west as Spain and as far north as Gaul and Germany.
These areas were to become great centres of Jewish life by the beginning
of the second millennium ce.
In the land of Israel, a much reduced population in Judaea after the
disaster of 70 ce was deprived of all political self- government. But the