from pagan rome to islam and medieval christendom 233
greatly over the ensuing millennium to the fall of Byzantium in 1453.
After the Islamic conquest of the land of Israel and of Egypt, Jews were
found in the major cities still ruled by Byzantium (which included, after
its reconquest by Justinian in the mid- sixth century, much of southern
Italy). The emperor Justinian II in 692 ce prohibited Jews and Chris-
tians from bathing together in public places. Decrees were issued by
Basil I (in 873– 4) and Romanos I (in 930) ordering the forcible conver-
sion of the Jews. It is evident that those Jews in the empire who remained
in their faith did so only on sufferance. But there was a Jewish quarter,
Pera, in Constantinople, at the time of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, and
still enough Jews in Greece and the Balkans in the thirteenth century to
attract the attention of local Byzantine rulers such as Theodore I
Angelus, who between 1214 and 1230 proscribed Judaism in the region
of Epirus and Salonica under his control.^4
Some Jews from these lands fled to Khazaria, a Turkish kingdom to
the north- east of the Black Sea in the lower Volga region, which flour-
ished (at times extending a good deal to the west) from the eighth to the
tenth century. Khazaria was ruled over by a dynasty which in c. 730
adopted Judaism as the state religion, probably in part as a ruse in their
complex diplomatic relations with neighbouring Christian Byzantines
and Muslim Arabs. They were not the first to see the advantages of
Judaism as a religion which would preserve independence from the
imperialist Christian ambitions of Byzantium. Already in the late fourth
century ce the king of the Himyarite tribe in south Arabia had pro-
tected his power in Yemen against Christian Byzantium in the north and
the Christian kingdom of Aksum in Ethiopia on the other side of the
Red Sea by conversion to Judaism. The Khazars were generally known
to their Muslim neighbours as Jews, but how much of the population
adopted the religion of the Khazar kings is unknown. Muslims, Chris-
tians and pagans formed the majority of the population and were
granted internal autonomy, and accounts of the origin of Khazarian
Judaism refer to some 4,000 nobles adopting the Jewish faith alongside
their king Bulan. The twelfth- century Jewish traveller Benjamin of
Tudela made no mention of Khazaria as a Jewish kingdom, but he did
refer to Khazars in Constantinople and Alexandria, and there is evi-
dence that at least some documents of Khazar Jews were to be found in
the following centuries also in the Ukraine and Poland.^5
The fate of the Jews in Babylonia was very different to that of their co-
religionists under Roman and Christian rule. Little is known about the