300 A History of Judaism
of the history of the Jews in the Second Temple period derived his infor-
mation on the period from Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities and Jewish
War ; but, although he came from a part of Italy which was within the
Byzantine empire where the official language was Greek, he knew Jos-
ephus only through a Latin version written by a Christian called
Hegesippus in the second half of the fourth century. A century later, a
chronicler and poet from Capua in Italy, Ahimaaz b. Paltiel, whose
rhymed account in Hebrew of the achievements of his family since the
ninth century was discovered in the library of Toledo cathedral in 1895,
claimed that he was descended from those who had been brought as
captives to Jerusalem by Titus, but he showed little knowledge of Greek.
In the eastern Mediterranean, by contrast, Jews continued to use Greek,
albeit in Hebrew letters, in religious documents such as marriage con-
tracts and biblical exegesis. In Constantinople, the Balkans and Asia
Minor, Romaniot Jews, whose name refers to the origins of their liturgi-
cal rite in the Byzantine empire, continued to use such Judaeo- Greek
throughout the Middle Ages, especially for reading the book of Jonah
on the Day of Atonement. But, apart from such occasional use of Greek
in liturgy, only a few other Jewish Greek customs survived into early
modern times, such as the recitation of the seven wedding blessings at
the betrothal ceremony rather than the marriage.^17
Quite why the rabbinic movement was eventually so much more suc-
cessful than the Greek Judaism it replaced in much of the Mediterranean
world is not easy to explain, because we have seen that religious teach-
ings promulgated by rabbinic Judaism itself were neither easily accessible
(since few Mediterranean Jews at the end of the first millennium will
have known how to read and understand Hebrew or Aramaic) nor
readily comprehensible (since a religious discourse based on interpret-
ations of talmudic discussions was essentially esoteric). But the effective
transmission of religious authority among Jews to a learned rabbinic
elite schooled in a special scholarly language mirrored the authority of
Christian clerics schooled in Latin within wider European society.
It seems that Greek Jews faced with the prestige of rabbis armed with
such knowledge felt unable to defend their own traditions. The Jews of
Candia in Crete, who copied in the late fourteenth century a Greek text
of Jonah now in the Bodleian Library, felt impelled in the first half of the
sixteenth century to write to Meir Katzenellenbogen, the Ashkenazi
rabbi of Padua, to seek (successfully) his explicit authority for their
liturgical use of Greek. It was evidently now not enough for them simply
to continue with the Greek Judaism of their ancestors.^18