THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN – A REGION IN FERMENThad happened in the context of the arrival of relics of St Stephen on the island
of Minorca in 417,^46 and many Christian bishops made it their business to stir
up Christian suspicion. The attitudes of Christians towards Jews in Palestine
also hardened, especially under the pressures of the seventh-century inva-
sions, although much of this was expressed at a literary level. A corresponding
process of increased Judaization has been seen by Seth Schwartz in synagogue
art and in the emergence of the Hebrew poetic form of piyyutim, with its close
relation to the rabbinic corpus;^47 this can be seen in turn as part of a resilience
which meant that the Jewish presence survived the transition to Islamic rule,
with Tiberias continuing to be a centre of Jewish learning and religious life
under early Islam.^48 If true, this may also have been a contributing factor to
the intense anti-Jewish rhetoric found in seventh-century and later Christian
sources on the Persian and Arab invasions.
While the diffusion of synagogues in fi fth- and sixth-century Palestine is
indicative of a thriving village network, the same period saw extensive church
building. How far Jews and Christians at this period tended to live in separate
communities is a matter of controversy,^49 but village synagogues, like village
churches, indicate the presence and willingness of donors to contribute on a
large scale; as with donor inscriptions in churches, the economics of their con-
struction were recorded, as at Bet Alfa and synagogues had treasuries. But the
region was also the home of ascetics, some very famous and much-visited.
The appeal of asceticsIn the late fourth and fi fth centuries prominent westerners including Jerome
and his friend Paula, who settled at Bethlehem, and the Younger Melania
and her husband Pinianus travelled to the Holy Land and Melania founded a
monastery on the Mount of Olives monasteries; the Empress Eudocia, wife
of Theodosius II, travelled there with Melania in 438 and lived there for some
years after 443. We have already encountered the stylite Symeon the Elder
(d. 459) with his pillar at Qalaat Semaan in Syria (Chapter 3), and more than
a century later, Symeon the Younger (d. 594), whose pillar was located out-
side Antioch on the so-called ‘Wondrous Mountain’, began his ascetic life by
attaching himself to the community that had grown up around another stylite.
According to his Life he was well informed about events in Antioch, knew
of the death of the Lakhmid al-Mundhir in 553 and predicted the succession
of Justin II in 565. Famous holy men like these were well connected and
enjoyed elite patronage. They were very different from some of the ascetics
who were the subjects of Theodoret’s Historia Religiosa in the fi fth century,
some of whom practised exotic forms of personal abnegation such as liv-
ing in cowsheds and eating grass.^50 Monasticism depended on ascetics; as we
have seen, Cyril of Scythopolis in the sixth century also wrote of Euthymius
and Sabas, monastic founders who were themselves ascetics, and the Judaean
‘desert’ was full of monasteries large and small, as well as hermitages and caves
inhabited by individual holy men. The region was also the location for more