198 CHAPTER SIX
But we should be careful. First of all, the story itself: while there now seem
no grounds for suspecting the authenticity of theLetter o fSeverus,^49 its veracity
is a different matter. Some episodes are questionable, the author knows too
much about his characters’ thoughts and motivations, and some of the charac-
ters are almost certainly invented.^50 But the letter is a social historian’s dream,
filled with plausible yet unexpected details about the social life of Magona.
Perhaps this fact alone should impose restraint. But perhaps, too, it gives the
story the value of a good historical novel: regardless of its truth, the story may
still be useful as garnish or illustration, especially since its author apparently
really did live on Minorca in the early fifth century.
How common were such events on Minorca? The ample evidence for the
destruction of synagogues or their reconsecration as churches suggests at least
that the episode was not unique, and the boom in synagogue construction
elsewhere provides evidence that some Jews took the option of turning inward,
of constituting themselves as religious communities, presumably protected
but marginal.^51 We should certainly suppose, though, that the ideological shift
in relations between the Jews and the state, which can be read with perhaps
misleading ease in the law codes, masked messy social realities. For one thing,
in real life, the process of marginalization proceeded at different rates in differ-
ent places. Though the Jews of Magona were excluded from the system in
the early fifth century, in Venusia, a rather similar sort of small town in Cala-
bria (now Venosa, in the Basilicata), we hear of a Jewishpatronus civitatisas
late as the sixth century.^52 The “barbarian” law codes and church councils
even later continue to prohibit many types of intimacy between Jews and
Christians—intimacies that we may take as tracers for relations of social de-
pendency.^53 It may be significant, though, that such references are far more
common in the West than in the East, where, in relatively stable conditions,
there may have been a closer connection between state ideology and social
(^49) This is the main, and convincing, argument of the introduction of Bradbury,Severus;
Stemberger, “Zwangstaufen,” pp. 86–90, is characteristically inconclusive, while most historians
have tended to assume the work’s authenticity and essential veracity without discussion.
(^50) See again the discussion of Bradbury,Severus.
(^51) On the Palestinian synagogues, see below; the vast majority of Diaspora synagogues were
built in the same period; see Rutgers,Hidden Heritage, pp. 125–35.
(^52) See Noy,Jewish Inscriptions, 1, #114; for the date, see M. Williams, “The Jews in Early
Byzantine Venusia: The Family of Faustinus I, the Father,”JJS50 (1999): 47–48. For an aristo-
cratic Samaritan family at Scythopolis in the sixth century, whose members includedpatroni
civitatisand even a Constantinopolitan senator who attained the illustrate, i.e., the highest sena-
torial rank (but who may have been Christian), see L. di Segni, “The Samaritans in Roman-
Byzantine Palestine,” in H. Lapin, ed.,Religious and Ethnic Communities in Later Roman Pales-
tine(Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 1998), pp. 65–66. The legal position of Samaritans
was somewhat different from that of Jews, as di Segni notes.
(^53) See the summary presentation of this material in Parkes,Conflict o fthe Church and the
Synagogue, pp. 379–86.