CHRISTIANIZATION 199reality, though even there, the insistence that Jews exercise their curial respon-
sibilities kept the door open to limited integration. Finally, the tendency to
form inward-turning, partly self-enclosed religious communities was strongest
in Palestine, where there remained a concentrated Jewish population. Even
there, though, as we will see, there is evidence for conversion to Christianity,
especially in the later fifth and sixth centuries. And it can scarcely be denied
that throughout the East, the state’s bargain with the Jews—protection in
return for withdrawal—beganto break down in the reign of Justinian.
Appropriation
What constituted the ideology that integrated the late antique Jewish world?
First, it didnotconsist of the prescriptions and attitudes of the rabbis, though
there is some evidence that they were assuming greater importance starting
in the sixth century. Though the rabbis continued to exist and to have follow-
ers in late antiquity, certainly benefiting in the end from the marginalization
of the Jews and their rejudaization, they themselves remained marginal in the
Jewish world. Marginal, but not totally insignificant. Rabbinic Judaism was
no more a completely discrete entity in late antiquity than it had been in
the second and third centuries. The rabbis were constantly engaged with the
attempt to assimilate and control the Jewish “little tradition,” which explains
their endorsement of the synagogue, but their ambivalence about some of its
most striking characteristics (e.g., its decoration) and their no-less-pronounced
ambivalence about the local religious community and the patriarchate. This
engagement probably demonstrates a sustained attempt on the part of some
rabbinic circles, already observed for the third century, to establish a foothold
in the Jewish world, and to reach some sort of modus vivendi with nonrabbinic
Jewishprimates. One indication of the growing success of the rabbis’ accom-
modative strategies in the sixth century is the emergence of the piyyut—its
form borrowed from a popular type of Christian liturgical poetry of the period,
its mood suffused with a sort of hieratic mystification that seems almost stereo-
typically Byzantine, but its content heavily and, it seems to me, sometimes
self-consciously and even polemically rabbinic (though there may have been
nonrabbinic piyyutim that did not survive).^54
The Judaism that most late antique Jews shared was no less a product of
christianization than the fact of their reemergence as a discrete religious entity.
In the following chapters I will concentrate on what I regard as the most
significant characteristic of late antique Judaism—the rise of the synagogue
(^54) Or perhaps several of them do; see M. Sokoloff and J. Yahalom,Jewish Palestinian Aramaic
Poetry from Late Antiquity(Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1999), pp.
39–45.