Early Medieval Continuities with Late Antiquity

What Did the Jewish World Look Like in the Year 600?

At the turn of the seventh century, the largest Jewish population centers were still to be found in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, the core areas of Jewish settlement going back to antiquity. 

Two World Powers: The Byzantine and Sasanian Empires

The lands on the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean were controlled by the Byzantine Empire, which, though officially Christian and ruled from Constantinople, saw itself as, and in many respects indeed was, the direct continuation of the Roman Empire established in the time of Augustus. Mesopotamia and the adjacent Iranian plateau, however, were controlled by the Sasanian Empire, which had come to power almost four hundred years earlier claiming to be the successor to the Persian state founded by Cyrus the Great (d. 530 BCE). 

Both were massive powers that shared not only a sense of a long imperial past and a claim to universal rule but also the difficulties inherent in governing populations that were ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse. 

More significantly, each faced the challenge of the other. For centuries the Roman-Byzantine and Sasanian empires vied, on the battlefield and off, for dominance in the Near East in a conflict with political, economic, and religious dimensions that neither side proved capable of decisively winning. Although the border fluctuated, it ran more or less north to south, bisecting eastern Anatolia and the northern portion of the Fertile Crescent. South of the Euphrates, however, the waterless desert opened up an expansive frontier zone between the two realms that extended all the way to Arabia. The two world powers had established an equilibrium of sorts, and a casual observer in the year 600 might be excused for having assumed that the tense geopolitical standoff, centuries old at that point, would continue for the foreseeable future, uninterrupted and unresolved.

Conflict Between the Empires

In this frontier region, however, disruptive developments were already underway as various proxies, the Jews among them, were increasingly drawn into the fray. In Syria, Arab confederations on either side of the desert became client states of neighboring imperial powers, while far to the south the conflict played out in an Ethiopian-led and Byzantine-supported military campaign in 525 that put an end to Himyar, a Jewish kingdom in southern Yemen that had been allied with the Persians. 

Crucially, this imperial struggle would also form the backdrop to the emergence of Islam in central Arabia and to the pivotal role in that process played by the oasis town of Yathrib, later known as Medina, with its large Jewish population.

The Final Confrontation

The final confrontation between the Byzantines and the Sasanians showcased both the strengths and the weaknesses of these two imperial powers. Taking advantage of a leadership crisis in the Byzantine Empire, the Sasanian ruler Khosro II initiated a series of westward thrusts into Byzantine areas beginning in 603. By 616, his forces had reached the Mediterranean and succeeded in occupying all of Syria and Palestine. Egypt and the eastern half of Anatolia soon fell as well. 

But, on the verge of defeat and with Constantinople itself under attack, the Byzantine emperor Heraclius rallied his troops and staged a brilliantly effective counteroffensive. Between 624 and 628, Byzantine soldiers overran the Persian army, recovered lost lands, and then pushed into Sasanian territory, ultimately pressing as far as Ctesiphon, the capital, situated not far from the future Islamic metropolis, Baghdad. The Sasanians were forced at that point to sue for peace, and the new border was drawn more or less where the old one had been.

The seeming return to normalcy at the end of the hostilities was deceptive. In reality, both empires were severely depleted, with little to show for their efforts in terms of actual territorial gains. What’s more, the conflict had exposed serious internal divisions simmering just beneath the surface. 

The Jews in Jerusalem

What transpired when Jerusalem was taken by the Persians in 614 and then recaptured by the Byzantines in 628 is revealing. 

For nearly three hundred years Jerusalem had been a Christian city, and Christians understandably mourned its loss to the Persians as a political and spiritual catastrophe. For Jews, by contrast, who had suffered under Byzantine rule, the arrival of the Sasanian army was cause for jubilation. Reports of the participation of Jews in the slaughter of the city’s Christian population are probably exaggerated, but there is every reason to assume that they initially viewed the Persians as their liberators. The celebration was to be short-lived, however. 

Heraclius returned victorious fourteen years later, and not long after he issued a decree commanding all Jews to be baptized, although it remains unclear whether that was in retaliation for their recent support of the Persians or as part of a broader effort to unify his realm. Jewish apocalyptic sources like the Book of Zerubbabel and the Book of Elijah, which were composed during this brief and turbulent period, reflect not only Jewish hostility toward the Byzantines, as we might expect, but frustration with the Sasanians as well. More broadly, these sources augur the collapse of an imperial system that struggled to integrate the diverse religious populations they encompassed.

The Jews in Visigothic Spain

At the other end of the Mediterranean, Jews confronted similar pressures under the Visigothic rulers of Spain. One of the Germanic tribes that entered Europe with the collapse of Roman rule, the Visigoths migrated to Spain in the middle of the fifth century and eventually came to dominate the region. Adherents of Arian Christianity, a non-Trinitarian doctrine condemned by the Catholic Church, they initially exhibited little interest in Jews. 

With their embrace of Catholicism following the conversion of King Reccared in 587, however, their attitude changed. Over the following century, a desire for orthodox unity spawned, among other things, expressions of virulent anti-Judaism that are reflected in royal legislation, the proceedings of church councils, and the writings of church officials like Isidore of Seville (d. 636). 

Indicative of this new, more hostile environment is the reign of Sisebut (612–621), the first monarch in Europe to demand that all Jews in his realm convert. Clearly not all did, as Sisebut’s successors in the second half of the seventh century saw the need to ban the observance of specific Jewish rituals (circumcision, dietary restrictions, and Passover) and devised a repudiation of Judaism that all Jews were required to sign. 

The difficulty in assessing the success of any of these measures is compounded by the fact that no Jewish sources from Visigothic Spain survive. Nonetheless, the official policies adopted during this last 125-year period of Visigothic rule stand in sharp contrast to the more benign approach formulated by the towering churchman Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) and pursued by most rulers in Christian Europe until the thirteenth century, which affirmed the Jews’ basic right to live unharmed in Christian lands.

Though localized, these glimpses of religious turmoil in the early years of the seventh century help explain Jewish reactions to the appearance in short order of a new theological and political force—Islam.