Jews and Syriac Christians: Intersections Across the First Millennium

Description

Scholarly interest in intersections between Jews and Syriac Christians has experienced a boom in recent years. This is the result of a series of converging trends in the study of both groups and their cultural productions. The present volume contributes to this developing conversation by collecting sixteen studies that investigate a wide range of topics, from questions of origins to the development of communal boundaries, from social interactions to shared historical conditions, involving Jews and Syriac Christians over the first millennium CE. These studies not only reflect the current state of the question, but they also signal new ways forward for future work that crosses disciplinary boundaries between the fields of Jewish Studies and Syriac Studies, in some cases even dismantling those boundaries altogether. Table of Contents Abbreviations Introduction Syriac Monastic Motifs in the Babylonian Talmud: The Ḥeruta Story Reconsidered (b. Qiddushin 81b) • Michal Bar-Asher Siegal Syriac Anti-Judaism: Polemic and Internal Critique • Adam H. Becker Bound and Banned: Aphrahaṭ and Excommunication in the Sasanian Empire • Bar Belinitzky and Yakir Paz Jewish Observance of the Sabbath in Bardaiṣan’s Book of the Laws of Countries • Shaye J. D. Cohen Jewish Christians and the Qurʾān: The Transit of Religious Lore in Late Antique Arabia • Sidney H. Griffith A Long Overdue Farewell: The Purported Jewish Origins of Syriac Christianity • Simcha Gross Exilarch and Catholicos: A Paradigm for the Commonalities of the Jewish and Christian Experience under the Sasanians • Geoffrey Herman Contextualizing Late Antique Rabbinic Narratives • Richard Kalmin Syriac Fathers on Jerusalem • Naomi Koltun-Fromm Staring Down a Laundress: Reading Hagiographic Literature from Syria-Mesopotamia Alongside Rabbinic Writings • Sergey Minov Versions and Perversions of Genesis: Jacob of Edessa, Saadia Gaon, and the Falsification of Biblical History • Yonatan Moss Hebrew and Syriac Liturgical Poetry: A Comparative Outlook • Ophir Münz-Manor Syriac Christian Sources and the Babylonian Talmud • Jeffrey L. Rubenstein Judaeo-Syriac: Syriac Texts in Jewish Square Script • Christian Stadel Anti-Jewish Rhetoric and Christian Identity in Aphrahaṭ’s Demonstrations • J. Edward Walters The Anonymous Mēmrā on the Maccabees: Jewish Pseudepigraphon or Late Antique Festal Poem? • Robin Darling Young Contributors Index