Jews in Byzantium : dialectics of minority and majority cultures / / edited by Robert Bonfil, Oded Irshai, Guy G. Stroumsa, Rina Talgam.

• Superior document: Jerusalem studies in religion and culture, v. 14
• Author: Scholion--Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies
• TeilnehmendeR: Bonfil, Robert; Irshai, Oded; Stroumsa, Guy G.; Talgam, Rina; Scholion--Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies; Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Mandel Institute for Jewish Studies
• Year of Publication: 2012
• Language: English
• Series: Jerusalem studies in religion and culture ; v. 14.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (1058 p.)
• Notes: Includes index.

In the ever increasing volume of Byzantine Studies in recent years there seems to be one very apparent void, namely, the history and culture of the Byzantine Jewry, its presence and impact on the surrounding convoluted Byzantine world between Late Antiquity until the conquest of Byzantium (1453). With the now classic but dated studies by Joshua Starr and Andrew Sharf, the collective volume at hand is an attempt to somewhat fill in this void. The articles assembled in this volume are penned by leading scholars in the field. They present bird's eye views of the cultural history of the Jewish Byzantine minority, alongside a wide array of surveys and in-depth studies of various topics. These topics pertain to the dialectics of the religious, literary, economic and visual representation world of this alien minority within its surrounding Byzantine hegemonic world.

Table of Contents

pt. 1. Setting the stage -- pt. 2. Cultural encounters and transmission of knowledge -- pt. 3. Images.

Confronting a Christian empire : Jewish life and culture in the world of early Byzantium / Oded Irshai -- Continuity and discontinuity (641-1204) / Robert Bonfil -- Survival in decline : Romaniote Jewry post-1204 / Steven Bowman -- Christians and Jews in Byzantium : a love-hate relationship / Spyros N. Troianos -- The legal status of Jews in the Byzantine Empire / Amnon Linder -- The Jews in the Byzantine economy (seventh to mid-fifteenth century) / David Jacoby -- Jewish survival in late antique Alexandria / Guy G. Stroumsa -- The Jews in Byzantine southern Italy / Vera von Falkenhausen -- The Jews of Slavia Graeca : the northern frontier of Byzantine Jewry? / Alexander Kulik -- Piyyut in Byzantium : a few remarks / Joseph Yahalom -- Style as a chronological indicator : on the relative dating of the Golan synagogues / Roni Amir -- The Greek Bible in the medieval synagogue / Nicholas de Lange -- Judeo-Greek or Greek spoken by Jews? / Cyril Aslanov -- Constructing identity through art : Jewish art as a minority culture in Byzantium / Rina Talgam -- Judaism and the development of Byzantine art / Herbert L. Kessler -- "By means of colors" : a Judeo-Christian dialogue in Byzantine iconography / Elisheva Revel-Neher -- Forms and functions of anti-Jewish polemics : polymorphy, polysémy / Vincent Déroche -- The physiognomy of Greek Contra Iudaeos manuscript books in the Byzantine era : a preliminary survey / Patrick Andrist -- The Judaizing Christians of Byzantium : an objectionable form of spirituality / Philippe Gardette -- Romanos the Melodist and Palestinian piyyut : sociolinguistic and pragmatic perspectives / Cyril Aslanov -- Early halakhic literature / Hillel I. Newman -- Byzantium's role in the transmission of Jewish knowledge in the Middle Ages : the attitude toward circumcision / Micha Perry -- The kabbalah in Byzantium : preliminary remarks / Moshe Idel -- Cultural exchanges between Jews and Christians in the palaeologan period / Marie-Hélène Congourdeau -- Byzantine Karaism in the eleventh to fifteenth centuries / Golda Akhiezer -- Barbarians or heretics? Jews and Arabs in the mind of Byzantium (fourth to eighth centuries) / Guy G. Stroumsa -- Images of Jews in Byzantine chronicles : a general survey / Rivkah Fishman-Duker -- Jews and Judaism in early church historiography : the case of Eusebius of Caesarea (preliminary observations and examples) / Oded Irshai -- Carnivalesque ambivalence and the Christian other in Aramaic poems from Byzantine Palestine / Ophir Münz-Manor -- The view of Byzantine Jews in Islamic and Eastern Christian sources / Yossi Soffer -- In search of the Jews in Byzantine literature / Vera von Falkenhausen -- Converts in Byzantine Italy : local representations of Jewish-Christian rivalry / Youval Rotman -- Byzantine-Jewish ethnography : a consideration of the Sefer Yosippon in light of Gerson Cohen's "Esau as symbol in early medieval thought" / Joshua Holo -- Historiography among Byzantine Jews : the case of Sefer Yosippon / Saskia Dönitz -- Refracting Christian truths through the prism of the biblical female in Byzantine illuminated manuscripts / Mati Meyer.