Chapter 2 - A great Empire; the Byzantines

Chapter 2 -A Great Empire; the Byzantines
As I told before around the year 132 AD there was another uprising by Jews in the Near East (Bar Kokba). The Emperor Hadrian outlawed teaching of the Law, and destroyed most of Judea. Many Jews went to Babylon, where they were fairly well treated and did quite well. In around 500 AD, they completed there the Babylonian Talmud, a collection of commentaries on and explanations of the Law. Around the same time the Judean Talmud was completed, which laid down the rules of behavior for the religious Jewish live, now that we do not have anymore the Temple as the heart of our religion.

The Talmud replaced the laws and rituals of the Jewish rites from the verbal passing on from father to son, to a more strictly regulated form of religion, similar as the testament of the Christians. Many rites and customs were adapted to ensure that the laws as was understood by the Rabbis of those days. This caused the break away of Jewish groups such as the Caraites. The Caraites attacked the Talmudic interpretation of the Bible, rejecting the oral law and interpreting the Bible literally, and they developed their own commentaries, which were in many respects more rigorous and ascetic than the Talmudic interpretations.
105 years ago, in the year 395 AD, the Roman emperor Theodosum I divided the empire and placed his son Arcadius at the head of the Eastern side and his other son Honorius on the throne of the Western side.

The city of Byzantium was chosen to be the capitol of the Eastern Roman Empire. Sixty five years later, however, the name of the city was changed to Constantinople in honor of its founder, Constantine. Even though, this radical change was made in the concept of the empire, the Byzantines always referred to themselves as the Roman Empire and their nation as the Nation of Rome. After the collapse of the empire, the historians began to refer to this empire as the "Byzantine" Empire and so it is remembered today. This empire began in 330 AD. A struggle between Moslems and Christians began to arise in the middle Ages. Those warriors known as the Crusaders were the most concrete example of the struggle between these two large religious beliefs.

The most important change made in the Roman Empire evolving the change in religion. While Rome had been a polytheistic society, the Byzantines accepted monotheism as the basis for their religious belief. The second greatest change that occurred in the empire was the change in language. The Roman Empire used a number of languages, but Latin was the official language of its government. Latin was used increasingly less after the founding of Byzantium and Greek began to take its place as the official language. Naturally, this change also brought with it major political changes.

The Byzantine Empire began with the Emperor Constantine who reigned for thirteen years. Then other emperors took over, were killed, removed, died, conquered etc. Those emperors came from different family lines. The leading ruling houses of Byzantium originated from Heraclion, Syria, Phrygia, Macedonia, Commenos, Angelos, and Palaiologos.
Although the Byzantines began their empire with a vast territory of land inherited from the Roman Empire, they soon lost the territories around the Northern and Easter Mediterranean and they became an empire with solely Aegean territory. Eventually by the time of the collapse of the Empire, Byzantium merely consisted of the city of Istanbul and its immediate surroundings, but this was of course not evident 500 AD., when Byzantium was still the center of civilization.

The juridical standing of the Jews in the Byzantine Empire was unique during the entire history of the Empire; they did not belong to the Eastern Christian Orthodox faith, which was the State Religion, nor were they--in most circumstances--grouped together with heretics and pagans. They were placed in a legal position somewhere between the two worlds. The place along the spectrum of social freedom in which Byzantine Jews found themselves varied somewhat--though far from drastically--with time, and depended largely on three factors: the desire of the state to maintain the Jews as a living testament to the victory of Christianity, the desire of the state to strengthen its control, and the ability of centralized rule from Constantinople to enforce its laws and legislatures.

The above reflections about this era I wrote many years later, when I was able to see a much wider spectrum of our life in Constantinople, the new capital of the civilization.
For us Jews, living in a relative friendly environment was a pleasant change from the hectic life of Jews in the Diaspora; finally we were recognized for our services, our knowledge and honesty.

Within the Roman Empire, the Jews were granted citizenship (like everyone else) in 212 AD. But we Jews were greatly disliked by other Roman citizens: We insisted on dressing differently, celebrating different holidays, eating different foods. Even more annoying was our exclusivity, our firm conviction that we are better than everyone else and our disdain for anyone other gods. The increasing popularity of one Jewish messianic sect -- Christianity -- only made things worse.

In 417 AD, Constantine, the first Christian emperor, lowered the Jew's status to secondary citizens of the Empire.
About 50 years before, Constantinople had been threatened by invasion of Atilla the Hun, the Hun' armies reached the outer walls of the town, but the circumstances caused the Huns to stop and abandon their attack Since the Huns disappeared from the scene, the trading routes are far safer, and the danger of Hun invasion seems to be averted

Those Huns after the death of Antilla and his dynasty eventually turned into the famous Khazar Empire, a kingdom of nomadic tribes that chose to convert to the Jewish religion.

Apparently, there was very little communication between our Jews and Khazars, and their appearance and disappearance never played an important part in the history of our people.

At that time of the Hun attack on Constantinople, I still lived in Smyrna, which had a large population of Jews. Around 200 years before, the town Smyrna had been the scene of frictions between the new Jews (the Christians) and the Jewish citizens in town.

Smyrna was a free city, a town that knew the meaning of loyalty and fidelity to Rome unlike most cities. Cicero called it, “one of our most faithful and our most ancient allies.” It was the first city in the world to erect a temple to the goddess Roma and to the spirit of Rome. Her fidelity to Rome was famous in the ancient world.

Another fact of importance concerns the Jews there.
The population of Jews in the city who were not only numerous, but influential and who did everything they could to oppose the growth of Christianity in Smyrna.

It also seems that a fair number of those Jews accepted Jesus as Messiah. For those who didn't, salvation of the Jews through Jesus infuriated them, and they sought to destroy this upstart movement. They had their means of doing so in the matter of Roman worship. They knew enough about Christians to know that Christians couldn't proclaim Caesar as Lord. They also knew the city leaders and knew of their heightened sense of loyalty to Rome. With those two bits of knowledge, threatening the Church was easy. All these Jews had to do was to meet the city officials (with whom they may have already had connections) and turn the Christians in.

Furthermore, in doing so they not only destroyed the Church, they also gained brownie points as faithful citizens (and those might prove useful in the future).
The Christian claimed that the Jews bore false witness against the believers in Smyrna, slandering them before the Roman authorities.

Their statement was that these Christians were political subversives, and therefore were dangerous to the Empire because they denied Caesar his proper place. There is no way for me to verify if this was really a true story, or the work of the Church leaders to create an animosity between the Christians and the Jews, is one of the known fore runners of Antisemitism, a hate which will in time develop in monstrous dimensions. The accusation that the Jews had crucified Joshua, the Nazarene was retold and became part of the Christian religion.

While until that time, the Jews and the Christians somehow tolerated each others, they now fought for the belief of the people. It should be noted that the tension between the Jews and Christian community became the root of animosity between the two religions. The Christians claimed that the Jews made the Christians looking bad in their complaints to the Romans, while the Christians started to teach and preach against the Jews. This became a chapter in the New Testament, which was composed many years later, however was accepted as the ground stone for justifying hatred of the Jews.