4 - Synagogue Poets in Balkan Byzantium

Summary

GENERAL BACKGROUND

Greece and Anatolia

ALTHOUGH it is likely that Jewish settlements in Balkan Byzantium existed from the time the Eastern Empire was founded by Constantine in 330 until the advent of Alexius Comnenus (1081-1118) and his heirs, the historical record begins with the visit of Benjamin of Tudela to the region in 1168. During his visit to Constantinople, the capital of the Empire, Benjamin was impressed with its sizeable Jewish community of Rabbanites and Karaites. Making his way through the Via Egnatia, the southern Balkan trade route linking the Adriatic to the Black Sea, and the seaport cities, the Tudelan itinerant noted his impressions of some twenty-seven Graeco-Jewish settlements engaged in farming and cloth-dying, silk manufacture and tanning. Jewish communities not mentioned by Benjamin include Kastoria on the Via Egnata, the home of the learned R. Tobias b. Eliezer, author of the Midraš Leqaḥ Ṭov (written and revised in 1097-1108) and Selymbria (Silivri), the city near Constantinople where the twelfth-century rabbi Hillel b. Eliaqim lived. Author of commentaries on the Sifra and Sifre, R. Hillel is cited as an authority in Jewish law by R. Isaac b. Abba Mari of Marseilles (c.1120-c.1190) in his Sefer Ha-‘Iṭṭur and by the thirteenth-century Italian Tosafist, Isaiah b. Mali of Trani.

In the Roman Empire, the Jews as a religious group were tolerated accord- ing to law (religio licita). Although their status did not change when the Empire came under the control of Christian monarchs, this became subject to several restrictions. In the east the Byzantine emperor Theodosius II (408-50) in his code of 438 prohibited the building of new synagogues and allowed only essential structural repairs on existing buildings. His code also forbade excesses in Purim celebrations. This intrusion into Jewish religious practice was followed by others under Justinian I (527-65), who sought to regulate the Jewish worship service by forbidding rabbinic interpretations in the Scripture lesson and by being involved in deciding which biblical translation to use (see Sharf, Byzantine Jewry, p. 24). Later emperors in the Heraclian (Heraclius I, 610-41), Isaurian (Leo III, 717-41) and Macedonian (Basil I, 867-86, and Romanus I, 919-44) dynasties sought to convert Jews to Christianity by force. The east Roman emperor in Nicaea, John III, Ducas Vatatzes (1222-54), made a similar effort.