Guy H. Haskell. From Sofia to Jaffa: The Jews of Bulgaria and Israel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. 235 pp.

Cannibal Maria in the Siege of Jerusalem: New approaches

“…Drawing upon an array of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and possibly Arabic/Judeo‐Arabic sources to reclaim Josephus's history of the Second Temple period from Christian triumphalist narrative and reframe it as part of a continuous history of the Jews going back to Creation (Dönitz, 2012), SY is the first real “Jewish” translation of Josephus. As Ruth Nisse observes, it “gave medieval Jews the means to interpret and redefine their history in relation to the ruling powers and texts of the Roman‐Christian world” (Bowman, 2023; Goodman, 2019; Nisse, 2017, p. 32). SY quickly became a canonical text for Jews globally and was translated into medieval Judeo‐Arabic, Arabic, and Ethiopian and, in the early modern period, into Latin, English, Yiddish and numerous vernaculars (Binyam, 2017; Goodman, 2019).…”

“…As Krummel notes, the act of physical annihilation that Maria describes in Josephus as a vehicle of spite or defiance is a long‐lasting memorial that “will forever represent how unjustly Jews have been treated….Josephus's Maria thus writes herself and her son into a future time.” (Krummel, 2022, p. 169; see also Neelakanta, 2019) By SY , drawing on Latin influence, Miriam's speech is longer and her questions more intimate: she twice asks: “what shall I do for you…?” and once “And if I die, to whom will I leave you…?” implying the answers nothing else and no one , and describes consuming her son as the only form of protection she can now provide. Even without food, water, or future, however, she is concerned with posterity, concluding: “so it will be said that his mother killed him and ate him” (Bowman, 2023, pp. 375, 376) 11…”

“…Scholarly developments in the past decade prompt a new look at this episode. These include source and textual criticism of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic and other translations of Josephus that demonstrate complex relationships among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim readerships (Bay, 2022b; Binyam, 2017) and first or new modern English translations of key Hebrew, Arabic, Ge'ez, and Middle English iterations of the story (Bowman, 2023; Binyam, 2017; A.W. Boyarin, 2013).…”

“…Important rabbinic texts include b. Yoma 38b.5, which explicitly links maternal cannibalism of the First and Second Temple destructions, and Lamentations Rabbah 1, part of a commentary on Lamentations that locates the logic of curse and remedy in “יְדֵי,” the hands that perform the cannibalistic action. Bowman (2023) apparently finds no direct influence by this tradition on the SY Miriam episode discussed below, but further research on the connection would be welcome.…”