Judaism and Imperial Ideology in Late Antiquity

Abstract

This book explores the influence of Roman imperialism on the development of Messianic themes in Judaism in the fifth through the eight centuries CE. It pays special attention to the ways in which Roman imperial ideology and imperial eschatology influenced Jewish representations of the Messiah and Messianic age. Topics addressed in the book include: representations of the Messianic kingdom of Israel as a successor to the Roman Empire, the theme of imperial renewal in Jewish eschatology and its Roman parallels, representations of the emperor in late antique literature and art and their influence on the representations of the Messiah, the mother of the Messiah in late antique and Byzantine cultural contexts, and the figure of the last Roman Emperor in Christian and Jewish tradition.

The serpent column: the persistent meanings of a pagan relic in christian and islamic constantinople

“…Indeed, Jewish rabbis vigorously challenged the Christian appropriation of the Holy Land, of Israelite identity, and of Jewish relics. The imperial conceptualization of Constantinople as the New Jerusalem, and the emperor as a new Solomon, was countered in Jewish thought by the conceptualization of Jerusalem as the future Constantinople (Sivertsev 2011). This is seen, for instance, in an anonymous rabbinic manuscript from the sixteenth century (though based on older views) in which King Solomon is portrayed with all the trappings and powers of a Byzantine basileus, and biblical Jerusalem is shaped as a mirror image of the Byzantine capital.…”

Muḥammad, Menaḥem, and the Paraclete: new light on Ibn Isḥāq's (d. 150/767) Arabic version of John 15: 23–16: 1

“…70 However shortlived this restoration of Jerusalem to the Jews was, Byzantium's humiliation stoked eschatological dreams of Israel as Rome's messianic and imperial heir and of the Messiah Menah ̣em's imminent advent. 71 No Jewish apocalyptic work embodies these expectations more vividly than the early seventh-century apocalypse Sefer Zerubbabel, itself likely written in response to the tumultuous events in Palestine and Syria during the Perso-Byzantine War (601-628). 72 The apocalypse recounts the vision of the Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel of Biblical fame, whom the archangel Michael carries away to the gates of Rome to meet the Messiah-in-waiting: 73 Then [the angel Michael] said to me, "This is the Messiah of the Lord: [he has been] hidden in this place until the appointed time [of his advent].…”