Development and contexts of the Syriac Christian Anti-Jewish Literature in North Mesopotamia (5th‒ early 6th century)

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Dmitrij Bumazhnov
• Subject Area: Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies ; Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 447703075

This research project focuses on the analysis of the historical contexts and the development trends of the Syriac anti-Jewish literature in North Mesopotamia in the 5th‒ early 6th century. The polemical literature in question is of special importance because of the linguistic proximity of the classic Syriac to the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. Nevertheless, it has been almost completely neglected in the scholarship so far. The main sources of the project are a corpus of the unknown verse homilies by Narsai (+ c. 500) and Jacob of Sarug (+ 521), which have been partly published in 2017 (Jacob) and partly remain available in the manuscripts (Narsai) as well as the Adversus Judaeos works by the same two authors, which have been known for a long time but still remain unstudied. The purpose of the project is to study the reception of the anti-Jewish motifs found in the earlier Syriac narratives, such as the Teaching of Addai, the Protonike Legend or the Kyriakos Legend in the new verse homilies by Narsai and Jacob, and to investigate whether these homilies played any role in the development of later Syriac anti-Jewish texts (e.g. the Syriac tradition of the Transitus Mariae or the Syriac Julian Romance). The contextualization of these processes and the Adversus Judaeos works by Narsai and Jacob shall clarify in which cases these authors had to do with representatives of the Jewish religion, Jewish Christians, Gentile Judaizers or with Christian heretics polemically called "Jews". It shall be also investigated to what extent their polemics depended on the religious politics and ideology of the Christian state with respect to the Jews. Finally, it shall be addressed the question about possible interferences between the Christian confession of the two authors ("hysism" [Jacob] and "nestorianism" [Narsai]) as well as their respective surroundings (Byzantine Empire [Jacob] and Sasanian Empire [Narsai, from 489]) on the one hand, and their attitude towards the Jews, on the other. The novelty of this project lies in addressing as a unity the scholarly neglected, vast literary production of the Syriac anti-Jewish literature in the 5th ‒ early 6th century, and in searching for plausible historical contexts of this phenomenon. By doing so, the applicant intends to elucidate an almost unknown facet of the Jewish-Christian relations in Late Antiquity. The project results will also be relevant for the interpretation of the Syriac anti-Muslim polemic literature, which heavily relies on the anti-Jewish one. The research results shall be made available in a number of journal publications which can be combined in a book.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants