Byzantine Jews and Liturgical Poetry in the Helladic Space

• In Event: Jews around the Mediterranean and Arabian Seas

Abstract

Despite the presence of a vibrant Byzantine Jewish community in the Eastern Roman Empire, we do not have many literary compositions by Byzantine Greek-speaking Jews also known as Romaniotes. A collection of Judeo-Greek poems, however, shows the importance of liturgical poems in the religious lives of Romaniotes of Northwestern and Western Hellas. Limited research on these poems has focused on the philological aspects of their language and, more specifically, on their variants. However, this paper aims to read these poems and contextualize them within the broader Jewish and Greek spheres of the medieval Mediterranean. A close reading of these poems shows how Romaniote Jews understood their place, culturally, within the Helladic space. Thus, it is argued that they adapted biblical and midrashic themes into the poems they wrote using the format of Greek dirges. The paper concludes that, despite their relative isolation, the Romaniote Jews of northern Greece drew on both their Jewish and Greek identities by merging successfully Jewish religious history and Hellenic cultural expression to speak to members of their unique ethnic group.

Author

• Michail Kitsos, Tel Aviv University, Israel