Jews and Syriac Christians

Scholarly interest in intersections between Jews and Syriac Christians has experienced a boom in recent years. This is the result of a series of converging trends in the study of both groups and their cultural productions. The present volume contributes to this developing conversation by collecting sixteen studies that investigate a wide range of topics, from questions of origins to the development of communal boundaries, from social interactions to shared historical conditions, involving Jews and Syriac Christians over the first millennium CE. These studies not only reflect the current state of the question, but they also signal new ways forward for future work that crosses disciplinary boundaries between the fields of Jewish Studies and Syriac Studies, in some cases even dismantling those boundaries altogether.Aaron Michael Butts/Simcha Gross: Introduction – Michal Bar-Asher Siegal: Syriac Monastic Motifs in the Babylonian Talmud: The Heruta Story Reconsidered (b. Qiddushin 81b) – Adam H. Becker: Syriac Anti-Judaism: Polemic and Internal Critique – Bar Belinitzky/Yakir Paz: Bound and Banned: Aphrahaṭ and Excommunication in the Sasanian Empire – Shaye J. D. Cohen: Jewish Observance of the Sabbath in Bardaiṣan's Book of the Laws of Countries – Sidney H. Griffith: Jewish Christians and the Qurʾān: The Transit of Religious Lore in Late Antique Arabia – Simcha Gross: A Long Overdue Farewell: The Purported Jewish Origins of Syriac Christianity – Geoffrey Herman: Exilarch and Catholicos: A Paradigm for the Commonalities of the Jewish and Christian Experience under the Sasanians – Richard Kalmin: Contextualizing Late Antique Rabbinic Narratives – Naomi Koltun-Fromm: Syriac Fathers on Jerusalem – Sergey Minov: Staring Down a Laundress: Reading Hagiographic Literature from Syria-Mesopotamia Alongside Rabbinic Writings – Yonatan Moss: Versions and Perversions of Genesis: Jacob of Edessa, Saadia Gaon, and the Falsification of Biblical History – Ophir Münz-Manor: Hebrew and Syriac Liturgical Poetry: A Comparative Outlook – Jeffrey L. Rubenstein: Syriac Christian Sources and the Babylonian Talmud – Christian Stadel: Judaeo-Syriac: Syriac Texts in Jewish Square Script – J. Edward Walters: Anti-Jewish Rhetoric and Christian Identity in Aphrahaṭ's Demonstrations – Robin Darling Young: The Anonymous Mēmrā on the Maccabees: Jewish Pseudepigraphon or Late-Ancient Festal Poem?