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SURVIVAL in DECLINE: ROMANIOTE JEWRY POST-1204* Steven Bowman the Jewish Communities of Byzantium Entered the Thirteenth Chris

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SURVIVAL in DECLINE: ROMANIOTE JEWRY POST-1204* Steven Bowman the Jewish Communities of Byzantium Entered the Thirteenth Chris SURVIVAL IN DECLINE: ROMANIOTE JEWRY POST-1204* Steven Bowman The Jewish communities of Byzantium entered the thirteenth Chris- tian century with trepidation, repressed anger, and messianic hopes. It was the beginning of a transitional period that lasted three centuries and included three stages. The first was the Crusader invasion in 1204 and dismemberment of the empire. The succeeding Palaeologan period (1258–1453) turned out to be one of continuity and discontinuity, as evidenced in three distinctive areas: the political history of Byzantium, its changing attitudes towards its non-Orthodox populations, and the cultural story of the Romaniote Jews. The fourteenth and fifteenth cen- turies witnessed the rise of the Ottoman sultanate, whose conquest of Constantinople completed the period of transition in the Balkans until the emergence of national states in the nineteenth century. Despite the significant changes that the Byzantine rulers and the minorities in the empire, including the Romaniote Jews, would undergo by the end of the period, the challenges and responses that characterize them throughout follow similar patterns, as outlined below. In the more than half century since Joshua Starr’s pioneering Roma- nia: The Jewries of the Levant after the Fourth Crusade, a significant number of studies have explored the Jews in the Latin and Palaeologan periods.1 These studies have broadened in depth with the appearance of specialists in the social and economic history of the Jews, the rela- tions between Rabbinates and Karaites, the intellectual encounter of Jews with Byzantine philosophy and other aspects of the intellectual * At the outset we should note that in the many areas of the Byzantine Balkans con- trolled by non-Byzantine governments, the culture and language remained Byzantine Orthodox. So too for the Jews who were predominantly Romaniotes and who con- tinued their own Balkan Greek and Palestinian traditions in former Byzantine areas. Hence our discussion will treat the area as one oecumenum, or as Dimitri Obololen- sky called the broader area, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe 500–1453 (London, 1971). 1 J. Starr, Romania: The Jewries of the Levant after the Fourth Crusade (Paris, 1949). Since 1987 there has been continued monitoring of an increasing volume of studies in the Bulletin of Judaeo-Greek Studies, edited by N. de Lange et al. and published semi- annually at Cambridge University [henceforth BJGS]. 102 steven bowman history of all the Jews in the empire, the Balkan chapter in the emer- gence of Jewish mysticism and kabbalah, as well as the Byzantine pro- legomenon to Ottoman Jewry. All of these studies have considerably enhanced the material available for further study of this transitional period. In addition, the phenomenon of immigration, the reception of various waves of Ashkenazim and Sephardim, and their subsequent acculturation to the Greek Orthodox milieu is only beginning to be plumbed and has yet to be integrated into the complexity of Balkan history during this period. Written as a sequel to Starr’s earlier survey of Byzantine Jewish his- tory and presentation of the source material, Steven Bowman’s The Jews of Byzantium, 1204–1453 provided a framework for the period 1204–1453 that is now being filled in by specialists in a wide variety of disciplines.2 Bowman’s attempt was the first to correlate the emerging material with recent developments in Late Byzantine Studies (which had then emerged as a major discipline) and to chart the settlement pattern of Jews following the Fourth Crusade of 1204. Starr had already provided a survey of Jewish life in Crete under the Venetians, which is being supplemented primarily in the extensive oeuvre of David Jacoby (see below).3 The period 1204–1453 witnessed at the start the fragmentation of the Byzantine Empire from 1204–1209, followed by increasing con- striction and concomitant weakening of the political and military power of the emperor and the state. Borders remained constantly in flux in both the Balkans and Anatolia throughout the period. Three Byzantine rump states appeared in Epiros, Nicaea, and Trebizond. Crusader kingdoms appeared in Constantinople, Thessalonike, Mistra (all returned to the Palaeologan dynasty by 1261), and later in the fourteenth century in Athens and Thebes. Bulgarian and Serbian lead- ers also established ephemeral states. In addition, the Venetians and Genoese established their control over numerous islands and cities, in particular Negropont, Crete, Coron, and Modon for the former and Chios for the latter. At the same time a new and vigorous entity, the expanding Ottoman sultanate, emerged during the fourteenth and 2 J. Starr, The Jews in the Byzantine Empire 641–1204 (Athens, 1939); S. Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, 1204–1453 (University of Alabama Press, 1985, paperback reprint New York, 2000). 3 J. Starr, “Jewish Life in Crete under the Rule of Venice,” PAAJR XII (1942): 59–114..
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