Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
20
Alexei Sivertsev, Judaism and Imperial Ideology in Late Antiquity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. viii, 247. ISBN
9781107009080. $85.00.
art, the enthroned emperor was an ageless, haloed figure exercising universal dominion that
assimilated the imperial office to a divine prototype. Unlike most earlier Jewish literature, some
Byzantine Jewish texts imagine the office of the Messiah in a very similar way. Functionally,
both the office of the Messiah and that of the Emperor reflected the same type of religiopolitical theory that emphasized the icon-like properties of earthly kingship and its exercise of
power by participation in the divine archetype of universal rule (173). It is for that reason that
in Jewish liturgical poetry one finds a rather consistent application of biblical verses originally
intended to describe the universal rule of God to the universal rule of the Davidic Messiah. In
this framework Sivertsev offers a fascinating discussion of the mirror-like semblance of imperial
churches and imperial palaces. The Messiahs enthronement inside the Jerusalem Temple
conveyed the same message as the Emperors enthronement inside the palace: "In both
instances, the personality of the ruler was conjoined with the personality of his Creator to the
effect that the two served to project joint presence and joint action that was both human and
divine (181). So the Messiahs status as Gods eschatological co-ruler reenacts Byzantine court
rituals. The book concludes with a bibliography and a (meager) index of subjects.
The author has provided us with a rich study of both early Byzantine imperial culture and early
medieval Jewish messianism and eschatology. He is well at home in both fields and that
combination yields fascinating cross-cultural insights. Even though some of his conclusions are
bound to remain somewhat in the realm of speculation, the overall argumentative force of the
book is impressive. The author might have taken more into account that not every classical
philologist or Byzantologist is at home in Jewish literature. Terms like piyyut(liturgical poetry)
and names such as Kebra Nagast are not familiar to everyone outside that field. And of course,
Origen did not live in the late third century (p. 14; he died around 250 CE)! But these quibbles
aside, Sivertsens book is a very welcome addition to the slowly growing body of scholarly work
on Byzantine Jewry.