Abstract
This book is about Christian memories of the Maccabean martyrs from the early to late medieval Christian periods, ranging geographically from the eastern Mediterranean to northwestern Europe.1 That Christians commemorated the Maccabean martyrs at all is noteworthy. The Maccabean martyrs were a group of seven Jewish brothers whose story was first recounted in 2 Maccabees 7. In this narrative an anonymous group of seven sons, in accordance with the exhortations of their mother, suffers martyrdom at the hands of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV for refusing to eat pork, a violation of the Jewish dietary laws as set forth in Torah. Both Christian and Jewish traditions about the Maccabean martyrs developed in the first two centuries of the Common Era, during the period of the separation of these communities.2 Among Christians, these traditions spread throughout the Mediterranean world. We have evidence, notably in the form of treatises on martyrdom, festal sermons, and liturgical calendars, for local commemorations of these martyrs in Syriac-, Greek-, and Latin-speaking regions, showing that Christians, from a relatively early period, considered them worthy of veneration.3 Into the Western medieval period, both Jewish and Christian communities continued to honor them as holy figures, with no evidence that each community was aware of the parallel patterns of devotion.4
Some Jew steps forward and says to us, “How can you reckon these people of ours to be your martyrs? … Read their confessions; see whether they confessed Christ.” To whom we reply, “It’s true, you are one of those who did not believe in Christ … what are you going to say, being one of those faithless people? They weren’t openly confessing Christ, because the mystery of Christ was still concealed behind a veil.”
—Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 300 “On the Maccabean Martyrs,” trans. Edmund Hill
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Notes
A number of articles have been written about the Christian cult of the Maccabean martyrs, but this is the first book-length treatment of this cult. For earlier works, see especially Jean Dunabin, “The Maccabees as Exemplars in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries” in The Bible in the Medieval World. Essays in Honor of Beryl Smalley, ed. Katherine Walsh and Diana Wood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 31–41
Gerard Rouwhorst, “The Cult of the Seven Maccabean Brothers and Their Mother in Christian Tradition” in Saints and Role Models in Judaism and Christianity, ed. Marcel Poorthuis and Joshua Schwartz (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 183–204
Margaret Schatkin, “The Maccabean Martyrs,” Vigilae Christianae 28 (1974): 97–113.
Raphaëlle Ziadé, Les martyrs Maccabées: de l’histoire de juive au culte chrétie. Les homélies de Grégoire de Nazianze et de Jean Chrysostom (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
On the Maccabean martyrs in Jewish and Christian Syriac traditions, see Witold Witakowski, “Mart(Y) Shmuni, The Mother of the Maccabean Martyrs, in Syriac Tradition,” Orientalia christiana analecta, 247 (1994): 153–68
In eastern Christianity other Old Testament figures, like Abraham and Moses, received feast days and were venerated as saints. The Maccabean martyrs were the only Jewish figures to receive such devotion in Latin Christianity. See Marcel Simon, “Les saints d’Israël dans la dévotion de l’église ancienne,” Revue D’Histoire et de Philosophe Religieuses 34 (1954): 98–127.
Robert E. Lerner, The Feast of Saint Abraham: Medieval Millenarians and the Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
It should be noted that I make a distinction between the use of the word “Torah” and “Law” in this study. In my analysis, “Torah” refers to Jewish reception and observance of God’s revelation at Sinai and the traditions and practices emanating from that event. “Law” refers to a Christian conception of the contents of the Pentateuch that is contrasted negatively with the Gospel as revealed by Jesus Christ. The differing understandings between Jewish and Christian texts on what the Maccabean martyrs were obedient to (Torah or Law) is a crucial element in discerning the differing meanings of this martyrdom in these communities. Jan Willem van Henten also draws this connection but uses differing terminology. See Jan Willem van Henten, The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People: A Study of 2 and 4 Maccabees (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 134–35.
Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Meaning: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 5.
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 119.
Susan A. Crane, “Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory,” American Historical Review 102 (1997), 1377.
On this concept see also Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998), 128.
Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1392–96.
Judith M. Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), see especially 62–97.
Fernando F. Segovia, Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000), 125.
Segovia, Decolonizing Biblical Studies, 126. Daniel Boyarin has employed post-colonialism most recently in his investigation of heresiology and the formation of the boundaries between Judaism and Christianity, while Andrew Jacobs has applied postcolonial theory to fourth-century Christianity, especially in relation to sites in the Holy Land. See Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)
Andrew S. Jacobs, Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004)
R. S. Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 25
Kwok Pui-lan, Don Compier, and Joerg Rieger, ed., Empire and the Christian Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007)
Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).
Especially important for framing my thinking have been works such as Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979)
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994; reprint, London: Routledge Classics, 2006)
Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2005).
See John Dagenais and Margaret R. Greer, “Decolonizing the Middle Ages: Introduction,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30, no. 3 (2000): 431–48
Catherine Brown, “In the Middle,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30, no. 3 (2000): 547–74
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000)
Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanna Williams, ed., PostcolonialApproaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Deborah Goodwin, Take Holdof the Robe of a Jew: Herbert of Boshams Christian Hebraism (Leiden: Brill, 2006)
John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), especially 280–83.
Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 9–10, 24.
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Épater les médiévistes,” History and Theory 39, no. 2 (2000): 246.
Some of the major works dealing with this issue are Bernhard Blumenkranz, Juifs et Chrétiens dans le monde occidental, 430–1096 (Paris: Mouton, 1960)
John Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983)
Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: A Study of the Relations between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire (135-425), trans. H. McKeating (New York: Littman Library, 1986)
R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987)
Robert Chazan, Daggers of Faith: Thirteenth-Century Christian Missionizing and the Jewish Response (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989)
Gilbert Dahan, Les Intellectuels Chrétiens et les Juifs au moyen âge (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1990)
Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1995)
Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jews in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).
Anne McClintock, “The Angels of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism’,” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 88
Sylvia Tomasch, “Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeremy Jeffrey Cohen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 250.
A study that illustrates this, though not framed in explicitly colonial terminology, is Ivan Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
Kathleen Biddick, “The ABC of Ptolemy: Mapping the World with the Alphabet,” in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Seally Giles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 268–93.
Tomasch, “Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew,” 250; Zygmunt Bauman, “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,” in Modernity, Culture, and “the Jew,” ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 143–56.
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© 2009 Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski
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Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, D. (2009). Introduction Remembering the Maccabean Martyrs. In: Christian Memories of the Maccabean Martyrs. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100138_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100138_1
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