ZAC 2025; 29(1): 85–107 Sergey Minov* The Syriac Reception of John Chrysostom’s Homilies against the Jews: First Soundings https://doi.org/10.1515/zac-2025-0005 Abstract: This article presents previously unpublished fragments of the lost Syriac version of the Homilies against the Jews by John Chrysostom. The three excerpts, preserved in West Syrian collections of patristic texts, bear an important witness to the textual tradition of the Homilies and shed light on the dynamics of reception and transmission of the Greek Adversus Judaeos compositions among Syriac Chris- tians during the early Islamic period. The texts are accompanied with an English translation and discussion. Keywords: Syriac literature, Jewish-Christian relations, anti-Judaism, polemic, John Chrysostom, florilegia 1 Introduction Polemics against Jews and Judaism played an important role in the processes of identity formation among Syriac Christians during late antiquity and the Islamic period.1 It was conveyed in a rich array of literary forms and transmitted through various discursive channels. One of the little studied aspects of the circulation of anti-Jewish material in the Syriac milieu concerns the ways in which works of the 1 For some observations, see Adam H. Becker, “Syriac Anti-Judaism: Polemic and Internal Cri- tique,” in Jews and Syriac Christians: Intersections across the First Millennium (ed. Aaron M. Butts and Simcha M. Gross; Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 180; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020), 47–66; Christine C. Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria (Patristic Monograph Series 20; Washington: The Catholic University of Amer- ica Press, 2008); Sergey Minov, Memory and Identity in the Syriac Cave of Treasures: Rewriting the Bible in Sasanian Iran (Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 26; Leiden: Brill, 2021), 49–141; Barbara H. Roggema, “Polemics between Religious Minorities: Christian Adversus Judaeos from the Early Abbasid Period,” in Minorities in Contact in the Medieval Mediterranean (ed. Clara Almagro Vidal, Jessica Tearney-Pearce, and Luke Yarbrough; Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 33; Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 119–142. *Corresponding Author: Sergey Minov, Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, HSE University, 21/4 Staraya Basmannaya St., Moscow 105066, Russian Federation, e-mail: sergeyminov@gmail.com