Reflections on Jewish Identity in Late Antiquity Nicholas de Lange The following remarks on Jewish identity in the late antique or early Byz- antine period are offered as a tribute to a longstanding friend and fellow worker in the history of Judaism in this period. They arise out of many years' reflection. 1 They are not intended as a contribution to current theo- retical discussions about the nature of identity, or about the ideological manipulation of questions of identity in rabbinic Judaism. My object is rather to reflect on what it felt like to be Jewish in the period in question, and more specifically how distinctive Jews were, in their own minds and in those of others around them. Those others include such categories as Greeks, Romans or Christians. I am not specifically concerned with distinc- tions between different kinds of Jews, such as "rabbinic" or "hellenised" Jews. Such distinctions certainly existed: we can see them most vividly in the preamble to the last of Justinian's Novellas (discussed below), which refers to a longstanding dispute between the two factions. 2 This conflict is an important element in the internal Jewish history of this period. While recognizing the limits of Jewish unity, often more of an ideal than a reality, I intend to confine my attention to the differences between Jews and oth- ers. I should add that I shall concern myself exclusively with the territories of the Roman empire, and that my primary focus is on the period from the consolidation of Christian rule after Julian, in the late fourth century, until the Arab conquest of Palestine, Syria, and Egypt in the early seventh. This is a period of Jewish history on which surprisingly little has been written. The basic historical background upon which the questions con- cerning identity can be sketched is itself almost blank. It is largely a matter 1 Beginning with an invitation to read a paper on "Defining Jewish identity in the late antique and early Islamic Near East" to the fourth Late Antiquity and Early Islam Work- shop, London, May 1994. See also my "Hebrews, Greeks or Romans? Jewish Identity in Byzantium," in Strangers to Themselves: The Byzantine Outsider. Papers from the Thirty-second Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, March 1998, ed. D.C. Smythe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 105-18; and "Jews in the Age of Justinian," in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, ed. M. Maas (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 401-26. 2 Text and translation in A. Linder, The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 402-11.