Page 115 - Edessa, 'The Blessed City'-01, by J. B. Segal (Oxford, 1970). Chapters 1-3

102 THE BLESSING OF JESUS AND THE TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANITY
to punish anyone who looted synagogues or interfered with Jews holding
religious services. Edessa was different only in degree from other places in
the Byzantine empire; throughout the whole empire, where in the course
of the fifth century only orthodox Christians were permitted to hold appoint-
ment as functionaries of the state, the name Jew had become a word of
opprobrium.
Ephraim attacks the Jewish practice of circumcision and the Jewish Sab-
bath and dietary laws. He asks Jewry contemptuously:
Where is the beauty of thy youth, the glory of thine espousals ? . . . Where is thy praise
and thine honour, and thine adornment and thy splendour ? Where is the house which
king Solomon erected for thy glory ? Where the priest . . . who waited in thy ministry ?
Where the girdle which was bound on him, the chain also and the turban? Where the
fine linen and scarlet, the golden bell and the pomegranate ? . . . Where are thy solemn
assemblies, thy new moons and thy stated observances? Joy hath ceased with thee, the
voice of the dance and thy singing; behold thy chants are funeral wailings in thy mouth
and the mouth of thy children.

He reviles the Jews as murderers of Jesus. Death, he writes, declares that
the dead of the Jews are very hateful to me, even their bones are foul to me in the midst
of Sheol. Would that I could find the means to cast their bones out of Sheol, for they
make it stink. I wonder that the Holy Spirit has dwelt among a people whose smell is
fetid.
When Monophysitism became the dominant creed of north-west Mesopo-
tamia the position of the Jews became pitiable. Nestorian doctrine was
attacked with fanatical virulence; Nestorianism could in some measure be
regarded as close to the doctrines of the Jews, and in time Nestorians were
equated readily enough with the Persians. An outstanding Monophysite church-
man of his day reviled the Melkite bishops as 'impious men, renegades and
New Jews';1 but we read equally of 'the darkness of the cult of that fellow
Nestorius—or rather, the Jewish odiousness and ugliness—I mean the duality
of the Natures [of Jesus]'.2 The Monophysite Emperor Anastasius abused the
Nestorian clergy of his capital as 'you accursed Jews', and his words were
echoed by the mob of Constantinople who screamed after the Nestorian
patriarch, 'No one wants [this] Jewish bishop.'3 Even the Fathers of the
Church from Constantinople who attended the Council of Chalcedon in
451 shouted in unison, 'To exile with Dioscurus of Alexandria! God has
cursed Dioscurus! . . . He who has communion with Dioscurus is a Jew!' We
cannot wonder, then, that the Monophysites of provincial Edessa in their

1 Elijah of Dara, in John Ephes., Lives. So z Severus of Antioch, Homiliae Cathedrales,
Severus of Antioch fulminated against the ed. Duval, PO iv, 80.
'Jewish Tome of Leo', 'Letters', ed. Brooks, 3 'Zach. Rh.', ed. Brooks (CSCO, Scrip-
PO xii, 331. tores syri 17), 43 ff.

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