Jews were among the founders of Antioch and contributed greatly to the social and material evolution of the city. How they adjusted to the imperial agendas of Late Antiquity, as well as their characterization in the textual record are the main objects of inquiry.

Comparing the fourth-century writings of John Chrysostom and Libanius with the sixth-century writings of Severus of Antioch and John Malalas suggests that Jewish characters continued to play significant roles in Christian writings even as Jews themselves became less visible in the city of Antioch.

Chapter 8 continues this discussion, noting that Moses and Elijah are both held in honour by Jews, Christians and Muslims, as is Jesus by Christians and Muslims (following Christian scholars such as David Thomas). Although there are important and abiding doctrinal differences between these Abrahamic Faiths, particularly about the status of Jesus and Mohammed, this chapter argues that there are crucial ethical commonalities that could and should help to move the world beyond religiously inspired violence. The chapter ends with an extended discussion of Raimon Panikkar’s inspiring vision of the Cosmic Christ in his collected works Omnia Opera.

The book is bought to a close by the invasion and occupation of Poland, the radical inner colonization of the Warthegau, ethnic cleansing of Poles, the simultaneous ghettoization of Jews, Lebensraum and the conquest of Eastern Europe, Christaller and his organizational plans for the conquered East, Zamosc, the Holocaust, and the post-war legacy. Posen and West Prussia were cleared of Germans and Poland successfully inner colonized this space. The Junker estates of East Germany were broken up. West Germany accepted 8 million expellees from Eastern Europe and, in their final act, the inner colonizers helped settle many of them on farms.

This chapter evaluates the landscape of Pauline studies, demonstrating the need for reevaluation of Paul’s understanding of the relationship between Israel, the Jews, and the non-Jewish individuals receiving the spirit through Paul’s ministry. Contrary to many modern readings, Paul’s gospel is not systematically opposed to “legalism” or “ethnocentrism,” and his treatment of (former) gentiles as descendants not only of Abraham but of Israel begs explanation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the composition and interpretive capacity of the recipients of Paul’s letters and a discussion of key terms in the Pauline letters.

The story of Merovingian decline is inexorably linked to that of Carolingian ascent, a coupling that is ubiquitous in the historiographical record. The success of Carolingian propaganda is thus evident in the adoption of its perspective in later works of historiography. While it is now widely held that the death of Dagobert I did not herald the depletion of Merovingian vigor, this view was adopted by numerous post-Carolingian compositions. It is present in the two sources discussed in this chapter, the twelfth-century Chronica of Sigebert of Gembloux and the sixteenth-century Sefer Divrei Hayamim leMalkei Tzarfat uVeit Otoman Hatogar [The Book of the Histories of the Kings of France and the Turkish House of Ottoman] by Yosef Ha-Kohen. Both were composed at considerable remove from the Carolingian period, yet they bear the traces of its historiography’s far-reaching influence. This is especially noticeable in their periodization of the Merovingian era. The chapter will argue that both authors saw the decline of the Merovingian line as a process precipitated by the disastrous reign of Clovis II (d. 657), and that this appraisal influenced their coverage of his successors.

“Decolonizing the Medieval Literary Curriculum” shows why the critical teaching of the literatures of the deep past – in the form of a critical canon, and a countercanon – is essential today, at a moment when White supremacist and alt-right groups in the West are weaponizing the symbols, cultures, and histories of the European Middle Ages to assemble a spurious, fantasied past of White racial purity and superiority, prelapsarian Christian homogeneity, and religiopolitical supremacy so as to make this fantasied past the basis of authority for transforming today’s world. At the same time, changing population demographics in the West are creating cohorts of students in higher learning who have diversified substantially in terms of their race, class, countries of origin, sexualities, genders, and physical, cultural, and psychosocial composition. Students, even more than faculty, have called for curricular transformations that are responsive to the urgencies of our time. The pedagogical strategies and curricular offerings in this essay are thus an example of the efforts undertaken today by a community of largely premodernists of color who are working to teach a decolonizing curriculum, and who are profoundly engaged in transforming how the deep past is taught and studied in the twenty-first century academy.

The aim of the book is to show, from a historian’s point of view, how strange the early Christians must have seemed to their contemporaries and what difficulties they faced in living their faith in a non-Christian world. In doing so, it will become clear that Christians chose a huge variety of paths and that there was no linear progression toward later forms of Christianity. Therefore, the seemingly familiar early Christians are strange even to modern observers. In order to make clear their diversity and strangeness, I do not follow chronological order, but treat the subject matter according to different topics, in four main chapters. The first illustrates the difficulties for Christians to position themselves between Jews and pagans, the second the dispute over forms of authority within the Christian group, the third the challenges of everyday life for Christians, the fourth the relationship to the political system up to Constantine the Great, who turned to Christianity. In addition, I discuss the methodological and theoretical issues involved.

The Mongol advance is described from an unusual viewpoint in the Hebrew sources. The writers either witnessed Mongol activity, as in the Jewish communities of Iraq and Armenia, or heard of it from afar, as in Sicily, Provence, Spain, and Morocco. The texts, scant in number yet diverse in nature, are traced according to genre – letters, poems, tomb inscriptions, eschatology and Kabbalah, exegesis, and sermons. They touch the early Mongol raids in Iraq and the vast invasion of Eastern Europe, the conquest of Baghdad and the advance into Syria, and the activity of the Ilkhanate and its conflict with the Mamluk Sultanate. Since the Jews had neither state nor army, they were not considered a target or a threat, and their texts therefore provide a sort of neutral, and often positive, description of the Mongols as a raiding force, a conquering army, and a state.

The final phase of Vichy’s dealings with Rome brought the sharpest divergence in its relations with the two Axis governments. The full occupation of France ended the last vestiges of French sovereignty. However, the power relationship between Vichy and Rome evolved very differently to that between Vichy and Berlin. Vichy’s negotiations between the conflicting demands of the German and Italian authorities were, characterised by opportunism, not fully appreciated when focusing exclusively on the German occupation. Whereas Vichy chose to work with Rome to offset Berlin’s demands on the Service du Travail Obligatoire, it resolutely chose collaboration with Berlin over the opportunities afforded by Rome when it came to the treatment of Jews. Vichy’s willing collaboration with Nazi anti-Semitic policies saw it oppose the Italian attempts to prevent the deportation of Jews in their occupation zone. The fall of Mussolini ended the prospect of any fruitful cooperation with Italy. With growing internal pressure from French collaborationist forces to engage in a more radical and ideological form of collaboration, Vichy’s alignment with Nazi Germany finally became definitive.

This chapter explores the Italian threats to French authority in the areas that fell within the remit of the Italian armistice and how French officials tackled them at a local level. Italian threats included encroachments on French sovereignty, Fascist propaganda and attempts to undermine French colonial rule. A further potential threat came from the large Italian communities living in France and French North Africa. French responses were complex and multi-layered, with local French authorities sometimes adopting different approaches to those advocated by Vichy. Where Italian actions clashed with Vichy’s defence of France’s colonies or its policies on Jews, the French authorities invited intervention from Berlin. However, as French attentions turned once again towards exploiting the rifts within the Axis, the response from Berlin showed that the strategy of seeking assistance from the Germans was to be no panacea.

The Italian occupation of south-eastern France and Corsica between November 1942 and September 1943 has often been portrayed as relatively benign compared to the German occupation and the Italian occupation elsewhere. However, this chapter suggests that mounting Italian military and political weakness and the wounded pride of the Fascist regime caused the occupying forces to assert their authority with growing repression and violence. French responses to Italian actions were characterised by opposition, unwilling compliance and limited cooperation, with local authorities often clashing with Vichy. Efforts to defend French sovereignty varied across areas of policy and in response to differing levels of threat. French authorities made pragmatic choices, making concessions to one Axis government in one policy area in an attempt to defend against the other Axis government and maintain control over another policy area. The absence of any sustained collaboration or collaborationism meant that the trajectory of French responses to the Italian occupation was in the opposite direction to those relating to the German occupation.

Between the twelfth and the fourteenth century, the Mediterranean Sea facilitated cultural exchange with profound effects on music. Chapter 8 witnesses the interaction of artists and musicians from Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions in Mediterranean locations such as Sicily and Iberia (now Spain and Portugal). We look at the cultural backdrop to the Cantigas de Santa Maria compiled at the court of Alfonso X of Castile-León, observing influences from Arabic and Hebrew poetry as well as Occitan and French song. Pilgrimage was another facilitator of travel and exchange, and repertories of polyphony and song from the pilgrimage sites of Santiago de Compostela and Montserrat point to the musical sounds that accompanied these journeys. A practical singing exercise offers readers a taste of the pilgrimage experience, by singing one of the songs provided for the rowdy pilgrims at Montserrat. In Italy, new religious movements inspired by St Francis of Assisi generated vernacular devotional songs in the form of the lauda, and in the fourteenth century - the era of Dante and Petrarch - the use of the Italian language for literature and song became paramount.