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Byzantine Jews: Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures is the collective product of a three year research group convened under the auspices of Scholion: Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The volume provides both a survey and an analysis of the social and cultural history of Byzantine Jewry from its inception until the fifteenth century, within the wider context of the Byzantine world.

An undated communication from Moshe Agura from the island of Rhodes seeking to emigrate to Egypt is presented. He describes his personal tragedy, in which he lost track of family members and failed to build a life in the Byzantine Empire.

Jewish philosophy and the attitude to astral magic in late medieval Byzantium are introduced. Several characteristics of Byzantine Jewish rationalism are discussed: (1) its isolation from the cultural centers (Spain, Provence, and to some extent also Italy); (2) moderation and syncretism. Byzantine Jewish rabbis did not hesitate to mix Aristotelian rationalism with kabbalistic concepts. The attitude toward astral magic in Spain and Provence is compared with that in Byzantium. One Jewish Byzantine savant claimed that popular \"primitive\" magic prevents \"real\" astral magic. Few manuscripts on the subject have been located, however, so attention to this subject is still in its infancy.

From ancient Hellenism to modern Hellenism: It would be easy to imagine that a straight line joins the one to the other. In reality the line is far from straight. In late antiquity the very term Hellene virtually disappeared from general Greek usage for several centuries, which is not to say, however, that Greek language and culture disappeared in the intervening period. They were maintained, in various ways, by Christians and to a more limited extent by Jews, in unbroken continuity, although thoroughly transformed by the admixture of a determinative \"Hebraic\" (by which I mean essentially Biblical) element, which on the Christian side often threatened and on the Jewish side actually managed to overwhelm the Hellenic tradition. It is a very complex story, the skeins of which have not yet been thoroughly disentangled. On the majority Christian culture, a good deal has been written (see particularly Mango 1965, Browning 1983, Garzma 1985), but very little attempt has been made so far to elucidate the Jewish experience. I have discussed elsewhere the continuity of the use of the Greek language by Jews (de Lange 1990c). In the present essay I consider the relationship between language and self-definition for Jews in the Byzantine Empire.

Enormous problems of a very basic sort confront the historian who would write a chapter on science in the Byzantine Jewish communities. What temporal and geographical bounds define Byzantium? Even the most preliminary investigation – and the present study claims to be no more than a very initial probing – reveals that the conventional boundaries employed in political history, for example, are not applicable. The Near East, from Syria to Egypt, was Byzantine until the Muslim conquests of the eighth century. Some seminal texts of medieval Hebrew science were (with varying degrees of probability) produced in those regions while they were under Byzantine rule, and the Greek language was widely known, even if it was not the everyday speech of Jews: These texts include Pirqei de-Rabbi Eliezer, Baraitha di-Mazzalot, Sefer ʾAsaf, and perhaps even Sefer Yeṣirah. Yet none of these texts can be considered to belong to the corpus of writings that compose, if I may call it such, “classical” Byzantine-Jewish science – by which I mean the activity of Mordechai Komatiano and other persons who flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Those figures are every bit as remote from those early texts as were their contemporary co-religionists in the Iberian peninsula or southern France. On the other hand, there seems to be no good reason to stop talking about Byzantine science after 1453. The work of people such as R. Elijah Mizraḥi, even if carried out after Constantinople had been under Ottoman rule for some time, appears to all intents and purposes to be a continuation of the Byzantine tradition.