THE JEWS: CHRISTIAN APOLOGISTS IN THE SYRIAC-SPEAKING CHURCH

By the "Syriac-speaking Church" is meant that portion of the Eastern Church which used the Syriac language in its public worship and its ordinary literature, whether it was Catholic, Nestorian, or Jacobite.

The Aramaic language prevailed at different times over a very large range of country, extending from Palestine, not to say Egypt, in the west to Persia in the east. And it has at least half a dozen dialects of greater importance, with others of less. We, however, are concerned with but one. For the only dialect of Aramaic in which Christian writings on the subject of Judaism are found is that which is known as Syriac, and was current in Northern Mesopotamia. Other dialects written in Syriac character contain nothing for our purpose, and almost everything of Aramaic in Hebrew character is of Jewish authorship.

Now it might have been supposed that in view of the large number of Jews in Mesopotamia the Syriac Fathers would have much to say about them. This is not the case. The fact is that by far the greater number of the Jews were in the south, in the Babylonia of the narrowest meaning of the word, which extended from Nehardea some seventy miles southwards to Sura. This was a comparatively small district, in which lay the two great seats of Jewish learning, Pumbeditha and Sura.1 It was always under the rule of the Sassanid kings till the Mohammedan conquest of A.D. 651. Probably only a few Christians ever lived there, and these either did not make books, or had not the good fortune to attract the notice of the copyists who have preserved for us the writings of their northern co-religionists.