ABSTRACT
The Trophies of Damascus is an anti-Jewish dialogue of the last quarter of the seventh century set in Damascus, which by this time was under Arab rule. This particular context has raised the question to what extent the text may reflect contemporary political concerns about the faltering Roman empire and how this affects anti-Jewish polemic. Indeed, it has been suggested that the Jews of the dialogue are only a cipher for the Arabs.1 The present chapter proposes a different approach. First, I shall argue that we should situate the Trophies in their appropriate textual context and see them as part of a larger polemical enterprise by a single author. Indeed, in the manuscript, the anti-Jewish dialogue is followed by an anti-miaphysite dialogue composed by the same author. I shall call this untitled text the Bonwetsch Dialogue after its modern editor and argue that is the second part of a single work.2 This re-contextualisation raises questions about our scholarly tendency to study Adversus Iudaeos texts in isolation and I shall suggest that contemporary heresiology provides a better context to understand this text (that is, both dialogues). Second, I shall interrogate the text for what it tells us about dialoguing – in other words, I shall focus on the explicit and implicit reflection of the text on the event it represents. I shall suggest that this approach may help us to overcome the problem of drawing conclusions about real practice from literary texts.
