Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity.

• Author: Feldman, Louis H.

The challenging and far-reaching thesis of this book is that the medieval European and west Asian world was dominated by three commonwealths born in and descended from late antiquity - the Islamic, the Second Byzantine in Slavic Eastern Europe, and the Latin. It was these commonwealths that provided most people with a frame of reference wider than the state to which they were immediately subject. It is the shift from the empires of antiquity to these commonwealths that concerns the author; his thesis is that this shift occurred when empire was conjoined with a universalistic rather than with an ethnic monotheism. Fowler's contention is that it is precisely the rise of heresies, which he finds inherent in monotheism, whether Christian or Islamic, that led to the development of the looser and more pluralistic commonwealths of Eastern Christendom and Islam. From Fowler's point of view, Islam, far from being the force destructive of late antiquity, was actually its climax. What is particularly original in Fowden's historical model is that he broadens the background to include, not merely the Greeks, Romans, and Persians, but the Egyptians, Syrians, Armenians, pre-Islamic Arabs, Himyarites, Ethiopians, and Nubians. Clearly the author's description of this evolution from empire to commonwealth has contemporary ramifications in view of the revival of the concept of an Islamic commonwealth. It likewise has considerable ramifications for the current debates as to whether our historical approach hitherto has been too Eurocentric.

Important for his argument is Fowden's contention that this universalistic monotheism is to be contrasted with the ethnic monotheism characteristic of ancient Judaism. Jews, he says, made no serious active effort to proselytize. In reply, we may note that pre-exilic Judaea (which contained the major part of the Jewish population at the time of the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E.), according to the calculations of Salo W. Baron ("Population," in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Cecil Roth et al. [Jerusalem: Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1972], 13:869), based on Biblical and archaeological data, had no more than 150,000 Jews. By the middle of the first century C.E. he estimates (A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd ed. [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1952], 1:370-72, n. 7) that the total number of Jews in the world had risen to about eight million and that Jews constituted about one-eighth of the population of the...