Leo III°
LEO III°
LEO III ° (called "the Isaurian " = Syrian; c. 680–741), Byzantine emperor from 717 to 741. Leo emerged a strong ruler after compelling the Caliph Suleiman to give up the siege of Constantinople early in his reign. In 721–22 he issued a decree ordering the baptism of the Jews, but, according to a Byzantine source, those that submitted "quickly washed off the baptism." No Jewish source mentions the decree. In 730 Leo forbade the worship of icons, allegedly because of his "saracen mindedness," or, alternatively, persuaded by a Jewish sorcerer. Yet Leo had earlier defended their use to the Caliph Omar ii, while direct Jewish influence was, obviously, quite unlikely. However, the fact that Leo's best soldiers came from Phrygia, the home of iconoclasm, partly engendered there by a constant Judeo-Christian syncretism, and his own origins in a monotheistic cultural milieu, might have produced a distaste for images in worship. In this sense there could be a Jewish element in Leo's final choice of iconoclasm rather than another issue for his real purpose – the reassertion of imperial authority over the Church.
bibliography:
J. Starr, Jews in the Byzantine Empire (1939), 90–93; G. Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State (1956), 142–5; Sharf, in: Byzantinische Zeitschrift (1966), 37–46; Baron, Social2, 3 (1957), 175–8; A.A. Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, 1 (1965), 255–6.
[Andrew Sharf]