St. Nikon: Patron Saint of Sparta and His Canonization

This essay examines the career of St. Nikon the Metanoeite (c. 930–c. 1000), patron saint of Sparta, and above all the episode that made his name there: the expulsion of the Jewish community of Lakedaimon in the early 970s. The Life of Nikon and the saint’s Testament both link the removal of the Jews to the end of a plague, and both treat the sequence as miraculous. Reading these texts against Byzantine law, against Greek and Western scholarship on the tenth- and eleventh-century Peloponnese, and against the little we know of the Jewish community itself, the essay argues three things. First, the expulsion was an extralegal act carried out by the citizens under the pressure of a charismatic monk, and it was not carried out without resistance. Second, the sanitary explanation sometimes offered for it, that Jewish trades had made the city unhealthy, is a modern conjecture that the sources neither state nor can bear; the charge in the texts is ritual pollution, not contagion and not well-poisoning. Third, Nikon’s sanctity was built in a local world of competing magnates, imperial officials, a cooperative bishop and a monastery in need of protectors, and the expulsion served that world as a founding act. The essay closes with the afterlife of the cult, from the writing of the Life to the dedication of the cathedral of St. Nikon in 1893, and with the unsettled question of where his first church stood.