George Zarkadakis

Long before Ashkenazi or Sephardic Jews ever set foot in Greece, a distinct Jewish community had already been living there for over 2,000 years, speaking their own Greek dialect and following customs found nowhere else in the Jewish world. The Romaniote Jews trace their presence in Greece back to the Hellenistic era, predating both the later Sephardic arrivals after the 1492 expulsion from Spain and any Ashkenazi migration. Their spiritual and cultural center for centuries was Ioannina, a city in northwestern Greece, where they developed their own liturgical traditions, synagogue architecture, and even their own Judeo-Greek language. On March 25, 1944, the Nazis deported nearly the entire Jewish population of Ioannina, over 1,800 people, to Auschwitz, and only a small fraction survived. Today, the community numbers only a few dozen people, and the centuries-old Kahal Kadosh Yashan synagogue still stands, maintained largely for memory as much as for regular worship. It's one of the oldest continuously documented Jewish communities in Europe, and also one of the most fragile survivors of the Holocaust's near-total destruction of an entire distinct culture. There's something haunting about a 2,000-year-old tradition now surviving through just a handful of people and a carefully preserved building. The Romaniote community developed their own distinct Hebrew and Greek liturgical poetry tradition that survives nowhere else in the Jewish world today. #archaeohistories

Here's my conversation with Anthony Kaldellis about the deep history of the Roman Empire in the west and the east (the Byzantine Empire). This was a truly fascinating conversation with a lot of wisdom for the modern world and for the future of human civilization. The Roman state lasted over 2,200 years. If we want to understand human nature, the modern world, and how humanity can flourish, it is valuable to study history, especially the history of why societies survive and why they collapse. It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Episode highlight 1:24 - Introduction 1:51 - The Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire 5:49 - 2,200 Years of Roman History 26:12 - Power, violence, and civil war 47:27 - Edict of Caracalla 1:00:23 - Crisis of the Third Century 1:14:52 - Constantine and the new Roman Empire 1:26:53 - Christianity in the Roman Empire 1:52:21 - Fall of the Western Roman Empire 2:05:17 - Eunuchs, Taxes, and Power 2:30:24 - Emperor Justinian and wars of conquest 2:47:26 - The Arab conquests 3:07:01 - Why the Roman empire survived so long 3:33:08 - Lessons from history

We're on a bad path with AI. But it's not too late to change course. This is how we ensure a flourishing, human-led future, with people empowered - rather than replaced - by AI:

Everyone should hear this at least once. This is the best explanation of Western civilisation you’ll ever hear: