CHRISTIANIZATION
IN THIS PART of the book I attempt to describe some aspects of the novel and distinctive Jewish culture that emerged in late antiquity (c. 350–640) as the integrative ideology of the Jews. In this chapter I will argue that one of the main causes of the rejudaization of the Jews was the christianization of the Roman Empire. This process (and it must be emphasized that christianization was a process, not a moment, which cannot be regarded as in any sense complete before the reign of Justinian [527–565], if then)1 affected the Jews in two ways. First, it tended to marginalize them. As religion assumed ever more importance in social relations in late antiquity, Jews were gradually excluded from the networks of patronage that held the empire together.2 The Jews had two possible ways of responding: continued integration at the cost of conversion to Christianity or continued adherence to Judaism (its component communities increasingly inward turning and possessing their own discrete social structures) at the cost of withdrawal.
Second, christianization, and what is in social-historical terms its sibling, the emergence of religion as a discrete category of human experience—religion’s disembedding—had a direct impact on the Jewish culture of late antiquity because the Jewish communities appropriated much from the Christian society around them. That is, quite a lot of the distinctive Jewish culture was, to be vulgar about it, repackaged Christianity. Much more importantly, the dominant forms of Jewish social organization and patterns of expenditure in late antiquity, the local community and the synagogue (its chief material manifestation), were constituted by appropriative participation by Jews in the common late antique culture. This point will be argued in detail later in this section.
Before proceeding with these arguments, I will pause very briefly to consider in a bit more detail what it is I am trying to explain. The remains of northern Palestine in late antiquity are very different from those of the second and third centuries. Most prominent among the late antique remains are synagogues, which, we may infer, were found in all but the very smallest settlements. The rise of the synagogue will be discussed in detail below; for now we may observe two of its chief implications. The first is that some version of Judaism apparently now reemerged as an important feature of Jewish life, and the second is that Jewish religious life was organized in local, partly autonomous, and self-enclosed communities, as has just been suggested. The synagogue remains also introduce us to the beginnings of a dynamic, novel, and distinctive religious culture. They provide evidence of the development of a specifically Jewish iconography and art, which in turn are obliquely and complicatedly related to a renewed literary culture, whose remains include the Palestinian Talmud, the Midrash collections, the massive quantities of innovative liturgical poetry produced in the sixth century and following, called piyyut, a magical/cosmological literature including the Hekhalot books, the Sefer Yezirah, and the Sefer HaRazim, as well as the beginnings of a medieval-style halakhic literature.
I have been careful not to write of a late antique Jewish society because the Jews in late antiquity (unlike in the later Second Temple period) were fragmented politically, socially, and economically. Though loosely bound together by a complex and varied religious ideology, they lacked any sort of institutional centralization, especially after the end of the patriarchate, around 425. This ideology may have come to provide Jewish life everywhere with a certain sameness, just as it did in the Middle Ages. Even in northern Palestine, where there was a concentrated Jewish population, routine social and economic relations may not have been marked as Jewish, and there may have been no way of excluding Christians and pagans from the networks created by such interactions. Alternatively, such networks as existed may, even if separated by religion, have been too localized to contribute to the integration of a still large regional population. In sum, it may be more useful to think about a late antique Jewish world than a society.3
Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity
Though it is not my intention to present a synthetic reappraisal of the history of the Jews in the later Roman Empire, my argument—that Jewish life was transformed by Christian rule—has important implications for the wider history of the Jews in the later Roman Empire, which I shall consider briefly here. Since the days of Heinrich Graetz it has been common to view the history of the Jews in late antiquity as one of inexorable decline, from the flourishing postrevolt revival of the Jewish polity under the Severan emperors to the horrors of the Middle Ages, a decline that had, however, only a superficial effect on the inner constitution of Jewish society.4 The old characterization of the Severan period is no longer tenable. Nor would many historians nowadays be willing to view the Middle Ages in Graetz’s terms, at least not without serious qualification. But the traditional view of Jewish life under the Christian emperors is undeniably powerful. No one could reasonably deny that the state and its various retainers sometimes displayed hostility to the Jews in the first through third centuries: the writings of pagan intellectuals are rife with it, and the brutality of the suppression of the three Jewish revolts goes without saying. But hostility to Jews and Judaism certainly reached an unprecedentedly high pitch in late imperial Christian writing, and this hostility was increasingly reflected in imperial legislation, as well as in an ever increasing number of local acts of persecution and violence.
On the Jewish side, there is, despite this slight sense of embattledness in literature thought to have been written or compiled in the fourth and fifth centuries, the Palestinian Talmud and the midrashim Genesis and Leviticus Rabbah (perhaps literature from the Diaspora, if we had any, would convey a different impression).5 But later midrashim and the early piyyut, mainly products of the sixth century, are suffused with defensiveness and aggressive opposition to Christianity and the state that supported it, indeed, with a strong sense of gloom. Some Jews had unhappily internalized Christian triumphalism and believed, as the payyetan Yannai put it, that the lamps of Edom (Rome, i.e., Byzantium) burned brightly while those of Zion were about to flicker out.6 So it is unsurprising that in the sixth and seventh centuries the historical apocalypse apparently experienced a revival in some Jewish circles (although the surviving Hebrew apocalypses are probably later; at the very least, they were heavily reworked in the Islamic period).7
Even before the theory of decline was systematically attacked, starting in the 1970s, it received occasional criticism. Most interesting is the characteristically iconoclastic argument of Yitzhak (Fritz) Baer that there was no golden age of Roman-Jewish relations in the high empire, that, on the contrary, the state was generally hostile to the Jews and even sometimes persecuted them, just as it did the Christians.8 This argument was based not on direct evidence (which is nonexistent),9 but on the observation, in my view correct, that as a body, professing Jews were hardly more assimilable in the pagan than in the Christian Roman state; it implies that the situation of the Jews in the latter was basically unchanged.
The reaction of the 1970s and 1980s approached the issue from a different direction.10 It is no coincidence that this was a period of intensive archaeological exploration in Israel and the occupied territories, and of the beginnings of the systematic questioning of the old consensus about the role of the rabbis and the normative status of their literature in post-Destruction Jewish Palestine. The new approach to rabbinic literature allowed scholars to adopt an exaggerated form of Saul Lieberman’s hypothesis of rabbinic acculturation (viz., rabbinic assimilation) and simultaneously to dismiss the rabbis as marginal. So, the argument goes, the rabbis’ particularism, which would have predisposed the Jews to a state of hostile separation from Christian Roman society, may be a mirage and in any case had little impact on the Jews in general. The new archaeological exploration suggested that starting in the third century the Jews, especially in Palestine, experienced a period of unprecedented prosperity and demographic growth, and they engaged in extensive cultural borrowing from their pagan and Christian neighbors. This seemed to imply that Jewish-Christian relations in late antiquity were generally friendly—a view paradoxically strengthened by, for example, the contents of John Chrysostom’s ferocious Sermons against the Jews. These consist mainly of the priest’s warnings to his flock to resist the attractions of the synagogues and the Jewish festivals, combined with vituperative attacks on the Jews. One of the harbingers of this reevaluation of the Jewish experience in late antiquity, the medievalist Jeremy Cohen’s account of “imperial policy” toward the Jews from Constantine to Theodosius II, was unconnected with either the Neusnerian or the archaeological revolutions. Cohen acknowledged his debt to Salo Baron and his intention to refute the “lachrymose” view of late antique Jewish history promoted by Graetz, Dubnow, and (it must be said, to a far lesser extent) Juster, and argued that the Christian emperors were basically sympathetic to the Jews, and their laws tended to protect their rights and privileges.11
In what follows, I would like to alter the terms of the debate. First of all, both the traditional and the revisionist accounts seem partly correct. There can be no doubt that as the interests of the state and the orthodox church gradually and incompletely converged, the state became increasingly hostile to Jews. Local persecutions, forced conversions, seizures of synagogues, and so on, which violated the letter but not always the spirit of the laws, may have been somewhat less common than has often been thought (surprisingly few are attested in contemporary sources), but they undoubtedly occurred.12 Stroumsa and Millar were right to argue that what distinguished Christian from pagan emperors was the Christians’ conviction that they possessed the unique religious truth—a conviction that could only make life difficult for the Jews, in the end.13
There is, however, no denying the prosperity demonstrated by archaeological discoveries, nor the extent of the Jews’ practice of appropriating cultural items great and small from their Christian environment. But it is far from obvious how these facts can be used to argue that Jewish Christian relations were basically friendly, or, what is far less likely, that Jews and Christians were still not fully differentiated in late antiquity. But presumably peaceful coexistence may have been the norm in some places (see below on Minorca). We should also consider the likelihood that the failure of many Jewish converts to Christianity to sever their family ties completely (as some laws and many church canons imply, just as others suggest that Jews sometimes persecuted their former coreligionists) may have created important groups of people characterized by religious lability, a phenomenon well attested among elements of the imperial aristocracy.14 We will encounter an example of this phenomenon below.
I would like to press the argument further. We should not be debating whether some preexisting Jewish polity declined or prospered, or think only about relatively superficial cultural borrowing conducted by two well-defined groups. In my view, we should be looking for systemic change: the Jewish culture that emerged in late antiquity was radically distinctive and distinctively late antique—a product of the same political, social, and economic forces that produced the no less distinctive Christian culture of late antiquity. In this chapter I will defend this position, and in the remainder of this book I will provide a more detailed account of some aspects of the distinctive Jewish culture of late antiquity.
The Third Century
There are scattered hints that some of the characteristics of late antique Judaism were beginning to emerge in the later third and early fourth centuries, before the conversion of Constantine to Christianity. We have already seen that the Jewish cities may have begun to lose their pagan character then, and that the patriarchs were beginning to grow in prominence. It is also thought that several archaeologically attested synagogues in the Palestinian countryside were constructed in the late third century, though this view is now under attack.15 Here I will attempt only a partial explanation; I would emphasize that whatever the causes of these changes, they were still very small in scale in the late third century.
It is generally supposed that one of the most important effects of the “crisis of the third century” was the decline of the curial classes. Contrary to what was once believed, this decline was probably neither steep nor terminal in the third century. The curial classes remained important for centuries thereafter, and the massive legislation about the city councils incorporated in the second book of the Theodosian Code offers no unambiguous evidence for a steady decline, as opposed to imperial interest in the city councils’ smooth functioning.
Nevertheless, it is not unlikely that city councils throughout the empire came under pressure in the later third century as silver coinage was debased because the councillors were responsible for the collection and transmission of most taxes, and the emperors continued to demand payment in undebased silver. That in general they were not able to bear the traditional expenses imposed upon them by the culture of euergetism is generally thought confirmed by the decline in the number of dedicatory inscriptions, taken as indications of expenditure on public construction and festivals. But this cannot be the only reason for the general decline in epigraphy—the vast majority of it funerary—in the third century.16
We have no direct information about the fate of the curial classes of Jewish Palestine in the later third century. But it would not be implausible to connect the retreat of paganism in the Jewish cities with the decline of the curiales for the simple reason that there, as elsewhere, municipal religions were expensive to maintain. Such a retreat may have favored the counterculture, in the form of the patriarchs and their rabbinic protégés. And the decline of the city councils may also explain why starting around 300 the patriarchs began to have at their disposal young Jewish men of Greek education to serve as agents. In their newly straitened circumstances, some city elites may have found it advantageous to seek the patronage of the patriarchs. Perhaps the same factor may also explain the first rural synagogues, built by villagers who increasingly felt left to their own devices.
We should consider other factors, too: the slow and incremental growth in the influence of patriarchs and rabbis as a result of their own aggressive selfpromotion; the increasing importance of religion as a discrete category of existence as the emperors belatedly confronted the alarming spread of Christianity;17 indeed, the same sorts of (mainly unknown) factors that favored the spread of Christianity. To repeat, though, the changes in Jewish Palestine in the late third century are only poorly attested and, if they occurred, were far from amounting to the systemic transformation that is well attested for the fourth century and following. It is to this process that we now turn.
Laws18
A discussion of late imperial legislation in regard to the Jews will introduce us to a crucial set of ideological and social changes. It has been commonly thought since the days of Jean Juster, if not earlier, that such legislation was characterized by tension between the emperors’ conservative tendency to continue to view the Jews as a licit collectivity, which enjoyed the full protection of the state and the right to practice its peculiar customs without disturbance, and their growing, theologically based conviction that those Jews who persisted in their religion were living a lie.19 As the interests of the state became ever more closely identified with those of the church, especially from the reign of Theodosius I on, the legal position of the Jews declined. They increasingly suffered various disabilities: they were barred from service in the army and the government bureaus, forbidden to own slaves and build synagogues, and so on. As early as the later fourth century, imperial constitutions might classify (licit) Jews with (illicit) heretics and pagans for limited purposes.20 By the early sixth century, this occasional similarity of status was approaching identity. It is tempting to view the condition of the Jews in the sixth century through the prism of the Christian Middle Ages. And yet, even under Justinian, Judaism, unlike paganism and heresy, was never declared illegal (nor was it in medieval Christendom).
This standard analysis seems mainly correct, as far as it goes, but it needs to be qualified and supplemented. We must, first, beware of translating the laws into human action in any simple way. Roman imperial laws were usually, though not always, reactive—responses to conditions brought to the emperor’s attention by administrators or private citizens. Once issued, laws were technically applicable everywhere, but there is ample evidence that they were not, indeed could not be, everywhere enforced, that in some cases the emperors were lax about enforcing laws they themselves had made, even when they had the means to do so.21 A concentration of constitutions and rescripts (imperial responses to legal questions sent by private citizens) on a certain issue around a certain date can inform us about the emergence of certain social tensions, and it can tell us how the emperor and his entourage tried to resolve such tensions. Perhaps we can even speak in some cases of rather loose and evanescent imperial policies, always modified by the need to pacify conflicting special interests.22 But we cannot write social history from prescription. So, for example, it is important to note, as all scholars have done, the ever shriller rhetoric of imperial legislation about the Jews, in part because deepening imperial hostility, and the episcopal hostility that influenced it, are important per se as expressions of official ideology. But it is not legitimate to infer from either rhetoric or law alone that the conditions of Jews everywhere correspondingly deteriorated.
Even when understood in these more modest terms—as oblique reflections of social concerns and/or as expressions of imperial will—the laws about the Jews in the Theodosian Code are not at all conservative. By their very existence they constitute a significant innovation because they imply that by the late fourth century, the Roman state consistently regarded the Jews as a discrete category of humanity. I am suggesting that the state had not done so, at least not consistently, between the first and the fourth centuries. This suggestion is related to but rather different from the argument of the previous section of this book—that the Palestinian Jews did not enjoy autonomy in the high empire—and requires some additional argumentation.
While it is true that Julius Caesar, Augustus, and their Julio-Claudian successors recognized the right of the Jews to live according to their own laws, emperors after 66, or 135 C.E., seem rarely, if ever, to have passed laws concerning the Jews or to have had anything like a Jewish policy. The Jews had no legal “personality” or, at most, a rather thin and ephemeral one.23 Martin Goodman argued, by contrast, that changes in imperial policy regarding the tax to the Jewish fisc in the first thirty years after its imposition in 70 constituted an attempt by the state to define the boundaries of the Jewish community. Thus, by trying to collect the tax from nonprofessing Jews and from gentiles (or, according to Goodman, Jews) who observed Jewish customs without formally converting (or acknowledging a formal connection) to Judaism, Domitian opted for a broad, “ethnic” definition, while Nerva made profession of Judaism the essential characteristic of Jewish identity (for the purposes of tax collection) and thereby contributed significantly to an alleged centurieslong shift of Judaism from ethnicity to religion.24
But this thesis seems implausible.25 One of the abuses Domitian’s “harshness” had made possible was calumnia, or denunciation (Suetonius, Domitian 12.2). Since he tried to collect the tax from people who for various reasons kept their Jewishness secret, it was now possible to inform on such “Jews” and thereby make them liable to the tax. That Nerva abolished such delation, as legends inscribed on some of his coins assert, does not automatically mean that he changed the rules in other respects. Nonprofessing Jews may still have been liable, though it would obviously have been harder to enforce such liability in the absence of delation, and some writers of the later second century do admittedly associate the tax with profession of Judaism. Even if Nerva did restrict the tax to professing Jews, then, we may infer from Suetonius’s account, he would have simply been restoring the practice that had existed before Domitian’s reign. What this most likely meant was that Nerva, probably like Vespasian and Titus before him, simply left determination of liability to the Jews themselves. Or perhaps collection was sold to an agent who, once again, was likely to be Jewish (and wealthy) or to have worked in close collaboration with Jews, since Jews are likely to have known who was liable to pay. In any case, sporadic imperial concern about liability for the Jewish tax hardly amounted to an enduring effort by the state to determine the boundaries of the Jewish community, the more so since there is no evidence for any further imperial interest in the question of liability after Nerva’s death in 98. Indeed, the history of the tax after the middle of the second century is obscure, to say the least.
Similarly, sources of the second, third, and early fourth centuries, legal and otherwise, preserve remarkably little information about relations between the Roman state and the Jews.26 The eccentric (so he later seemed) Christian Syriac writer Bardesanes claimed in his treatise On Fate (or, On the Laws of the Regions), composed in the later second or early third century, that (para. 43–44, my translation):
All the Jews who received the Law through the hand of Moses circumcise their male children on the eighth day, and do not await the arrival of the stars, and do not observe the law of the region (in which they live), and the star which rules that region does not control them. But whether they are in Edom or Arabia or Greece or Persia, in the north or the south, they observe that Law given to them by their ancestors, and clearly do not do so because of their horoscope. For it is not possible that Ares rises for all the Jews who circumcise on the eighth day, so that iron crosses over them and their blood flows [44]. Wherever they live they do not worship idols and one day a week they and their children refrain from all work, from all building, from every journey, from buying, from selling; they do not slaughter animals on the seventh day, do not light fires, do not try cases. There is to be found among them no one whom Fate can command on the seventh day to be found innocent or guilty in a trial, to demolish or build, or to do anything that men who have not accepted this Law do.
Bardesanes is contrasting the Jews with the Arabs, for his interlocutors and audience not ethnographic exotica but part of their personal experience (deqariba lekon den detehezun hada). As is well known, when the Romans seized (ahdu) Arabia, they abolished all the Arabs’ earlier laws, especially their practice of circumcision. They failed to do the same to the Jews, Bardesanes implies.27
What Bardesanes left implicit was stated more openly by his African contemporary Tertullian: No one, the church father wrote (Apologeticum 21.1), should imagine that just because the Christians use the Hebrew scriptures, they are trying to draw on the the prestige of the older and more famous, or, Tertullian adds parenthetically, at any rate, legal, religion; in fact Christianity has nothing in common with Judaism. Scholars have tended to interpret Tertullian’s comment more positively than its context warrants; indeed, scholars who argue for the essential friendliness of Roman–Jewish relations (give or take a few massacres) use Tertullian’s phrase (religio licita) as a shorthand characterization of early and high imperial Roman policy. But Tertullian never implies that the legality of Judaism was a matter of state policy. On the contrary, Judaism is legal only in the sense that no one has ever bothered to declare it illegal, unlike Christianity.28 Indeed, earlier in the same work, Tertullian describes what is probably the Jewish tax as the fine Jews are compelled to pay for their observance of the Jewish laws (Apol 18.9). This may not be meant entirely literally but may nevertheless reflect a common understanding of the relationship between those Jews who insisted on maintaining their separateness and the state: they were, barely, tolerated, and taxed.29
Other information on the status of the Jews in the high empire comes from much later legal sources. Two of the leading jurists of the early third century, Ulpian and Modestinus, preserved, respectively, fragments of a constitution and a rescript concerning the Jews, both extant in the Digest. According to Modestinus, Antoninus Pius had permitted the Jews to circumcise their sons, but not others (Digest 48.8.11; Linder, no. 1), while Ulpian wrote that Severus and Caracalla had “permitted those who follow the Jewish superstitio to acquire honors [i.e., serve as decurions], but also imposed on them such obligations [i.e., munera publica, liturgies] as do not harm their superstitio.”30
The comments of Bardesanes and Tertullian may be taken to mean that the Jews were generally left to their own devices after 135, while the two legal fragments indicate that the Jews retained some of their traditional exemptions, at least in theory. For we must wonder why, if the state’s intervention to preserve Jewish privileges was anything other than sporadic and ad hoc, there are so few laws (and no stories to speak of) about the conflicts between these privileges and the Jews’ civic obligations—in sharp contrast to the situation in the first century. To be sure, our information is very incomplete. But why has rabbinic and Christian literature so little to report? Perhaps because the Jews’ traditional privileges were in fact widely recognized and thus rarely generated conflict and new legislation.31 But it would be very surprising if city councils throughout the eastern part of the empire suddenly acquiesced in a legal situation so disadvantageous to them—in that the Jews’ traditional privileges had exempted them from many civic duties—after having resisted it for centuries previously.32 Perhaps, rather, in many places the Jews themselves were disinclined to press their privileges, that is, they were willing to perform liturgies even if they “harmed their religion,” and so on, much as many Palestinian Jews in the same period conformed without noticeable hesitation to the cultural and religious norms of city life.33
In sum, for most purposes, the Jews were subjects and later citizens like all others, not in any meaningful way a separate category of humanity. We may in general compare them to such groups as the priests of the Egyptian temples and Gallic religious experts, still in existence, still occasionally asserting traditional privileges, but much reduced, by a combination of official apathy and official hostility. In this reduced state, such people were not thought immune to the salvific power of Roman civitas and humanitas.34 Similarly, the state tacitly allowed the Jews to do more or less as they pleased—a benefaction that the Jews either often declined or their neighbors almost never bothered to challenge. Perhaps the Roman state felt it could leave the Jews alone because it had already stamped out their religion in 70 C.E.; all that was left was a set of largely inoffensive private mores.35 In any case, the state expressed little interest in the inner constitution of Jewish corporations (e.g., in the rights and privileges of their leaders) or in determining the legal and social boundaries between Jews and others. Indeed, there is reason to believe that, at least after the universal grant of Roman citizenship in 212, the state did not recognize the legal existence of the Jewish corporations at all.36
All this changed in the later fourth century. The emperors now explicitly recognized the Jews as a legitimate religious organization, with a clergy whose authority and privileges approximated those of the Christian clergy, and with the right to police their own boundaries of membership without state interference. This recognition should be seen not as traditionalism but as an innovation of the 380s and 390s, which in the end helped redefine the relation between the Jews and the state in a radical way (see below). Admittedly, the legislation of the late fourth century and following was no less reactive than that of earlier periods; the emperors were responding in part to changes in the position of the Jews in cities that were increasingly dominated by Christians. Whatever strategies the Jews had developed to cope with life in the pagan cities were, we may infer, no longer working. If these strategies consisted in part of religious eclecticism, as they had in high imperial Palestine, then it is easy to understand why: to be eclectically Jewish and pagan marked you as a successful accommodationist; but to be eclectically both Jewish and Christian marked you as a heretic.37
Recognition and Its Limits
The structural tension between the growing religious exclusivity of the Christian Roman cities, and the desire of some hitherto integrated Jews to retain a sense of separation, demanded assiduous imperial response. The emperors did so by both empowering and marginalizing the Jews, in effect declaring that the Jews were for most purposes a unique category of humanity, like neither orthodox Christians nor pagans and heretics, who were gradually outlawed. Some of the elements of official recognition have already been discussed in connection with the patriarchs. In brief, laws of the 380s and following consistently regard the Jews as constituting a religious community with an authoritative and privileged clergy. This clergy was based in local communities throughout the empire but derived its authority from its dependency on the patriarchs, who for several decades were ardently patronized by Theodosius I, Arcadius, and those who ruled on behalf of the child emperor Theodosius II. The patriarch’s privileges were limited in a law of 415, and under unknown circumstances abolished about ten years later, perhaps with the death of Gamaliel “VI” (the identity and chronology of the patriarchs of the fourth and early fifth century are very obscure). Though the emperor, not the remaining Jewish officials, then inherited some of the patriarch’s privileges, most importantly, the right to collect the so-called aurum coronarium, or apostole (CTh 16.8.29), there is no reason to think the Jewish primates were entirely stripped of their recognized authority over the Jews. At any rate, most of the laws granting them such authority were retained in the Codex Justinianus, promulgated over a century after the end of the patriarchate.
Several laws of the 390s are of special interest because their backgrounds are easy to reconstruct. They may thus enable us to learn something of the social pressures that helped precipitate this change. For example, in the case of CTh 16.8.8 (Theodosius I to Tatian, praetorian prefect of the East, Constantinople, 17 April 392), a group of Jews who had been expelled from the Jewish community in an unknown eastern location by the decision of the local communal leaders appealed to the provincial court, which restored them to their community; apparently the expelled Jews, by misrepresenting the facts of the case, had secured a favorable imperial rescript, whose decision the Roman judges were legally constrained to follow. In the law in question (not a rescript addressed to the injured primates but a constitution issued to a high imperial official), the emperor rectified the situation and concluded by recognizing the primates’ jurisdiction over their own religion (sua de religione sententiam).
We would like to know more. Where did this incident occur? Why and how were the Jews expelled from their community, and how, precisely, did the decision of a Roman court secure their readmission? But for our purposes the law is important even without such details, indicating as it does the existence (though not the extent of the diffusion) of the partly self-governing Jewish community, which offered enough to its members that expulsion from it was something to be avoided. It implies the existence of a class of Jewish leaders, though as we have seen we should probably not assume that this class was well defined. And finally this law shows that the emperors recognized the existence and legal rights of the community and its leaders, as well as its authority to establish its own boundaries. But the law also implies a limitation: the Jews are a secta, followers of a religio, and their primates’ authority is limited to the religious sphere.
This implication is spelled out in two laws of roughly the same period. The first of these is of interest because it supplements one of the other implications of the law just discussed, that the legal separation of the Jews from their neighbors suited the interests of (the? some?) Jews. In CTh 13.5.18, a law of 390 issued by Theodosius I to the governor of Egypt, it is the non-Jewish (presumably mainly Christian) citizens who benefit from the Jews’ separation. The municipal, or perhaps imperial, administrators in Alexandria, or another Egyptian town, were in the habit of holding the local “corpus Iudaeorum” collectively responsible for the transport of grain to the capital cities (or rather, some share of it, presumably), in violation of the previous practice, in which the liturgy was incumbent on the college of ship owners. The emperor prohibits the innovation on the grounds that it is illegal to oblige small traders and other poor people to transport grain and, conversely, to reduce the obligation of the wealthy. In other words, when it comes to their civic obligations, the Jews do not constitute a separate body but remain citizens. The same conclusion emerges clearly from the emperors’ repeated insistence that Jews, other than their clergy, are obliged to serve on city councils—the insistence presumably implying that in many places the Jews managed to avoid such service, which was both an honor and a burden.
The tension between Jews as a separate body and Jews as Roman citizens, and the related recognition of the Jews as members of a religion, is expressed most clearly in a law given by Arcadius to Eutychianus, praetorian prefect of the East, in 398 (CTh 2.1.10). Here the Jews are obliged to subject themselves to Roman laws, as well as Roman courts, in matters that pertain not to their superstition but to forum, leges et iura, that is, civil law. The law continues by recognizing the right of Jewish religious judges to serve as arbitrators in civil cases, a right, as already indicated, the emperor was in no position to deny. This may reflect the difficulties that some Jews may have had in distinguishing between religious and civil cases, but it does not subvert the principle that as far as the state is concerned, the Jews are separate from other citizens primarily with respect to their religion.
Marginalization
Neither the pagan nor the Christian Roman Empire was founded on an ideology of pluralism.38 What changed under Christian rule was the emperors’ promotion of religious uniformity—as opposed to cultural uniformity containing a diffuse and rather vague religious component. Notwithstanding what has just been said, many laws already in the fourth century move far in the direction of identifying Roman citizenship with orthodox Christianity. This theme emerges in an edict Theodosius I issued at Thessalonica in 380, shortly after his accession (CTh 16.1.2), in which he declared his desire that all his subjects “shall practice the religion which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans…. the religion that is followed by the Pontiff Damasus and by Peter, Bishop of Alexandria,” that is, post-Nicene orthodoxy. Others were inevitably marginalized in the state ideology, however insistently the emperors declared their legality and their Romanness.
In the case of the Jews, marginalization took the form of actual legislation, not just general declarations, which are unlikely to have had any practical results except to inform them, along with the remaining nonorthodox, of the state’s hostility, and the aforementioned insulting rhetoric (which is by the way not universally used in the laws). Several laws seem intended to prevent Jews from exercising any authority over Christians; hence, starting in 404, a series of laws remove Jews from service as imperial officials.39 Likewise, the oft repeated prohibition of Jewish ownership of Christian slaves started under Constantine as an extension of the traditional Roman taboo against circumcision, since it was assumed that Jews would circumcise their male slaves (CTh 16.9.1; Const. Sirm. 4; issued 335). But it came to be an expression of opposition to the subjection of Christians by non-Christians.
Other laws seem to have different motivations. The emperors, before Justinian (see Novella 37, issued 535), consistently stated that synagogues may not be seized by Christians and destroyed or turned into churches. But starting with CTh 16.8.25 (Constantinople, 423; cf. 16.8.27, given several months later; Theod. Nov. 3, 438) they also forbade construction of new synagogues—perhaps a concession to the apparently numerous bishops and monks who opposed the imperial protection of synagogues. The prohibition of synagogue construction provides us with an important warning about the functioning of the law because, as is well known, the great age of synagogue construction in Palestine was in the fifth and sixth centuries, precisely the period when such construction was illegal.40
Social Consequences of Marginalization
The progressive marginalization of the Jews (of which the laws are an important manifestation) was not simply a matter of expulsion from government bureaus and military office, and theologically motivated prohibitions against synagogue construction. The laws, both the apparently friendly and the restrictive ones, can be viewed as components of a structural shift, in which the relations between the Jews and the state were radically redefined. The increasing importance of religion affected the structure and composition of the patronage networks that held the empire together. Although Peter Brown has recently revised his classic argument about the importance of “holy men” as patrons in the late empire, by admitting that the traditional elites were never really fully replaced, and that the gulf between the bishops and the leading ascetics was not as wide as he had supposed, his more general point, about the potential utility of religious authority for the acquisition of prestige, and of dependents, seems unchallengeable.41 We should perhaps suppose that one of the corollaries of this change was that the Jews’ position in the conventional patronage structures was becoming increasingly unstable.42 Indeed, the laws can quite easily be read as an attempt by the emperors to create for the Jews an alternate structure, in which the Jewish commoners are dependent on their primates, who are dependent on the patriarch, who is dependent on the emperor. Other avenues are gradually shut down (we will see presently that the emperors were in some cases trying to slow, to control, what was in some places a violent and disorderly process), and aristocratic Jews in turn are barred from acting as patrons to Christians and others.43
It is tempting to understand the well-known story of the conversion of the Jews of Minorca in 418, as told in the Letter of Bishop Severus on the Conversion of the Jews, as an example of how this shift could be played out in life. In brief, the arrival of the relics of St. Stephen on the island in 417 sent the inhabitants, especially Severus and the people of Iamona, his entirely Christian see, into such a state of religious enthusiasm that they attacked the large and socially prominent Jewish community of Magona, the larger of Minorca’s two towns, and in effect compelled them to convert to Christianity. If we stand back a bit from this ominous story, we can easily grasp its broader importance. The leaders of the Jews of Magona were also the leading citizens of the town, its patroni and defensores civitatis,44 well connected even in the central government. One of the Jewish leaders was the son-in-law of Litorius, an important, rather surprisingly Jewish (or ex-Jewish) imperial official, the governor of the Balearics.45 The climax of the story is the conversion of Theodorus, “even now” patron of the city, former defensor and leader of the Jews. Apparently his position had been unproblematic previously, but the intrusion of Severus and his followers into the affairs of Magona had made it untenable. His conversion is fairly openly described as an attempt to recover his prestige and power, and it is a successful attempt.46 Theodorus publicly promises to convert and is given a tumultuous and heartfelt welcome by his Christian fellow citizens: “some ran to him affectionately and caressed his face and neck with kisses; others embraced him in gentle arms, while still others longed to join right hands with him or to engage him in conversation” (16.17–18).This story can be used to confirm the hypothesis that in broad terms, and in ideology if not always in practice, the Jews of the Roman Empire were given a choice—they could live as socially isolated communities, with internal hierarchies of dependence, under the protection of the emperor, or they could be integrated into the social fabric of the cities, but only as Christians.47 The story also informs us that it was not uncommon in late antiquity, at least for a time, for Jews to have it both ways—to function both as discrete communities and as components of their towns—a situation I believe was relatively uncommon in the second and third centuries.48 It is worth adding that Severus’s forcible conversion was a violation of imperial laws, which consequently can be seen as not always successful attempts to regulate an often violent and disordered reality.
But we should be careful. First of all, the story itself: while there now seem no grounds for suspecting the authenticity of the Letter of Severus,49 its veracity is a different matter. Some episodes are questionable, the author knows too much about his characters’ thoughts and motivations, and some of the characters are almost certainly invented.50 But the letter is a social historian’s dream, filled with plausible yet unexpected details about the social life of Magona. Perhaps this fact alone should impose restraint. But perhaps, too, it gives the story the value of a good historical novel: regardless of its truth, the story may still be useful as garnish or illustration, especially since its author apparently really did live on Minorca in the early fifth century.
How common were such events on Minorca? The ample evidence for the destruction of synagogues or their reconsecration as churches suggests at least that the episode was not unique, and the boom in synagogue construction elsewhere provides evidence that some Jews took the option of turning inward, of constituting themselves as religious communities, presumably protected but marginal.51 We should certainly suppose, though, that the ideological shift in relations between the Jews and the state, which can be read with perhaps misleading ease in the law codes, masked messy social realities. For one thing, in real life, the process of marginalization proceeded at different rates in different places. Though the Jews of Magona were excluded from the system in the early fifth century, in Venusia, a rather similar sort of small town in Calabria (now Venosa, in the Basilicata), we hear of a Jewish patronus civitatis as late as the sixth century.52 The “barbarian” law codes and church councils even later continue to prohibit many types of intimacy between Jews and Christians—intimacies that we may take as tracers for relations of social dependency.53 It may be significant, though, that such references are far more common in the West than in the East, where, in relatively stable conditions, there may have been a closer connection between state ideology and social reality, though even there, the insistence that Jews exercise their curial responsibilities kept the door open to limited integration. Finally, the tendency to form inward-turning, partly self-enclosed religious communities was strongest in Palestine, where there remained a concentrated Jewish population. Even there, though, as we will see, there is evidence for conversion to Christianity, especially in the later fifth and sixth centuries. And it can scarcely be denied that throughout the East, the state’s bargain with the Jews—protection in return for withdrawal—began to break down in the reign of Justinian.
Appropriation
What constituted the ideology that integrated the late antique Jewish world? First, it did not consist of the prescriptions and attitudes of the rabbis, though there is some evidence that they were assuming greater importance starting in the sixth century. Though the rabbis continued to exist and to have followers in late antiquity, certainly benefiting in the end from the marginalization of the Jews and their rejudaization, they themselves remained marginal in the Jewish world. Marginal, but not totally insignificant. Rabbinic Judaism was no more a completely discrete entity in late antiquity than it had been in the second and third centuries. The rabbis were constantly engaged with the attempt to assimilate and control the Jewish “little tradition,” which explains their endorsement of the synagogue, but their ambivalence about some of its most striking characteristics (e.g., its decoration) and their no-less-pronounced ambivalence about the local religious community and the patriarchate. This engagement probably demonstrates a sustained attempt on the part of some rabbinic circles, already observed for the third century, to establish a foothold in the Jewish world, and to reach some sort of modus vivendi with nonrabbinic Jewish primates. One indication of the growing success of the rabbis’ accommodative strategies in the sixth century is the emergence of the piyyut—its form borrowed from a popular type of Christian liturgical poetry of the period, its mood suffused with a sort of hieratic mystification that seems almost stereotypically Byzantine, but its content heavily and, it seems to me, sometimes self-consciously and even polemically rabbinic (though there may have been nonrabbinic piyyutim that did not survive).54
The Judaism that most late antique Jews shared was no less a product of christianization than the fact of their reemergence as a discrete religious entity. In the following chapters I will concentrate on what I regard as the most significant characteristic of late antique Judaism—the rise of the synagogue and the local community which now became the chief organizing institutions of Jewish life and remained so until 1800; indeed, in an attenuated and altered form, down even to the present. In what way was this development a product of christianization?
The local Jewish community had certainly existed in the Diaspora as early as the third century B.C.E. But where we know about such communities, they turn out to have been simply a special manifestation of a general phenomenon. Groups of immigrants in Egypt, and elsewhere in the Hellenistic world, though they enjoyed a high level of integration in their environment, often formed compartmentalized corporations in order to preserve elements of their traditional cults by building temples dedicated to their national gods. The Jews were similarly integrated, and they formed similar corporations. Like the others, they built holy places—but synagogues, not temples—dedicated to the God of Israel. Some of these Jewish corporations appear to have been more durable than other ethnic corporations, and the fact that they built synagogues and not temples may help explain why. The corporations for which we have evidence were those that had internalized to some extent the monism and exclusivism of Torah-centered Judaism, and so they are likely to have remained more separate from their neighbors than other ethnic corporations. But some non-Jewish groups were probably as durable as the Jews (we know of a temple of Qos-Apollo in Hermopolis, Egypt, still functioning along traditional lines four centuries after its foundation in the second century B.C.E. by a group of Idumaean immigrants),55 and it must always be recalled that the evidence favors the most separatist of the Jews—others would be unrecognizable (all these issues are discussed in more detail below). In any case, such corporations are very different from what is normally meant by a Jewish community.
In late antiquity, the local community became the predominant form of religious organization in rural Palestine, where it had never before been significant, as we know from the remains of synagogues discovered by archaeologists. What this development surely implies is the emergence of the local community as a full-blown social institution—no longer just a practical response to a set of perceived needs, as earlier in the Diaspora, but something freighted with significance, particularly, as we happen to know, religious significance, in its own right; it reflects, in sum, a comprehensive reorientation of Jewish life. These points are confirmed by the emergence, attested in inscriptions placed in late antique synagogues, of a new, ideologically loaded language used to refer to the community. The local community is now the Holy Qehillah or Qahal (roughly, congregation or assembly), or the Nation (’am or laos), and in some places possibly even Israel—terms that in their original scriptural context refer to the community of Israel as a whole.
There are important gaps in our knowledge about these local religious communities. For example, we know nothing about the role of charitable foundations. They were an essential part of the medieval and modern Jewish community and are sporadically attested in rabbinic literature. But they are never mentioned in inscriptions and are invisible in archaeology.56 But we do know that one of the main tasks of the community was to build and maintain a synagogue, which even in small villages was likely to be an elaborate structure decorated with surprising luxury and urbanity. Why did Jews begin to imagine their villages as loci of religious meaning and spend so much of their presumably unabundant surplus capital to construct monumental commemorations of their local religious autonomy?
Obviously, in the absence of detailed information we cannot answer such a question satisfactorily. But certain factors may be profitably considered. It is generally and plausibly thought that the great period of synagogue construction in Palestine, probably around 350–550, was also a period of unprecedented prosperity in Syria and Palestine. It is often considered a period when the village economy was unusually independent of urban influence, and unusually highly integrated—a view that seems to me far more speculative, based as it is on highly ambiguous archaeological remains, but especially on a single celebrated passage in Libanius’s Eleventh Oration. Prosperity should mean that more surplus was available for rural construction projects, and rural economic integration can help explain the large-scale presence in the ancient synagogues of nonlocal items, although there is good evidence that many of these items came from cities or were made by craftsmen who did. If we accept this scenario, then we might conclude that the local community and the synagogue reflect an attempt by well-to-do villagers (who clearly were the main funders of the community and its institutions) to institutionalize local loyalties that increasingly lacked a real material foundation. At a time when most people’s social connections were elsewhere, the old patrons felt the need to stress, by public commemoration, their honor and generosity all the more strongly.
But we should be careful of exaggerating the effects of the economic boom. It certainly did not benefit every town and village equally and, in any case, was not significant enough to alter the fact that in nucleated settlements, most social and economic relations presumably remained local. If, then, the religious community was deeply embedded in the rural economy and social structure, which were basically unchanged from what they had been previously, why did the community emerge only in the fourth century and following? In response, I would suggest that a purely socioeconomic approach is insufficient (as we should have expected in any case) because it leaves unanswered the question, Why synagogues? And why the community?
What we are actually witnessing is a change that, though it certainly had important social and economic causes and effects, was essentially cultural, and was not restricted to the Jews. As we will see, the entire Palestinian, and Syrian, landscape changed in late antiquity. The great period of synagogue construction was also the great period of church construction. The many important similarities and differences in detail between the village church and the village synagogue, as well as in the ideological factors that justified their construction (see below), cannot conceal the gross similarity in pattern: both Jews and Christians came to view the small settlement as religiously important and to some extent self-contained. Both acted on this idea by producing monumental construction and public writing that commemorated both the religious self-determination of the town or village and the generosity and piety of relatively well-to-do donors. Both synagogues and churches testify to the spread of the Greco-Roman urban culture of euergetism to the countryside and to the various transformations of that culture. And both point to the growing importance of religion in the self-understanding of the villagers. From the rise of the synagogue, we learn of the importance of appropriation in the construction of the novel Jewish culture of late antiquity. In the chapters that follow, I will examine these developments in greater detail.
1 See, e.g., Averil Cameron, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, AD 395–600 (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 57–80; P. R. L. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), passim. This point requires special emphasis as a corrective to much of Jacob Neusner’s work on the Palestinian Talmud and the midreshei aggadah—to take just one example, Judaism in Society.
2 For this sense of marginalization, see the fundamentally important first chapter of A. Avidov, “Processes of Marginalisation in the Roman Empire” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1995).
3 See B. Musallam, “The Ordering of Muslim Societies,” in F. Robinson, ed., The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 164–207, who uses the concept of the Islamic world to describe the similarly fragmented not-quite society of the high Middle Ages.
4 See the discussion in J. Cohen, “Roman Imperial Policy toward the Jews from Constantine until the End of the Palestinian Patriarchate,” Byzantine Studies/études Byzantines 3 (1976): 1–29.
5 Perhaps the Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum is such a work, but its schematic character makes it difficult to interpret; see Rutgers, Hidden Heritage, pp. 235–84.
6 Z. M. Rabinovitz, The Liturgical Poems of Rabbi Yannai (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1987), 2: 37. On Yannai’s gloom and hostility to Byzantium and to Christianity, see H. Schirmann, “Yannai Ha-payyetan: Shirato Ve-hashqafat Olamo,” Keshet 23 (1964): 56–59.
7 See Y. Even-Shmuel, Midreshei Ge’ulah: Pirqei Ha-apoqalipsah Hayehudit Mehatimat Hatalmud Habavli Ve’ad Reshit Ha’elef Hashelishi (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1953), for these texts.
8 “Israel, the Christian Church, and the Roman Empire,” SH 7 (1961): 84–86. By contrast, J. Juster had argued (Les juifs dans l’empire romain [Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1914], 1: 44) that the inability of the church fathers of the second and third centuries to provide concrete legal proof for their repeated contention that the Jews were persecuted demonstrates that they were not.
9 Or nearly so: see S. Lieberman, “Palestine in the Third and Fourth Centuries,” Texts and Studies (New York: Ktav, 1974), pp. 112–53 (= JQR 36–37 (1946): 329–70); for a direct response to Baer, see Lieberman, “Redifat Dat Yisrael,” in D. Rosenthal, ed., Studies in Palestinian Talmudic Literature (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1991), pp. 369–80 (= S. Baron Jubilee Volume, ed. S. Lieberman [Jerusalem: AAJR, 1974], 3: 213–46).
10 The large bibliography on this issue will be cited below as needed. The “friendly” hypothesis underlies much non-Israeli archaeological publication; for an influential example, see E. Meyers and J. Strange, Archaeology, the Rabbis, and Early Christianity (Nashville: Abingdon, 1981). Also important have been several books by Robert Wilken, especially John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
11 And note also T. Braun, “The Jews in the Late Roman Empire,” SCI 17 (1998): 142–71.
12 For a perhaps too skeptical view, see G. Stemberger, “Zwangstaufen von Juden im 4. bis 7. Jahrhundert: Mythos oder Wirklichkeit?” in C. Thoma, G. Stemberger, and J. Maier, eds., Judentum—Ausblicke und Einsichten: Festgabe für Kurt Schubert zum Siebzigsten Geburtstag, (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 81–114. Stemberger comes down firmly on the side of mythos, and it must be admitted that the stories of forced conversions tend to be found mainly in noncontemporary sources and function as foundation myths of churches, in a way that arouses suspicion. But Stemberger’s question is too narrow. For a broader view, see the works cited in the following note.
13 G. Stroumsa, “Religious Contacts in Byzantine Palestine,” Numen 36 (1989): 16–42; F. Millar, “Jews of the Greco-Roman Diaspora Between Paganism and Christianity,” in J. Lieu, J. North, and T. Rajak, eds., Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 97–123; also, Z. Rubin, “Christianity in Byzantine Palestine: Missionary Activity and Religious Coercion,” Jerusalem Cathedra 3 (1983): 97–113. By contrast, the pagan Roman state established a set of behavioral norms, adherence to which might result in a subject’s successful integration. Many of these norms were in conflict with Jewish practice, but other aspects of Jewish practice were of no interest to the state. The Christian state regarded Judaism as simply wrong.
14 See the material collected in the appendices of J. Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Antisemitism (London: The Soncino Press, 1934, reprint New York: Hermon, 1974), especially the church canons (pp. 381–88) and the mainly undatable but suggestive professions of faith extracted from Jews on baptism, pp. 394–400. On the religious lability of some elements of the aristocracy, in Peter Brown’s view especially characteristic of the later fourth century, less so later, see Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
15 Note also the synagoge Ioudaion of Oxyrhynchus mentioned in a papyrus of 291: CPJ 3, no. 473.
16 See S. Mrozek, “À propos de la répartition chronologique des inscriptions latines dans le Haut-Empire,” Epigraphica 35 (1973): 13–18; R. MacMullen, “The Epigraphic Habit in the Roman Empire,” AJP 103 (1982): 233–46.
17 See J. B. Rives, “The Decree of Decius and the Religion of Empire,” JRS 89 (1999): 135–54.
18 The best recent treatment by far is A. Linder, The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987); some bibliographical but not conceptual updating of J. Juster’s classic but now badly outdated book (Les juifs dans l’empire romain) may be found in A. M. Rabello, “The Legal Condition of the Jews in the Roman Empire,” ANRW 2.13 (Berlin: DeGruyter, 1980, pp. 662–762.
19 Or alternatively that both positive and negative legislation had a theological foundation (e.g., Rabello, “Legal Condition,” 693).
20 E.g., CTh 16.7.3, 383; Const Sirm 12, 407; CTh 16.5.44, 408; Const Sirm 14, 409, etc. And see Avi-Yonah, Jews of Palestine, pp. 213–20.
21 The “classic” though possibly fictional case is that of Arcadius and the temples of Gaza in 400—see Vita Porphyrii 41; for a perhaps too optimistic discussion of the authenticity and date of this work, see H. Grégoire and M.-A. Kugener, Marc le diacre: Vie de Porphyre évêque de Gaza (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1930), introduction. But see now Z. Rubin, “Porphyrius of Gaza and the Conflict Between Christianity and Paganism in Southern Palestine,” in A. Kofsky and G. Stroumsa, eds., Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1998), pp. 31–66, for an even more optimistic evaluation.
22 See J. Harries, Law and Empire in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 77–98.
23 Contrast K. L. Noethlichs, Das Judentum unter der römischen Staat: Minderheitenpolitik im antiken Rom (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996), pp. 76–90.
24 Goodman, “Nerva, the Fiscus Judaicus, and Jewish Identity,” JRS 79 (1989): 40–44.
25 Even aside from the fact that I am not fully convinced that such a shift, which Goodman takes for granted (following the arguments of S. Cohen: see the articles collected in his Beginnings of Jewishness), ever really occurred—at least not in quite the way that Goodman assumes.
26 I am excluding the fictions of the Historia Augusta and the equally fictional stories of “Antoninus and Rabbi” in the Palestinian Talmud. Both reflect fourth-century conditions, if anything.
27 Bardesanes’s assertion that the Jews all observe their own laws (the same claim is made about all the groups discussed in the ethnographic section of the treatise) is an aspect of his argument that the stars may control human passions but not their actions; humans have free will and so are subject to divine reward and punishment. If Bardesanes had admitted that people do not all observe their national laws, he would have had to admit the possibility that their behavior might be influenced by their horoscopes. Bowersock, Roman Arabia, p. 79 n. 12, suggests that Bardesanes’s comment refers not to the annexation of Arabia in 106 but to that of Mesopotamia by Septimius Severus.
28 See Baer, “Israel, the Christian Church, and the Roman Empire,” 84–86; cf. Hippolytus, Refutatio Omnium Haeresium, ed. M. Marcovich (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1986), p. 351: some Roman Jews, having been attacked in their synagogue by a Christian scoundrel, argue successfully before the urban prefect that “the Romans have permitted us to read our ancestral laws publicly.” See also P. Garnsey, “Religious Toleration in Classical Antiquity,” in W. J. Sheils, ed., Persecution and Toleration, Studies in Church History 21 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 9, who characterizes the standard Roman approach to foreign religions as “toleration by default,” since there was nothing the state could do about them. He claims that Judaism was the exception to this rule, but the evidence is all from the late republic and the first century of the empire. See also J. Rives, Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 234–49.
29 Though a literal interpretation is not impossible—see E. M. Smallwood, The Jews under Roman Rule (Leiden: Brill, 1981), p. 345; cf. Origen, Epistula ad Africanum 28a (PG 11, col. 81).
30 See commentary of Linder for interpretation; superstitio may be value-neutral, something like “religion.”
31 So F. Blanchetière, “Le statut des juifs sous la dynastie constantinienne,” in E. Frézouls, ed., Crise et redressement dans les provinces européennes de l’empire (Strasbourg: AECR, 1983), p. 128; Rabello, “Legal Condition,” pp. 686–90, argues that the silence of the sources is accidental and even that such lost legal collections of the third century as the “Codex Gregorianus” and the “Codex Hermogenianus” had separate chapters on the Jews.
32 See Garnsey, “Religious Toleration,” 11.
33 Apart from the evidence cited in the last section for Jews in municipal office, see CPJ 3, no. 474: Aurelius Ioannes, most likely Jewish, gymnasiarch at Karanis, in 304. Were the Jews exempted from the imperial cult and/or the requirements to sacrifice imposed especially during the sporadic persecutions of Christianity? Remarkably, there is almost no ancient information on this question at all. A possible exception is Y. Avodah Zarah 5:4: “(Why is the wine of the Samaritans forbidden?…) Some would say that when King Diocletian came here [to Palestine], he decreed that all the nations must offer libations, except the Jews; the Cutheans [Samaritans] offered libations and so their wine was forbidden. Some would say, etc.” What should we make of this? Probably it is one of several stories invented to explain the otherwise inexplicable prohibition of Samaritan wine. Even if it has a “historical kernel,” it may have nothing to do either with the imperial cult or with the persecution of Christians (so Baer, “Israel, The Christian Church, and the Roman Empire,” 119–28: Diocletian visited Palestine in 286 but did not persecute the Christians until 303). Modern scholars are divided over whether the Jews were exempt or not—see Juster, 1.339–54; Rabello, “Legal Condition,” pp. 703–4; Smallwood, Jews Under Roman Rule pp. 539–44; Rives, “Decree of Decius,” 138. Perhaps some Jews were able to convince local authorities that they did worship the emperor, in their own way, in the synagogues (why not? who knew what went on in there anyway? and why doubt the Jews if they were upstanding citizens otherwise?); other Jews may have participated.
34 See, in general, Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt; Woolf, Becoming Roman, pp. 206–37.
35 See, pending publication of James Rives’s discussion of this issue, G. Bohak, “Theopolis: A Single-Temple Policy and Its Singular Ramifications,” JJS 50 (1999): 6–7; and note Cassius Dio’s oddly periphrastic comment (37.17.1) that the Jews, though frequently persecuted in the past, have now (early third century) so grown in number that they have achieved the right to express their beliefs freely (es parrhesian tes nomiseos eknikesai).
36 See CJ 1.9.1, dated 213, which denies to the universitas Iudaeorum of (Syrian?) Antioch the right to recover in court a legacy left them by one Cornelia Salvia; since the senate had not long before affirmed the right of collegia licita to claim legacies, this law probably implies that the Jewish community of Antioch, and by extension Jewish communities in general (?), had no legal standing. See the comments of Linder, no. 3. The suggestion of Rabello that the universitas Judaeorum was not the Jewish community (who, then?), is apologetic special pleading.
37 A status far more dangerous than Jewishness, as a glance at the laws in CTh book 16 demonstrates.
38 See Garnsey, “Religious Toleration,” and in general Rives, Religion and Authority.
39 CTh 16.8.17, Rome, 404, removing Jews and Samaritans from service as agentes in rebus, and all other imperial service; CTh 16.8.24, Ravenna, 418, prohibition of Jews as agentes in rebus, palatini and military officers, but permission of advocacy; Jews already in nonmilitary service shall not be expelled; Const. Sirm. 6, Aquileia, 425, Jews and pagans removed from government service and advocacy, “ne occasione dominii sectam venerandae religionis inmutent” (lest [Christians], because of the Jews’ rule over them, exchange the venerable religion for a sect); Theodosii (II) Novellae, 3, Constantinople, 438, Jews and Samaritans barred from all government offices, including that of defensor civitatis; CJ 1.5.12, Constantinople, 527, all nonorthodox barred from civil and military offices. But Jews of the curial class were consistently liable for service as decurions, unless they were members of the clergy.
40 Cf. Theophanes the Confessor, Chronographia, ed. De Boor, 1:, 102.
41 See P. Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” JRS 61 (1971): 80–101 = Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (London: Faber, 1982), pp. 103–52; “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man, 1971–1997,” JECS 6 (1998): 353–76.
42 Venantius Fortunatus, Carmina v.5.17–20, composed c. 576 to celebrate the forced conversion of the Jews of Clermont in the Auvergne: plebs Arverna etenim, bifido discissa tumultu,/ urbe manens una non erat una fide./ Christocolis Judaeus odor resilibat amarus/ obstabatque piis impia turba sacris. This is quoted by B. Brennan, “The Conversion of the Jews in Clermont in AD 576,” JThS 36 (1985): 328.
43 Cf. the following passage in Pesiqta deRav Kahana (ed. S. Buber, 139b), a text of perhaps the sixth century: “the nations of the world count Israel and say, ‘How long will you go on being killed for your God, and giving up your souls for Him? … How much pain does He inflict on you! … Come, join us, and we will make you duces, eparchs, and stratelatai.’ And Israel enters its synagogues and study houses, and takes the Torah scroll, and reads in it … (then, at the End of Days) Israel says before the Holy One, Blessed Be He, ‘Master of the Universe, if not for the Torah scroll which You wrote for us, the nations of the world would long since have corrupted us (so that we ceased to worship) You.’ ”
44 The post was created in the 360s to protect the weak from the depredations of the powerful, and so the defensores had themselves to possess considerable auctoritas (CTh 1.29.1, 3). They were supposed to be nominated by the city council and the bishop, and, as of 409, were supposed also to be orthodox Christians (CJ 1.55.8). For discussion, see S. Bradbury, Severus of Minorca: Letter on the Conversion of the Jews (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 32–34.
45 On the remarkable career and problematic religious identity of this man, see Bradbury, Severus, 34–37.
46 16.24–25, a Jew who has already converted tells the panic-stricken Theodorus, “If you truly wish to be safe and honored and wealthy, believe in Christ, as I too have believed. Right now you are standing and I am seated with bishops; if you should believe, you will be seated and I will be standing before you.”
47 Cf. the discussion in P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 102–5, which attempts, not very convincingly, to account for the marginalization of the Jews and others in terms tacitly borrowed from Mary Douglas. See the criticism of Carlo Ginzburg, “La conversione degli ebrei di Minorca (417–418),” Quaderni Storici 79 (1992): 277–89. I am not suggesting, of course, that individual Jewish communities, even apart from that of Minorca, were actually given such a choice: on Clermont and Orléans, in 576 and 585 respectively, see Brennan, “The Conversion of the Jews.”
48 The tendency of late antique Jews, especially but not exclusively in the western empire, to bury their dead without separation from Christians, but in graves marked iconographically as Jewish, may serve at least as a metaphor for, if not a proof of, the diffusion of this transitional condition; see the important discussion in Rutgers, Hidden Heritage, pp. 83–91. This phenomenon is attested even in Palestine; and note also Beth Shearim 2.164, the epitaph, probably of the later fourth century, of an apparent vir clarissimus—a low ranking senator—who was also an archisynagogue in Beirut.
49 This is the main, and convincing, argument of the introduction of Bradbury, Severus; Stemberger, “Zwangstaufen,” pp. 86–90, is characteristically inconclusive, while most historians have tended to assume the work’s authenticity and essential veracity without discussion.
50 See again the discussion of Bradbury, Severus.
51 On the Palestinian synagogues, see below; the vast majority of Diaspora synagogues were built in the same period; see Rutgers, Hidden Heritage, pp. 125–35.
52 See Noy, Jewish Inscriptions, 1, #114; for the date, see M. Williams, “The Jews in Early Byzantine Venusia: The Family of Faustinus I, the Father,” JJS 50 (1999): 47–48. For an aristocratic Samaritan family at Scythopolis in the sixth century, whose members included patroni civitatis and even a Constantinopolitan senator who attained the illustrate, i.e., the highest senatorial rank (but who may have been Christian), see L. di Segni, “The Samaritans in Roman-Byzantine Palestine,” in H. Lapin, ed., Religious and Ethnic Communities in Later Roman Palestine (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 1998), pp. 65–66. The legal position of Samaritans was somewhat different from that of Jews, as di Segni notes.
53 See the summary presentation of this material in Parkes, Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue, pp. 379–86.
54 Or perhaps several of them do; see M. Sokoloff and J. Yahalom, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1999), pp. 39–45.
55 See E. Kornemann and P. Meyer, Griechische Papyri im Museum des Oberhessischen Geschichtsvereins zu Giessen, vol. 1 (Leipzig-Berlin: Teubner 1910–1912), no. 99; F. Zucker, Doppelinschrift spätptolemäischer Zeit aus der Garnison von Hermopolis Magna (Berlin, 1938), 13.
56 With the remotely possible exception of the famous “godfearers” inscription from Aphrodisias: see J. Reynolds and R. Tannenbaum, Jews and Godfearers at Aphrodisias, Cambridge Philological Society Supplementary Volume 12 (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1987), pp. 26–28. But Tannenbaum’s interpretation is very implausible.