Part III - Ethnicity and Identity in the Roman Empire

10 Religious Pluralism in the Roman Empire Did Judaism Test the Limits of Roman Tolerance?^*

Erich S. Gruen

1

Paganism, one would imagine, promoted pluralism by its very nature. It contained multiple gods, with a host of major and minor deities and divine offshoots. The smorgasbord of divinities should have fostered forbearance for a wide spectrum of supernatural beings, a motley crew whose authority and responsibilities may have overlapped confusingly but whose collective presence suggests a broad-mindedness by pagans that monotheistic religions did not possess. In principle at least, pluralism ought to have issued in toleration.

Roman expansionism, however, complicated matters in various ways. As the empire spread, first in Italy, then in both the western and eastern Mediterranean, it encompassed an ever increasing number of peoples, cultures, traditions – and gods. How far would tolerance extend when Romans encountered peoples who worshipped snakes and a wide variety of other animals, whose gods had eunuch priests adept at ecstatic dancing accompanied by clashing cymbals, whose mystery cults involved initiation rites with a bull slaying ceremony, whose celebrants indulged in nocturnal and orgiastic rituals, or who worshipped a single divinity but scorned all images or representations of him?¹

With so many diverse practices brought under the umbrella of the Roman Empire, how far does one stretch the notion of tolerance for religious pluralism? Some scholars indeed have expressed skepticism about the vaunted open-mindedness of the Romans. A famous fictional speech put by the historian Cassius Dio into the mouth of Maecenas, the close friend and adviser of Augustus, should cause some concern on that score. Maecenas purportedly counseled Augustus on the most effective ways to entrench his monarchy. Among them was the enforcement of a national religion by compelling others to honor it and punishing those who introduce foreign rites, because new divinities turn people away from traditional practices and promote conspiracies, cabals, and upheavals.² That suggests troubling limits to tolerance. How tolerant, in fact, were the Romans?

Our own categories create obstacles. Tolerance or intolerance may not be the best designation of alternatives. The terms are modern rather than ancient. There is no Greek or Latin word for tolerance. Nor did any Greek or Roman writer articulate a policy of toleration, let alone formulate a philosophy advocating freedom of religion. Romans, so some have claimed, engaged in imperialism, not magnanimity. As one scholar put it, “Roman-style polytheism was disposed to expand and to absorb or at least to neutralize other gods, not to tolerate them.”³

The idea of toleration as policy would have been unintelligible to Romans. And even on the most charitable estimate, tolerance presumes superiority, the greater power’s willingness to tolerate the eccentricities of the lesser – a willingness that could at any time be withdrawn. Motives of benevolence and generosity, if they existed at all, are beside the point.

2

A different fact needs emphasis here: Romans could and did import external cults at the public level, making them part of the state apparatus, and welcomed them on the private level, as significant numbers of Romans became adherents of foreign rituals. That experience provides critical insight into the Roman disposition.

The importation of cults from elsewhere to Rome began already in its earliest history. So, at least, the traditions preserved by later literary sources attest. The worship of Herakles came from Greece, according to legend, through the Arcadian king Evander who brought it to the site of Rome in time for Romulus himself to sacrifice at the Ara Maxima.⁴ The celebrated summoning of Juno Regina from the great Etruscan city of Veii in 396 BCE turned the tide of the supposed ten-year war between Rome and Veii. The goddess, by moving from Veii to Rome, decided that contest for supremacy between the two powers. The ceremony of this summoning, the evocatio, meant that Juno Regina would now have her worship in Rome, on the Aventine Hill, where a temple would be constructed for her, and her cult would forever be a reminder of divine favor for Romans against their foes.⁵ Evocatio, however, it should be noted, has a character quite different from sheer imperialist expropriation. Juno Regina’s transfer to Rome was not abduction or a coerced seizure. As the tale has it, a Roman soldier asked Juno whether she wished to move to Rome, and the statue of the goddess duly nodded. Juno thus shifted her allegiance voluntarily, bringing an Etruscan divine presence to the side of Rome where she would be ministered to by Roman priests and worshipped thereafter as part of the state religious structure.⁶ The historicity of that and similar events matters little. The attitude indicates a readiness to embrace principal foreign deities and make them part of Roman public ritual. In a parallel development, Etruscan priests, the haruspices, took their place at some point in the fourth or early third century as a priestly college, steeped in Etruscan lore, on whom Rome relied for purposes of divination, particularly the expiation of prodigies.⁷ The adoption of alien religious elements was, in short, an integral part of Roman history almost from its beginning.

The process accelerated in the third and second centuries, as Rome drew on cults and traditions from further afield. The worship of Asklepios arrived from Epidauros in 293 BCE; the healing deity was brought to Rome to counteract a dreadful pestilence – and stayed to enjoy a shrine built for him on the Tiber Island. It is not irrelevant that the reaching out to Asklepios came as a consequence of a recommendation found by priests in the Sibylline Books – scrolls that themselves were of Hellenic origin composed in Greek hexameter verse.⁸ Sibylline advice also prompted the introduction of the worship of Venus Erycina in 217, a goddess of mixed Greco-Phoenician character in western Sicily.⁹ Legend had it that the site of her temple in Sicily was also the place where Aeneas had dedicated a shrine to his mother.¹⁰ Venus Erycina, who trailed echoes of the Trojan legend, would thus enhance Roman morale at a critical time in the Hannibalic war. But her arrival was no mere temporary visit. Venus Erycina received a temple on the Capitoline itself, a place of conspicuous honor. The goddess could thus not only serve as reminder of the national heritage; she also represented yet another foreign deity brought into the very center of Roman public life.¹¹

A still more dramatic instance of this occurred in 205 BCE, during the final years of the Hannibalic war. Unusual prodigies in that year caused Romans to consult the Sibylline Books once more. The priests produced a prophecy that predicted Hannibal’s defeat if the Romans should bring Magna Mater, the Great Mother goddess from Asia Minor, to Rome. The goddess was duly conveyed, in the form of a sacred stone, and was received, as directed by the oracle at Delphi, in solemn ceremony by select representatives of the senate, and installed on the Palatine.¹² The significance of this event for Roman politics, diplomacy, and cultural aspirations has been much discussed.¹³ What stands out on any interpretation, however, is an elaborate negotiation to transfer to Rome the cult of this powerful Anatolian deity, serviced by eunuch priests in glaringly colorful garb, with ecstatic gyrations, accompanied by tambourines, flutes, and cymbals.¹⁴ The senate determined that the unseemly character of the celebrations prohibited Romans themselves from serving as participants in the ceremonies.¹⁵ That at least preserved some decorum. But the fact remains that this foreign cult was welcomed upon arrival by eminent Romans and was established on no less a location than the Palatine hill. The ludi Megalenses were inaugurated there in honor of the goddess and would be held annually as one of the major festivals on the Roman sacred calendar.

We know of just one notable exception to this welcome parade of pluralistic immigrant cults. It occurred in 186 BCE. At that time Roman authorities notoriously cracked down with punishing harshness on the worship of Dionysus, the so-called Bacchanalian conspiracy. For many, the event serves to define the limits of Roman tolerance for alien religion: Bacchic revels crossed the line of Roman endurance; the senate resorted to persecution of practices inimical to their traditions and threatening state supervision of worship.¹⁶ But that analysis fails to tell the whole story. Indeed the tale of a sudden and threatening arrival of the Bacchic cult, discovered in the nick of time, is vitiated by the fact that Dionysiac worship had been widespread in Italy for a long time before – without engendering any repression.¹⁷ Further, the measures actually taken by the senate in 186 are telling. They aimed to assure control of the cult, not to eradicate it. Secret ceremonies were banned; men were prohibited from holding priesthoods, and neither men nor women could serve as administrative overseers; common funds were prohibited; and initiates could not exchange oaths or vows. At the same time, however, the new regulations allowed for retention of altars and images that had a long history; individual worshippers could maintain their connection to the cult if they made their case to the urban praetor and received permission from the senate, and they could continue to participate in the ritual, so long as no more than five persons were involved. All of this indicates a drive to regulate the activities of the cult and to keep them under senatorial control rather than to eliminate Bacchic worship. The curbing of Dionysiac ritual, in other words, represented social and political management – not an attack on alien imports on grounds of their foreignness. In that essential regard, the crackdown on the “Bacchanalian conspiracy” constitutes no real exception to the rule.

The importation of cults that lacked Roman roots proceeded apace. No need to detail them here. In addition to those actually summoned by the state, others entered the scene through private embrace or individual adherence. The worship of Isis serves as a conspicuous example of widespread popularity. An Egyptian deity in origin but expanded and transformed in the Hellenistic era, she subsequently meandered in the Roman Empire to various points in the west, including, quite prominently, Rome itself. The cult or cults of Mithras enjoyed a comparable following. Mithraic roots may have been Persian, but adherents of Mithras spread successfully to Italy and, largely though not exclusively, through the army, to frontier regions, particularly along the Rhine and Danube, as well as elsewhere in the west. A range of other divinities from abroad found their way to Rome or to Romans elsewhere.¹⁸ Juvenal might sneer about the Orontes pouring its refuse into the Tiber. But worshippers in Rome and Italy, whether foreigners or indigenous, practiced a miscellaneous variety of rituals, with little or no repression or persecution.¹⁹

None of this involves tolerance. The term is inapplicable. The state lacked a religious establishment or a centralized apparatus to demand uniformity, even if anyone wished to do so. And the thoroughly pluralistic religious society of the Roman Empire discouraged it. Hence, the very notion of extending or withdrawing tolerance is simply irrelevant. Even the characterization of Romans as broad-minded or liberal may be off the mark. Acceptance and embrace of alien cults was simply a long-standing ingredient of Roman identity.

3

How does Judaism fit into this picture? On the face of it, the community ill suits the profile of the other sects discussed earlier. Jews carried the reputation of an exclusivist, separatist group, rigorously monotheistic, disdainful of other gods, and hostile to their worshippers as misguided idolaters. The attitude, of course, goes back to the Hebrew Bible. The distinctiveness of Israel constitutes a central motif, as in the classic text of Leviticus 18:3 that enjoins the Israelites to set themselves definitively apart from the ways of Egyptians and Canaanites alike.²⁰ A core value of the nation rests in its self-perception as the Chosen People, with an obligation to follow the Law and resist those who revere false gods and lead the devout astray.²¹ Postbiblical texts reinforced the image of Jewish exclusiveness. The Book of Jubilees, for instance, supplies a deathbed speech for Abraham to his children and grandchildren, exhorting them to steer clear of all Gentiles, and to scorn any association with their ways, their food, and, especially, their daughters.²² And a celebrated passage in the Letter of Aristeas, the fictional tale of the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, makes the point unequivocally. It has the Jewish High Priest ridicule Greek idolatry and insist that the laws of Moses erect iron walls and inviolable fences to keep the Jews safely isolated from Gentile taint.²³

The impression of Jewish separatism prevailed also among Greek and Latin writers of the Roman period who took any notice of them. Diodorus of Sicily maintained that of all people the Jews alone would associate themselves with no other nation and reckoned them all as enemies.²⁴ Tacitus famously accused the Jews of a malignant hatred toward all people but themselves, refusing to eat or sleep with others, and, although most prone to lust, abstaining from all intercourse with non-Jews.²⁵ And Juvenal caustically quips that Jews in Rome lead no inquirers to a desired destination unless they are circumcised.²⁶ It is hardly surprising that scholars regularly cite these and other passages to exhibit pagan denunciation of Jews for their exclusivist ways and their displeasure with Gentiles.²⁷ All this would seem to make it quite unlikely that the practice of Jewish rites would be readily welcomed under the umbrella of the Roman Empire.

4

Yet the facts on the ground offer a very different picture from literary representations, whether by Jews who stressed their exclusivity or by Romans who focused on Jewish idiosyncrasies. Did Rome marginalize the Jews? Documentary testimony points in other directions. The Jewish historian Josephus preserves a dossier of documents recording pronouncements by Roman leaders and officials that protect the rights and privileges of Jews, mostly in Greek communities of the Roman province of Asia. This collection of senatorial decrees, letters by magistrates, municipal declarations, and imperial edicts appears to imply a policy of Roman guardianship of practices and prerogatives belonging to Jews against efforts to restrict or abolish them.²⁸

To be sure, one needs to exercise caution here. Josephus’ dossier does not add up to a general policy that holds everywhere and throughout. Most of the items he records belong to a relatively brief period at the end of the Roman Republic and the principate of Augustus and refer to events in the circumscribed area of western Asia Minor. The pronouncements by representatives of the government arose in the ad hoc circumstances of the Roman civil war, beginning in 49 BCE between Caesar and Pompey, proceeding through the conflicts that followed the assassination of Caesar between the triumvirs and the “liberators,” and the unsettled political and economic circumstances of Asia Minor as the Augustan principate established itself. They do not attest to a sweeping attitude of “toleration” or an active engagement by Rome in support of Jewish priorities. For example, exemption of Jews from military service in the Roman legions by backers of the Pompeian cause aimed at shoring up support against the Caesarians. Similarly, Caesar’s own declarations that strengthened the hand of the Jewish High Priest sought to enhance his position in the eastern part of the empire where Pompeian sentiment had previously prevailed. Comparable assertions issued from Augustus and Agrippa, reiterating confirmation for Jewish commitment to matters like observance of the Sabbath and annual contributions to the Temple in Jerusalem. These repeated Roman declarations of backing for Jewish privileges (with little evidence of actual implementation by Roman officials) were episodic, infrequent, and prompted by the conditions of civil conflict in the empire – not a matter of Roman stewardship of Jews.²⁹

But there is a broader import here. The very issuance and reissuance of these pronouncements, however conventional they may have become, carry real significance. They indicate that, far from marginalizing Jews as a separatist sect, Roman officialdom found reasons for reasserting their place within the confines of the empire.

5

The idea of Jewish exclusivity also needs reconsideration. How separatist, in fact, were the Jews? Despite the impression delivered by some sources, Jews welcomed and gained converts in notable numbers in the age of the Roman Empire. Specific figures, of course, elude us. And just what constituted “conversion” in this period is beyond our grasp – if indeed there was any specific formula. The degree of adherence to Jewish laws, customs, and traditions by proselytes doubtless varied by situation, period, and location.³⁰ Even circumcision need not have been obligatory. Philo maintains that proselytes could forgo physical circumcision, so long as they could circumcise their desires, pleasures, and other passions.³¹ In the Jewish novel Joseph and Aseneth, Aseneth’s conversion required only repentance and a smashing of her idols.³² The Roman historian Cassius Dio observed that those of alien race who do no more than emulate the customs of the Jews could still be reckoned as Ioudaioi.³³ The Jewish openness to conversion, in any case, is undeniable. Both Philo and Josephus boasted that Jewish customs like the Sabbath, dietary laws, and fasts have won adherents from all over the world.³⁴ Pagan writers also noticed the appeal of Judaism to non-Jews and the burgeoning numbers of those who joined the faith – although the writers were not particularly happy about it.³⁵ Converts to Jewish ways of life and institutions and those who became, in some fashion, members of Jewish communities were conspicuous in the Roman world. The Jews did not discourage, let alone exclude, them.

Nor was conversion of any sort necessary to become part of a broader Jewish society. The term “godfearers” has become convenient to describe those who belonged to this larger circle. It appears in both literary and epigraphic sources.³⁶ That it had some recognizable significance is clear from the great donor inscriptions from Aphrodisias that list benefactors with distinguishing labels as Jews, proselytes, or theosebeis, as well as a whole separate category of theosebeis.³⁷ The term evidently designates a group of Gentiles closely associated with Jews and operating in a shared society. Their existence further demonstrates the willingness of Jews to bring within their broader compass a range of interested and sympathetic Gentiles. This seriously undermines the idea of deliberate Jewish segregation.

One can go further along these lines. Jews themselves reached out to the wider pagan religious world. Even the worship of Yahweh, fundamental and binding though it was for all Jews, was not altogether restrictive or singular. A famous line in the Letter of Aristeas, put in the mouth of a Greek aristocrat but composed by a Hellenistic Jew, states that “the god whom Jews worship, the overseer and creator of all, is the same one worshipped by all people, including us Greeks, only we call him Zeus.”³⁸ This is not a merging or blending of interchangeable deities, as it is often interpreted. Rather, it expresses a Jewish sense that their monotheistic faith can be ascribed without strain to Gentiles as well.

Epigraphic testimony from the Roman Empire bears out the crossovers and intertwinings most persuasively. One might cite as illustrations two funerary epitaphs from different parts of the Roman world, one from Pannonia on the Danube, one from Cirta in North Africa, probably sometime in the second or third century CE. In each case, the deceased, a woman, carries the identifying marker of Iudea, but the gravestone is headed by D.M. (i.e., dis manibus), a standard formula in pagan epitaphs, alluding to the divine spirits of the dead.³⁹ Not that dis manibus occurs all that frequently in Jewish inscriptions. But plainly no prohibition prevented Jews from adopting a Gentile formula alluding to spirits of the dead and interpreting them in their own fashion.

A different sort of illustration with comparable significance deserves mention. Manumission declarations from the Black Sea region show that some Jews at least were conversant with forms and procedures in pagan documents. The emancipations themselves took place in Jewish synagogues, but the proceedings regularly followed Gentile models. In one inscription from Gorgippia in the Bosporan kingdom, dated to 41 CE, the manumitter invokes theos hypsistos, “highest god,” a phrase commonly employed in Jewish inscriptions, and frees his slave in the synagogue. But he accompanies this with a vow that the liberated slave be under the protection of “Zeus, Earth, and Sun.”⁴⁰ Evidently the dedicator found no strain or tension between appealing to the Jewish god and simultaneously calling upon the protection of divine powers as framed by Gentiles.

Finally, a recently published document also from Hierapolis, dating to the mid second century CE, illuminates still another corner of this process. It belongs to the sarcophagus of a certain Hikesios, “also named Judah,” whose accomplishments deserved record. The inscription calls him “most famous victor in sacred contests.” Indeed it refers to him as “multiple victor.”⁴¹ Whether his triumphs came in athletic or musical contests is unspecified. But the fact that a man who carried the name Judah could enter – and win – numerous “sacred contests” (i.e., those consecrated to pagan deities), holds real significance. The text demonstrates not only that gymnasial games were open to Jews but that Jews advertised their participation proudly in these quintessentially pagan competitions.

The evidence as we have it challenges any notion of impenetrable borders between paganism and Judaism. Jews did not retreat into isolationism or separatism. Nor was the distinctive identity of the Jews compromised by participation in the wider religious pluralism of the Roman Empire.

6

Judaism, like other religious communities under the aegis of the imperial power, enjoyed the indifference of the authorities. Jews in the diaspora dwelled all over the Mediterranean. Their synagogues were ubiquitous. Attestations, whether literary or archaeological, place these houses of prayer, in multiple numbers, in Syria, Egypt, Cyrenaica, Cyprus, Anatolia, the Black Sea, Greece, Macedonia, the Aegean islands, and Italy.⁴² The institutions had their own officialdom, untrammeled by Roman interference, and provided a setting not only for religious services but also for education, communal dining, celebration of festivals, judicial decisions, gathering of assemblies, and manumission of slaves. Jewish communal life thrived. And it was not cut off from the larger society. Evidence exists from various quarters for Jewish access to the cultural and educational institutions, even the civic institutions, of cities in the empire. Nor should one omit to mention that many Jews in the diaspora possessed Roman citizenship. Paul of Tarsus is only the most celebrated example. However rare the practical exercise of that privilege may have been, it represented a key mark of status.⁴³

Jews in fact had a strong representation in the city of Rome itself. If issues arose that involved their interests or those of Jews in general, they could turn out in force. So, for instance, when Roman policy in the east threatened to affect contributions to the Temple in Jerusalem in 59 BCE, the Jews of Rome organized vociferous demonstrations. Indeed, it was not uncommon for them to make their presence felt in Roman contiones, gatherings for discussion of public issues, when the matter was of concern to them – and they carried weight.⁴⁴ When King Herod, ruler of Judaea under Roman hegemony, died in 4 BCE, and Jewish embassies arrived in Rome to express diverse views over the future of the land, Roman Jews, up to eight thousand of them according to Josephus, gathered to put pressure on the emperor Augustus to grant Judaea independence from the Herodian family.⁴⁵ Philo claimed quite plausibly that Augustus interfered not at all with Jewish traditional customs, including their meetings in synagogues and their contribution of tithes to Jerusalem. Moreover, Augustus saw to it that if allocations of grain were scheduled on the Sabbath when Jews could not be present, their portion would be held in reserve, to be distributed on the following day.⁴⁶ That form of consideration offers insight into the successful integration of Jews into the social and economic life of the city. Pronouncements by Roman officials and by Roman emperors regularly reiterated affirmation of Jewish prerogatives and the protection of Jewish adherence to the traditions of their ancestors.

There were, to be sure, some bumps in the road. On three separate occasions, so we are told, Jews were expelled from the city of Rome. But those occasions were widely spaced, in 139 BCE, 19 CE, and 49 CE; special circumstances prevailed in each case; the expulsions (as in the case of Isis worshippers) were more symbolic than effective, expressions of the government’s need to reassert its commitment to traditional religion; and had no long-term impact upon the Jewish experience in Rome.⁴⁷ Sejanus, the ambitious and sinister praetorian prefect of the emperor Tiberius, allegedly plotted (for reasons unknown) against the Jews, slandering those in Rome, and encouraging attacks against others in the provinces. Whatever the truth of those claims, to be found only in Philo, Tiberius himself canceled the efforts after Sejanus’ death, denounced the accusations, and instructed all provincial governors to reassure Jews in their jurisdictions that only those few who were guilty of infractions would be punished, and the nation as a whole should be regarded as a trust under Roman protection.⁴⁸ Caligula notoriously sought to install a statue in the Temple, an effort that caused frightful consternation among Jews, thwarted only by Caligula’s assassination. But, despite Philo’s representation of Caligula’s lunatic anti-Semitism, the emperor may have had other purposes in mind than an assault on Jews. And he dropped the effort anyway when the intensity of Jewish objections became clear.⁴⁹ Caligula’s successors made no comparable attempts. The emperor Claudius indeed, in his famous letter to the Alexandrians, asserted, as had Augustus and Tiberius before him, that the Jews of Alexandria should be permitted to follow their own customs and honor their own god.⁵⁰

The bumps in the road have attracted much of the scholarly attention. But it needs to be emphasized that they were brief, temporary, exceptional, and by no means representative of imperial policy or Jewish experience. Pronouncements by Roman officials and by Roman emperors regularly reiterated affirmation of Jewish prerogatives and the protection of Jewish adherence to the traditions of their ancestors.

7

Rome comfortably incorporated Jews, indeed explicitly safeguarded their privileges, within its pluralistic religious universe. The behavior provides a telling indicator of Roman attitudes toward that universe. But there is a fundamental question that still needs to be confronted. Did the Jews, in the eyes of Rome, fall under the heading of a religious sect at all? Did the Romans not regard Jews as a nation (i.e., an ethnic entity) rather than a religion? In other words, did the empire not treat Jews as part of its collection of nations instead of its assemblage of multiple religions? In that case, attitude to the Jews was a social and political matter, and had nothing to do with worship, ritual, or belief.

The language of our texts does not afford an easy answer. Ancient authors frequently refer to Jews as ethnos or genos in Greek, natio or gens in Latin, which would seem to designate ethnicity rather than religion. If so, relevance to the subject of religious pluralism would be marginal. Jews could be categorized with Syrians or Phoenicians, with Gauls or Spaniards, rather than with worshippers of Isis or Mithras, the reference being to their origins, their location, or their ethnic association, not to beliefs or rituals. The term Ioudaioi in Greek or Iudei in Latin might apply simply to inhabitants of the land of Judaea, to members of the Jewish state, or to those in the diaspora whose families stemmed from that land. Religious connotations, in principle at least, need not be part of that identity.⁵¹

But is that how Romans understood the Jews? The question needs to be addressed, and the evidence for Roman perception of Jews deserves closer scrutiny. Key texts for this purpose have for the most part been surprisingly overlooked in the discussion: the letters, senatorial decrees, and edicts by Roman officials, noted earlier, that reaffirmed Jewish privileges. To be sure, we do not have the documents themselves, only Josephus’ reproduction of them. But the historian’s collection closely parallels the phraseology, content, and formulas to be found in Roman pronouncements on stone, bronze, or papyrus in other contexts. Josephus could certainly have obtained copies of the texts from Jews in diaspora cities. And one can have confidence in the general reliability of his dossier.⁵²

What emerges most strikingly is the consistent reference to Jews in terms of their sacred rites, rituals, practices, ceremonies, and observances – in short, their religion. For example, the Roman consul of 49 BCE declared in a letter to Ephesus that Jews who are Roman citizens should be exempt from military service on grounds of their religion, so that they can practice their sacred rites.⁵³ A subsequent letter from the governor of Asia to Laodicea and other cities sharpened the principle somewhat by stating that Jews have a right to observe the Sabbath and the rest of their sacred rituals in accord with their traditional laws.⁵⁴ Yet another missive expanded on the exemption from military service by specifying that Jews do not bear arms on the Sabbath and that military service would interfere with their dietary restrictions, their ability to assemble in accordance with ancestral customs, and their offerings for sacrifices.⁵⁵ Other comparable pronouncements, with similar phraseology, can also be cited.⁵⁶ In all of these documents, Jews come under the Roman aegis almost exclusively as a religious group.⁵⁷

The comments of Roman writers and intellectuals, whatever their particular outlook, also repeatedly refer to Jewish ritual, practices, and beliefs, not to ethnicity. So, for example, Cicero, although he recognized that Jews could be an effective pressure group in Rome, sums them up as a barbara superstitio and makes reference to the religio Iudaeorum.⁵⁸ Varro does employ the term gens Iudaea but he does so in the context of Jewish worship of the divine without images.⁵⁹ Seneca expressed criticism of Jews for their sacred institutions (sacramenta), most especially for their observance of the Sabbath, which he reckoned as a colossal waste of time.⁶⁰ Petronius sardonically labels Jewish abstinence from pork as worship of a pig-god, and proceeds to heap scorn on the Sabbath and on circumcision.⁶¹ Pliny the Elder refers to the Iudaea gens but denotes it as remarkable for contempt of the divine powers.⁶² Plutarch’s references to Jews concern their opinions on the gods, their adherence to the Sabbath, and their abstinence from pork.⁶³ Tacitus characterizes the Mosaic laws as creating new religious prescriptions different from those of all other mortals, and, among other Jewish traits, he stresses their contributions to the Temple, their beliefs about the underworld, their monotheism, aniconism, and their religious festivals.⁶⁴ Juvenal’s scorn fastens upon laws handed down in a secret volume by Moses and the Jews’ supposed refusal to accommodate anyone who did not share their sacred beliefs.⁶⁵ And Apuleius’ one reference to the people calls them “superstitious Jews.”⁶⁶

It is essential to stress that this collection of offhand remarks that run the gamut from admiration to disapproval to indifference constituted neither racism nor “proto-racism.”⁶⁷ Romans avoided reference to Jewish ethnic traits, inherited or genetic characteristics, descent, geographic influence, appearance, speech, or any qualities associated with racial origins. Religion almost alone sprang to mind when Romans paid any attention to Jews.⁶⁸ The Jews’ peculiar practices called forth some caustic comments, puzzlement, and amusement from Roman literary figures. But those comments had no racial overtones.

The laissez-faire attitude that prevailed in the pluralistic world of the Roman Empire comfortably included Judaism within its compass. With only very rare exceptions, Jewish practices and beliefs went unhindered, synagogues flourished, advocacy for Jewish causes was successful, and Jews maintained a network of connections among themselves between Jerusalem and the diaspora all over the Mediterranean.

The very fact that Romans regarded Jews essentially as practitioners of a religion carries significance. Ethnicity was irrelevant. Romans did not speak of Jews in terms of origins, bloodlines, descent, or ethnic attributes that might suggest an alien presence in their midst.⁶⁹ Jewish religious customs, however strange and unusual they might seem, were no more alien than those of the numerous cults and modes of worship that Romans had incorporated into their society almost from the beginnings of their history. The commitment to religious pluralism accommodated Jews without difficulty. Jewish experience in the Roman Empire for the vast proportion of the time, at least until the great war of 66–70 CE, was smooth and untroubled.⁷⁰ Jews thrived in the Mediterranean diaspora, even in Rome itself. The Roman government extended favor and support abroad, and found ample space for Jews at home. Increasing numbers of Jews indeed enjoyed Roman citizenship, which was perfectly compatible with Jewish traditions – especially as those traditions became increasingly open to the outside world. It should be underscored that this was not a matter of “tolerance” on the Roman part but an integral part of the Roman mindset. Rome’s own legends and history show a receptivity to foreign cults and alien sects of a bewildering variety of types. A receptivity to adherents of Judaism, by comparison, was simply business as usual. It fit a consistent pattern of Roman indifference, religious pluralism – and supreme self-confidence.

11 Rome’s Attitude to Jews after the Great Rebellion – Beyond Raison d’état?

Alexander Yakobson

According to an influential thesis set out by Martin Goodman in his Rome and Jerusalem,¹ Jews and Judaea were treated with extraordinary harshness in the wake of the Great Rebellion. Goodman refers chiefly to Rome’s failure to allow the Temple in Jerusalem to be rebuilt and to the imposition, as well as the continuing retention, of the special tax on Jews throughout the empire. This, he argues, amounted to unusual severity that cannot be explained by ordinary considerations of imperial policy. He suggests that this policy resulted from the new Flavian dynasty’s need to base its legitimacy on a victory in a foreign war. Since Vespasian was a usurper of humble origins who had seized power through civil war, and thus deficient in legitimacy, he had to present himself as Rome’s saviour from a foreign foe in order to legitimize his rule. In order to drive this point home, the Jews had to be presented and treated as dangerous enemies of Rome. This policy, not originating in religious or ethnic hostility, but imposed by the regime’s pressing political needs, amounted to a ‘war on Judaism’ and ‘depicting the religion of the Jews as not worthy to exist’. This was to have fateful repercussions for the relations between Jews and the empire, finally resulting in two rebellions with catastrophic results – in the Diaspora under Trajan and in Judaea under Hadrian.

Despite many valid points, I disagree with the thesis. Vespasian enjoyed considerable legitimacy at the beginning of his reign; he did not need to base his legitimacy on a continuous ‘war against the Jews’; nothing he did needs to be explained by attributing this motivation to him. Naturally, the new ruler was anxious to cultivate his public image, and the victory in Judaea played an important part in this. This put the Jews in an unenviable position. The Flavian victory was, for them, a catastrophic and traumatic event; its celebration must have been deeply offensive. But there is no reason to assume that Vespasian needed to defend his legitimacy by extraordinary means. His policy towards Jews and Judaea is perfectly susceptible to rational explanation without such an assumption. Hostility to Jews in the wake of the rebellion,² and perhaps also the political expediency of demonstrating this hostility, cannot of course be ruled out; but there is no reason to attribute decisive importance to this aspect. This applies both to the Jewish tax and to the issue of the Temple. However, what from the Roman viewpoint can easily be accounted for by ordinary considerations of imperial policy must have seemed to many Jews a religious and ethnic insult. This may well have contributed to the final result, as suggested by Goodman.

1 Crisis of Legitimacy?

No doubt, the victory in Judea came in very handy for Vespasian and was used to the full extent in order to enhance the prestige of the new ruler who, indeed, lacked distinguished ancestry. But there is no need to overdramatize Vespasian’s deficit of legitimacy at this point, much less to attribute it to his seizure of power in a civil war. The main legitimacy of any victor in a civil war was, surely, the fact that he has extinguished the flames of civil strife and brought internal peace to Rome. Only unsuccessful civil wars are well and truly illegitimate. The inherent illegitimacy of a civil war works, eventually (as had happened with Octavian), in favour of the victor whose victory brings peace; history then tends to be rewritten in order to absolve him of any blame for having started the war in the first place. As regards Vespasian, as we shall see, this task was easy.

For all the undoubted importance of the victory in the Jewish war, it is an exaggeration to present it, as is sometimes done, as the ‘foundation myth’³ of Vespasian’s principate and the new dynasty. The main foundation myth was different: it is surely reflected in what Suetonius says in the opening sentence of Vespasian’s biography:

The empire, which for a long time had been unsettled and, as it were, drifting, through the usurpation and violent death of three emperors, was at last taken in hand and given stability by the Flavian family (rebellione trium principum et caede incertum diu et quasi vagum imperium suscepit firmavitque tandem gens Flavia). (Vesp. 1.1).⁴

Elsewhere (Vesp. 8.1), Suetonius says that the state had been ‘tottering and almost overthrown’ (prope afflicta nutansque) before Vespasian’s accession. According to Tacitus, the year 69 was ‘nearly the last year of the commonwealth’ (rei publicae prope supremus) (Hist. 1.11), ‘a period rich in disasters, frightful in its wars, torn by civil strife’ (Hist. 1.2). Res publica here is obviously without ‘republican’ political connotations. It is the existence of the Roman state that is said to have been threatened – because it was repeatedly torn by civil wars, not, principally, because of the Jewish rebellion.

The Judaean war could never have been presented as having posed anything like an equal danger to Rome. Even the blatantly exaggerated account of the victory in an inscription on the now-disappeared ‘Arch of Titus’ at the south-east end of the Circus Maximus (erected under Titus) could do no more than falsely claim that Jerusalem had never been conquered, and had mostly been left unmolested, before 70.⁵ Taking such a city and ‘subduing the race of the Jews’, in the words of the inscription, was indeed a glorious victory (of Titus and of his father, the commander-in-chief). But the contest was not one in which the fate of the empire hung in the balance, nor is it described as such. The Jewish enemy had simply not been powerful enough to mark the victor(s) as having ‘saved the state by defeating the Jews’⁶ – whereas Vespasian was definitely presented as having saved it by ending the civil wars.

In fact, according to Josephus’ preface to his Jewish War, part of his motivation for writing was that ‘some men’ had published accounts of the war that sought, out of hostility to Jews, to belittle their stature as a (worthy) enemy, thus presenting the victory as less glorious by implication (BJ 1.3). Naturally, we cannot be sure that Josephus presents his rivals’ writings fairly.⁷ But this line of argument was only possible because the Jews in Judaea were an enemy that, however one managed the delicate balancing act of disparaging them without belittling the importance of the victory, could not in any case be described as having threatened the existence of the empire.⁸ Thus, they could not provide the victor with a credible claim of having ‘saved’ it from them.

Of course, the military achievement involved was considerable. Taking a major well-fortified city by storm after a prolonged siege made ‘subduing’ the Jews an outstanding accomplishment, not merely a matter of suppressing a rebellion in a small province. While the Judaean triumph was ‘an anomaly’ in being the only triumph ever celebrated over a provincial population, the war itself was ‘a major event in Roman military history, demanding a massive concentration of forces’; the siege of Jerusalem was ‘the longest … in the whole of the imperial period’ and the forces deployed there were ‘significantly larger’ than those deployed for the invasion of Britain in 43.⁹ Naturally, a victory won by Vespasian and Titus was in any case bound to be presented as a victory in a full-fledged foreign war in order to justify the triumph and other displays of Flavian triumphalism. For the Jews, being advertised as a defeated enemy of Rome was an unenviable position. It is not obvious that to be presented as conquered foreign foes was, in itself, worse than to be portrayed as long-time subjects of the empire who had treacherously rebelled against it.¹⁰ On the other hand, a foreign victory left greater room for advertisement, and the Flavians certainly made the most of it, celebrating and monumentalizing their victory on a grand scale.¹¹

While Vespasian was certainly ‘portrayed … as warrior hero’ due to this victory, his claim to be the ‘saviour of the state’¹² could not rest wholly or primarily on it but was sustained mainly by the very factor blamed for his alleged deficit of legitimacy – victory in civil war. The horrors brought by this war extending to Rome and to the Capitol itself were such that the man who had ended them could indeed be credibly presented as Rome’s saviour. The emphasis on aeternitas in Vespasian’s coinage may reflect the existential anxieties generated by these events.¹³ Pliny the Younger, writing under Vespasian, holds that the relief extended by him to the exhausted state (fessis rebus subveniens) – obviously, a state exhausted by civil strife – is paving his way to heaven (NH 2.18). The greater the calamity preceding Vespasian’s advent to power, the greater the glory brought by ending it.

Thus, there is no reason to portray the Flavians as insecure in their legitimacy and implicitly apologetic – ‘a government seeking to justify the seizure and retention of power by claiming to have defeated a dangerous enemy’.¹⁴ Vespasian’s seizure of power was very probably regarded by many as a major blessing to Rome (not merely presented as such by the regime, which was inevitable in any case). According to Tacitus (Hist. 4.3), the senators who voted him the imperial powers were ‘filled with joy and confident hope, for it seemed to them that civil warfare, which, breaking out in Gallic and Spanish provinces, had moved to arms first the Germanies, then Illyricum, and which had traversed Egypt, Judaea, Syria, and all provinces and armies, was now at an end, as if the expiation of the whole world had been completed’. Josephus attributes a similar attitude to the people: ‘The people, too, exhausted by civil disorders, were still more eager for his [Vespasian’s] coming, expecting now at last to obtain permanent release from their miseries, and confident that security and prosperity would again be theirs’ (BJ 7.66).

Josephus is no doubt echoing Flavian propaganda. But this only goes to show that, far from trying to ‘disguise the unpalatable truth of the civil strife’ which had brought Vespasian to power,¹⁵ this propaganda was using this fact in order to glorify the new emperor. And indeed, it is not difficult to believe there was a widespread feeling of relief, with high hopes pinned on someone whose victory had brought peace – a man who, for all his lack of distinguished ancestry, was a victorious military commander, with two adult sons holding out a hope for uncontested hereditary succession.¹⁶

Moreover, unlike others who could claim credit for extinguishing a civil war (including Octavian), Vespasian bore no blame for having fomented it in the first place. He had stepped in only at a late stage, under Vitellius – an unpopular ruler and a usurper in his own right, who inspired little confidence in future stability. At any rate, it was easy to portray Vitellius in this light retrospectively. The man who could be plausibly blamed for burning down the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol (‘the saddest and most shameful crime the Roman state had suffered since its foundation’, Tac. Hist. 3.72) was an easy target.

Furthermore, Rome’s second dynasty was not haunted by the ghost of the first one. The latter had safely vanished without a remnant, its prestige tarnished by Nero’s tyranny (and the collapse of the Augustan peace following it) – though Vespasian had not been disloyal even to Nero.¹⁷

Unlike the ‘usurpation’, Vespasian’s modest pedigree was, indeed, a handicap. However, his legitimacy was amply enhanced by sundry omens, prophesies and miracles for which the Orient provided wide scope but which included also earlier events interpreted ex eventu.¹⁸ This clearly demonstrated that Vespasian had come to power by divine favour – something that in any case could be taken, in Roman terms, as implied by the victory itself: victrix causa deis placuit.¹⁹ Having related these things, Suetonius (Vesp. 7.2) notes that Vespasian still lacked auctoritas and maiestas; however, ‘these also he obtained’ (haec quoque accessit); he then relates how Vespasian healed a blind man and a lame one in public in Alexandria.²⁰ By the time he returned to Rome, Vespasian is described as being at the height of his power and glory: talis tantaque fama in urbem reversus (8.1).

Naturally, the new ruler took care to enhance his auctoritas and maiestas still further; Suetonius proceeds to mention the triumph of de Iudaeis and Vespasian’s eight consulships. But it is highly unlikely that Vespasian felt that he was facing a ‘crisis of legitimacy upon [his] accession’.²¹

Although his rule was duly confirmed by a senatus consultum and a subsequent lex, Vespasian’s decision to make July 1, the date of his military proclamation in Egypt, his dies imperii shows him unembarrassed by the legions’ role in his advent to power. His two sons were, and were presented as, a guarantee of dynastic continuity and stability,²² an important element of legitimacy after the experience of the civil war.

Finally, Vespasian ‘never tried to conceal his former lowly condition, but often even paraded it. When certain men tried to trace the Flavian family’s origins to the founders of Reate and a companion of Hercules … he laughed at them for their pains’ (Suet. Vesp. 12). Nevertheless, lack of noble ancestry was, no doubt, felt to call for auctoritas-enhancing measures such as Vespasian’s accumulation of ordinary consulships and imperial salutations and the assumption of censorship – as well as, probably, putting an even greater emphasis on the Judaean victory. But there is no indication that this deficiency produced a ‘crisis of legitimacy’.

Admittedly, the borderline between a ‘crisis of legitimacy’ and a simple need to cultivate the new emperor’s prestige energetically can be blurred. This is a matter of degree. Millar, for example, describes Vespasian’s standing in terms that are somewhere between those two poles: ‘As a first-generation senator, Vespasian had no inherited social prestige to draw on, and immediate steps needed to be taken to enhance the public standing of the new Flavian dynasty.’²³ This urgent need explains, according to Millar, the intensity with which the victory in Judaea was celebrated in monuments through the city; note that he speaks of a weakness caused by Vespasian’s modest descent, not his ‘usurpation’.

It is thus an exaggeration to say that, in Vespasian’s case, ‘the glory of a foreign victory was used, as earlier in Roman history [Octavian is obviously meant; we shall return to him presently – A. Y.] both to justify seizure of political power and to disguise the unpalatable truth of the civil strife though which it had been won’.²⁴ Rather than the foreign victory’s being used to disguise the origins of Vespasian’s principate, the two achievements, external and internal, were celebrated together. The Flavian triumphalism and the rhetoric of peace were sending a double message to the public. One triumphed, naturally, over foreign enemies – not over fellow citizens; but internal peace (resulting from the not-to-be-openly-celebrated victory over Roman citizens) was even more important – Vespasian’s main claim to have ‘saved the state’. The pax celebrated by him comprised both aspects. Vespasian was following Octavian’s footsteps: Octavian’s triple triumph in 29 BCE celebrated, officially, three foreign victories, two of them over Cleopatra (Actium and the conquest of Egypt); but Augustus’ main achievement was the peace he brought to the Roman world by ending civil strife.

The prominence given to pax under Vespasian,²⁵ therefore, should not be interpreted exclusively, or mainly, as an allusion to the Judaean victory – still less as a sign that he was waging a ‘war on Judaism’. According to Goodman, following the Judaean triumph during which ‘a copy of Jewish Law’ was displayed as part of the spoils, it became clear that ‘this war on Judaism was not to be only a temporary feature of Flavian propaganda’; this is reflected in the regime’s building projects, starting with the Templum Pacis.²⁶ But although the spoils from the Jerusalem Temple, including the famous candelabrum, were indeed displayed there (alongside other masterpieces of painting and sculpture from all over the empire),²⁷ the peace celebrated by the Templum Pacis was surely much more than the victory in Judaea.²⁸ According to Millar, the intended message of the speedy construction of the Templum was the reestablishment of peace – generally, after a period of civil war, and specifically in Judaea.²⁹

Moreover, the Roman peace had been challenged by foreigners and restored not just in Judaea. Certainly, Judaea provided the new dynasty with the most dramatic ‘peace-bringing’ external victory, with which Vespasian and Titus were personally identified. But the external aspect of the peace for which the regime claimed credit, in the Templum Pacis and generally, was surely much wider than the peace secured by that victory. It must have been the universal peace dramatically symbolized by the extraordinary step, taken by Vespasian, of closing the temple of Janus;³⁰ something to be done, according to Augustus in Res Gestae (13), when ‘peace had been secured by victories throughout the Roman empire by land and sea’.³¹ In his account of 68 BCE, Tacitus described Rome’s foreign and domestic tribulations together, as part of the same grim picture:

Four emperors fell by the sword; there were three civil wars, more foreign wars, and often both at the same time. There was success in the East, misfortune in the West. Illyricum was disturbed, the Gallic provinces wavering, Britain subdued and immediately let go. The Sarmatae and Suebi rose against us; the Dacians won fame by defeats inflicted and suffered; even the Parthians were almost roused to arms through the trickery of a pretended Nero.

(Hist. 1.2)

The rebellion led by the Batavian auxiliary commander Iulius Civilis, which came to involve Germanic and Gallic tribes in an attempt to set up a ‘Gallic Empire’, took heavy effort and massive forces to suppress at the beginning of Vespasian’s reign.³² The Templum Pacis was surely meant to celebrate the peace throughout the empire, in both its aspects, external and internal.

Moreover, there was a clear connection between the two: foreign enemies were encouraged to challenge the empire because of Roman civil strife. In Tacitus’ words (referring to the rebellion led by Civilis), ‘nothing had encouraged [the Gauls] to believe that the end of our rule was at hand than the burning of the Capitol … Now [according to Druids] this fatal conflagration has given proof from heaven of the divine wrath and presages the passage of the sovereignty of the world to the peoples beyond the Alps’ (Hist. 4.54).³³ This view (reflecting, at any rate, the Rome perception) helps explain how the civil war could be presented as a threat to the very survival of the empire – more so, certainly, than any threat originating in Judaea.

That a victory in civil war could be celebrated implicitly, under the pretext of an external victory, is attested by Tacitus for the beginning of Vespasian’s reign, when senators ‘gave Mucianus the insignia of a triumph, in reality for civil war, although his expedition against the Sarmatae was made the pretext’ (Hist. 4.4). Celebrating the victory in Judaea was, of course, of great importance in itself, rather than merely a pretext for something else. Nevertheless, Josephus attests that the Judaean triumph itself was widely regarded as signifying much more than the victory to which it was officially dedicated:

The city of Rome kept festival that day for her victory in the campaign against her enemies, for the termination of her civil dissentions, and for the dawning hopes of her felicity. (BJ 7.157)³⁴

All this is not to minimize the obvious importance of the victory in Judaea in the regime’s self-presentation. However, making extensive political use of a foreign victory did not have to result in long-term official demonization of the vanquished, dictating the policy towards them. This did not happen after Actium, for all the allegedly fateful character of the confrontation, the virulence of anti-Egyptian propaganda that accompanied it, and its ideological importance for the Augustan principate. The Judaean war was no match for Actium and Cleopatra’s alleged schemes to put herself, with Mark Anthony’s help, in a position of rendering judgement on the Capitol. Nevertheless, already a few years after Actium, Cleopatra herself could be treated (by Horace, Carm. 1.37, while recalling her alleged threat to the Capitol) with a degree of respect: once no longer an active and dangerous foe, she could be given credit for dying bravely, with dignity.³⁵ Here, admittedly, one can point to the difference between Vespasian’s modest pedigree and that of Caesar’s (adopted) son: Vespasian, it can be argued, had a greater need to exploit a foreign victory, even if it was a more modest one. However, neither the Jewish tax nor the failure to have the Temple rebuilt need to be accounted for in the way suggested by Goodman.

2 The Jewish Tax – Imposed by Propaganda Needs?

As for the tax imposed on Jews throughout the empire – this was indeed an extraordinary step in Roman terms. However, it was clearly inspired by extraordinary circumstances, and these must have been (mainly) financial rather than propagandistic. It should be viewed above all as a measure aimed at increasing state revenue at a time when this was urgently needed. The finances of the empire had been devastated by the civil wars (following Nero’s extravagance); it was widely recognized that extraordinary steps needed to be taken to remedy the situation.³⁶ Vespasian was notoriously inventive in devising new sources of revenue, above all new and increased taxes (including the famous pecunia non olet one). ‘Not content with reviving the imposts which had been repealed under Galba, he added new and heavy burdens, increasing the amount of tribute paid by the provinces, in some cases actually doubling it’ (Suet. Vesp. 16.1);³⁷ ‘he declared at the beginning of his reign that a huge sum [forty billion sesterces; though the manuscript is often amended to make the sum less astronomical] was needed to put the state on its feet financially’ (ut res publica stare posset). Suetonius assumes that Vespasian’s notorious unscrupulousness in financial matters was largely involuntary: he was ‘driven by necessity to raise money by spoliation and robbery because of the desperate state of the aerarium and the fiscus’ (16.3). It was one of the great achievements of his reign that he restored the state to financial health – while carrying out an extensive building programme that included, as a matter of priority, the restoration of the Capitol. But this achievement came at a high price. Part of the price, unsurprisingly in the circumstances, had to be paid by the Jews. This, surely, is the context in which the Jewish tax should be examined. Any additional motivation, while it cannot be ruled out, must have been secondary.

Imposing a tax on a non-territorial ethnic or religious group was, admittedly, unexampled in Roman practice. But from Vespasian’s (far from disinterested) viewpoint, this tax had already existed, in a way – in the form of the voluntary contribution paid by Jews to the Temple in Jerusalem. It was now ‘diverted’ to the Capitoline Jupiter (as the testimony of Josephus and Dio is usually understood)³⁸ in a greatly aggravated form – the aggravation being perfectly in the spirit of the times. From Vespasian’s perspective, the choice was between diverting these sums to Roman uses or allowing the Jews to keep their money and, in that sense, benefit from the war. The latter option must have looked singularly unattractive to him. The question is, needless to say, not one of fairness – of which there was obviously very little in these proceedings – but of motivation.

All this is not to argue that there could not have been an element of deliberate humiliation there – especially if the tax was indeed earmarked for the temple of Jupiter. Appearing to share a widespread prejudice against an unpopular group is something that a ruler might occasionally find useful without any crisis of legitimacy forcing his hand. But there is no need to assume that the desire to humiliate the Jews, and the political need to be perceived as humiliating them, was the main motive for imposing the tax – or for retaining it later on. Once a tax is imposed, whatever the original reason for this, and starts yielding very considerable sums (as was clearly the case with the Jewish tax),³⁹ it is unfortunately the rule that it will not be abolished unless there are very strong reasons for doing so. The Jews were never in a position to provide the Roman government with a good enough reason to give up the revenue produced by the Jewish tax. Its retention under Domitian does not show that the dynasty still felt, under its third emperor, a need to defend its legitimacy by appearing to wage an incessant ‘war on Judaism’ and the Jews.

It is true that, as Goodman points out, Domitian, at the start of his reign and before he had accumulated his own triumphs, triumphal arches and imperial salutations, lacked, and doubtless envied, his father’s and elder brother’s military prestige. The fact that he ‘was still in 85 issuing coins with the caption JUDAEA CAPTA’ may indeed be attributed to his desire to partake in the glory of that victory; but this is not tantamount to feeling the need ‘to justify his rule’ by ostentatious hostility to Jews.⁴⁰ It is far more probable that he regarded the Jewish tax as an important source of revenue which he, so far from giving it up, was determined to exploit to the full. The harshness with which the tax was exacted under Domitian, vividly attested by Suetonius, was not out of tune with the general character of his rule,⁴¹ and with the financial difficulties he faced. The context in which Suetonius mentions this harshness is the financial straits to which Domitian ‘was reduced by the cost of his buildings and shows, as well as by the additions which he had made to the pay of the soldiers’; faced with this, he resorted to ‘every kind of robbery’ (Dom. 12). It is, admittedly, likely that his task, in the case of the Jewish tax, was made easier by the fact that an unpopular minority was targeted; the same applies to the original imposition of the tax.

There seems to be no good reason to think that, as Goodman suggests, the tax was abolished by Nerva and reimposed by Trajan. It seems more likely that the phrase fisci Iudaici calumnia sublata,⁴² inscribed on a coin issued under Nerva, refers not to an abolition of the tax but to putting an end to harsh investigations of people suspected (often unjustly, hence calumnia) of evading it. This was presumably more worth taking credit for, before the general public, than any measure of relief benefiting the Jews;⁴³ all the more so if one assumes that Jews had been relentlessly demonized as dangerous enemies of Rome, but also on general grounds. If one assumes that Trajan did reimpose the tax, it seems very unlikely that his main reason for this would have been, as Goodman suggests, that his father had been a legionary commander in Judaea. The main reason would have been, presumably, that Trajan had grand plans of his own and needed a lot of money. Reimposing a tax abolished by Trajan’s deified adoptive father (bringing back the calumnia he had taken pride in abolishing) would have been a drastic step. In the absence of positive evidence that it was taken, it is safer to assume that it never was than to postulate an abolition (on the strength of an inconclusive piece of evidence)⁴⁴ and a subsequent unattested reimposition. But assuming that it was taken because Trajan was pursuing a vendetta against Jews inherited from his father is even more difficult than attributing it to pressing fiscal necessity.

Coming back to Vespasian, my colleague Gil Gambash has suggested to me that the Romans may have viewed the tax as a war indemnity of sorts, since the money collected from abroad must have been used to finance the rebellion. Of course, this was not an indemnity in any precise sense, for there was no claim that Jews in the Diaspora were guilty of anything. But Josephus makes Titus tell the Jews in Jerusalem, while enumerating the advantages of Roman rule (in order to stress the Jewish ungratefulness):

And, as our greatest [favour], we permitted you to exact tribute to God and to collect offerings, without admonishing or hindering those who brought them – only that you might grow richer at our expense and prepare with our money to attack us! And then … you turned your superabundance against the donors, and like untameable serpents spat your venom upon those who caressed you. (BJ 6.335–6)⁴⁵

The claim that the money was a Roman ‘donation’ is, naturally, a rhetorical exaggeration; but from the Roman viewpoint, allowing it to be collected throughout the empire and sent to Jerusalem appears to have been a special privilege, not something merely technical or to be taken for granted. We know already from Cicero’s Pro Flacco (28.67–9) that some took strong exception to it. From this viewpoint (coloured, no doubt, by the pressing need for money) it might have seemed reasonable that if Roman kindness had been abused in this way, Rome would help itself to this money from now on, even if the Diaspora contributors were not guilty of anything.

3 The Temple in Jerusalem: Different Perspectives

It has been pointed out that the imposition of the Jewish tax implied a decision that the Temple in Jerusalem would not be rebuilt – or at least that it would not be allowed to enjoy its former status;⁴⁶ clearly, the tax created a strong financial disincentive for any such restoration. But the main thing about the Temple, from the Roman viewpoint, was, surely, that it had served as a military fortress during the rebellion, and in many ways as its epicentre;⁴⁷ that it had to be taken by storm; that its treasures must have financed the rebellion; and that, if rebuilt, it would again draw huge numbers of Jewish pilgrims into Jerusalem during especially sensitive periods. If considered by Roman authorities at all, the idea of rebuilding it must have seemed risky and unattractive.

Beyond direct considerations of public order, Romans were probably aware that Jewish rebels were influenced by ‘hopes and memories which centred upon the Temple’ which they viewed as ‘God’s House, that is, the palace of a supreme Jewish monarch who in no way could be considered a vassal to Rome’.⁴⁸ At this point, admittedly, the distinction between religion and politics becomes blurred. But even if the Flavians can be described as acting, in this matter, with the aim of neutralizing a certain aspect of the Jewish religion that had proved politically dangerous, it is still an exaggeration to say that they waged (or postured as waging) a war against Judaism. It was well known that the religious practices of the Jews were by no means confined to the Temple cult.⁴⁹

According to Goodman,⁵⁰ there were less hurtful ways of coping with the threat of unrest posed by the Jewish Temple: ‘It would be understandable if the Romans took greater care than they had before 66 to prevent the crowds at the great pilgrim festivals in Jerusalem getting out of hand, but that precaution would hardly require the Temple site to be left altogether in ruins. Treatment so harsh and unusual must have another explanation.’

But should it surprise us that Roman attitudes and policies on such matters did not correspond to modern notions of proportionality? And, moreover, how unusual and exceptional was Rome’s conduct in this case? This, obviously, is a crucial element of Goodman’s thesis:

In the context of normal practice in the Roman Empire, the Jews’ hopes [to see the Temple rebuilt] should not have been idle. Temples burned down through accident quite frequently in the ancient world. Romans took for granted that the obvious response was to rebuild. The great temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome was burned down during the civil strife between Vespasian’s supporters and those of Vitellius in 69; … the first step towards the temple’s restoration, took place on 21 June 70. But the Roman state was not to allow the Jerusalem Temple to be rebuilt in the same way, a refusal which may reasonably be seen as a major cause of the sixty-five years of conflict to come. It is worthwhile to emphasise the enormity of this refusal in the context of ancient religious practice, and the extent to which it revealed a special prejudice against the Jews.⁵¹

But one would have wished to find a closer parallel than Rome’s decision to rebuild the temple of Jupiter on the Capitolium. How many examples do we have, in Roman history, and specifically in the decades preceding the Judaean rebellion, of a major enemy city taken by storm after a prolonged siege and sacked, and a major temple therein destroyed after it, too, had to be taken by storm, and then restored, within a short period of time, with Rome’s permission? I cannot think of such an example.

All this does not mean that animosity to Jews – out of ethnic and religious prejudice, sheer vindictiveness, or the propagandistic needs of the regime – played no part in Roman policies towards Jews and Judaea under Vespasian and his successors. But there is no reason to assume that Roman policy was driven primarily by such feelings, or the political need to demonstrate them, rather than by conventional imperial policy considerations. These were indeed harsh, but not necessarily unusual.

This paper deals with the Roman perspective, not the Jewish one, but I would like to round it up with two observations on the latter. Firstly, what for the Roman state was perfectly rational imperial policy may well have been regarded by many Jews in the light suggested by Goodman. The Jewish tax was oppressive and offensive. If indeed it was earmarked for the temple of Jupiter, it must have been widely regarded by Jews as a religious insult.

In other respects, it should be stressed, Vespasian’s policy towards Jewish religion was tolerant. It is surely an overstatement to say, that ‘[Vespasian and] Titus set about depicting the religion of the Jews as not worthy to exist’.⁵² Nothing was done against Jewish religious observance in matters unconnected with the Temple. As Goodman notes, ‘The only special and different aspect of Roman attitudes to Judaism compared to other provincial religions was the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple’.⁵³ The continued existence of Jews practicing their religion, freely and under state protection, throughout the empire, was conspicuous and well known enough to make any posture of treating Judaism as ‘unworthy to exist’, on the regime’s part, quite meaningless. The Flavian patronage extended to Josephus and his writings, though its scope and Josephus’ standing in Flavian Rome are debated,⁵⁴ seems hardly compatible with any consistent official posture of implacable hostility to Jews and Judaism. For all his Roman and Flavian loyalism, Josephus, in all his writings, is certainly a proud Jew.⁵⁵ ‘His entire literary output was predicated on the indestructible value of Judaism’.⁵⁶ A comparison such as with ‘the plight of the Jews in the early years of the Third Reich’⁵⁷ is out of place: there could have been no Flavius Josephus there.

For all that, Goodman may well be right to argue that in the first decades after the destruction of the Temple, the kind of post-Temple Judaism that was destined to develop was yet to emerge. Many must have hoped for a speedy restoration of the Temple, and were bitterly disappointed when this did not happen. Moreover, the very significance of the fact that the Temple was destroyed and lay in ruins, was, whatever the Romans’ motives, much graver for the Jews than the case of a single sanctuary – one of many – being destroyed, and left unrestored, for other peoples of the empire.

On the other hand, it is worth noting that Vespasian is treated in the Jewish tradition with surprising leniency for someone who allegedly launched a war on Judaism and treated it as ‘not worthy to exist’. Titus, the destroyer of the Temple, is naturally demonized, and so would be Hadrian. The non-demonization of Vespasian is surprising enough for someone who was, at any rate, an enemy, and that in a war that ended in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. On the assumption that he then also, beyond imposing an oppressive tax in the aftermath of the suppression of the rebellion, waged what was perceived as a systematic war on Judaism, this non-demonization becomes very difficult to explain. Jewish tradition generally does not suffer from amnesia in such cases.

12 Between ethnos and populus The Boundaries of Being a Jew

Youval Rotman

In Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969), the Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth has argued that it is impossible to find definite criteria for ethnicity and that ethnicity is rather the result of labelling.¹ Boundaries between so-called “ethnic groups” are created either by the group itself, or by others. So it may be that at one time the boundary marker is language, the other time it is religion, a third time it is a common history. Barth’s perspective was adopted by scholars who were looking for ways to address the question of what forms a “collective identity.” Barth suggested, however, that collective identities do not really exist but are fictions. In fact, we can moreover argue that the term identity itself, loaded with psychological significance, cannot so easily be translated from the psychological-individual sphere to the social-collective sphere.² Nonetheless both terms, ethnicity and collective identity, are used in all aspects of human life and serve as means to achieve real and often political objectives. Collective identities as demarcations between peoples, whether we define them as reality or fiction, are referred to for a reason.³

In what follows we shall examine what criteria can be adopted as defining features of a collective entity. We shall take here as a case study the very large definition of Jews in the Greco-Roman world and will focus on the ways in which certain Jews portrayed themselves to themselves as a collective group.⁴ Having a single term to designate themselves, Bney Israel (“the sons of Israel”), they had to do without terms such as ethnos, genos, laos, dēmos, populus, natio, polis, and civitas when referring to themselves as an entity. The question is what kind of collective entity they were referring to, and whether their definition was kept unchanged.

To examine this question, this chapter proposes to focus on the borderline between what constituted a Jew and a Gentile by analyzing the way in which Jews included newcomers in their collectivity and excluded others. My main thesis will be that Jews referred to themselves as an entity by employing prisms to define political entities available to them in Greco-Roman antiquity. We shall use here the English term “the Jews” as a translation of the Hebrew haYehudim and of the Greek hoi Ioudaioi. The use of the English translation and its meaning, and the question of whether the translation should be Jews or Judaeans have been the center of a historiographical debate related to the modern definition of Judaism in antiquity.⁵ Daniel Schwartz, for example, has addressed it and criticized the translation of hoi Ioudaoi as Judaeans instead of Jews affirming the religious aspect of the Greek term. This was recently challenged by Daniel Boyarin, who wished to dismiss the very notion of Judaism as a religion in antiquity.⁶ Premodern Judaism, according to him, has very little to do with what we term today as religion.⁷ In what follows we shall attempt to address the same question of ancient Jewish ethnicity by analyzing the use and meaning of the terms haYehudim, hoi Ioudaioi, and Iudaei to designate an entity. The question is what kind of entity these terms refer to. We shall employ here the English term “Jews” as a convenience without addressing directly the historiographical debate concerning Jews and Judaeans. In fact, this debate will be indirectly resolved by replacing the idea of a single meaning with that of an area of meanings, changeable in view of the political culture that those referring to themselves as Jews were exposed to. Our investigation begins with Classical times, albeit not with Greece itself but with the repercussions that its political culture had in Judaea under Persian rule.⁸

Methods of Political Exclusion in Achaemenid Judaea

In a paper dedicated to naming names, Benjamin Isaac has shown the dynamic use of what we term as ethnic for geographic and administrative concepts in Roman times.⁹ He also revealed how this was used the other way around, namely how geographic concepts came to designate what we would term ethnicity.¹⁰ We find this very process in the book of Ezra, which constructs the historical memory of the exiled Jews who returned to the land of Zion. They refer to themselves as both Shavey Zion (literally “the Returned to Zion”) and Yehudim.

A lot has been written about the organization of Yehud Medinata, the Persian province of Judaea.¹¹ We can apply here Isaac’s observation about a geographic name being used to create a group separated from all other descendants of the First Temple period. At its basis we find a political objective: defining the collectivity of haYehudim as a political entity. This term is never used here to refer either to the biblical Judah or to the land of Judaea, but it serves as a demarcation between the population that returned from the Babylonian exile to the land of Zion, and the local inhabitants of the land.¹² This demarcation is achieved for a reason: exclusion of the first from the second. The means are historical exclusivity, cultural exclusivity, and social exclusivity. These are recurrent themes in Ezra-Nehemiah. Historical exclusivity is achieved by a detailed documentation of the families who constitute the closed group of the Returned to Zion (Ezra 2, 8, 10:18–44, Nehemiah 7, 12), and by ignoring any reference that would connect them to those Israelites who were not exiled.¹³ Their self-nomination as haYehudim serves here to make haYehudim a synonym to “the Returned Exiled” (i.e., a group separated from the Israelites who were not exiled or were exiled but did not return to Zion). The history of this group starts therefore from the moment of “the Return.”

The cultural exclusivity of the group is achieved by the creation of an exclusive cult around the new temple in Jerusalem. The Returned refuse to allow the local peoples to share with them its financing and construction despite the eagerness of the second to participate in the enterprise (Ezra 4). This establishes a new cult to the God of the Returned. Finally, social exclusivity is achieved by a repeated prohibition on mixed marriage with women of local origin (i.e., women not from the group of haYehudim – the Returned; Ezra 9–10, Nehemiah 9, 13).¹⁴ Genealogical enlisting of all the families who can prove their exile-return lineage (Ezra 2, 8, 10:18–44, Nehemiah 7, 12) enabled them to realize and control their designation as a distinct group. But what was the purpose of this exclusion?

Michael Heltzer compared the restrictions on mixed marriage defined by the Returned in Ezra-Nehemiah to the Athenian law of citizenship.¹⁵ Fifth-century Judaea had very little to do with a Greek polis. Yet we would like to consider here the way in which the returning families designated themselves collectively as a means to construct a sense of a political entity akin to the way in which it was constructed in Greece in their time. In fact “the Judaeans”/“the Jews” – haYehudim – can indeed serve here as the equivalent to hoi Athenaioi, hoi Lakedaimonioi, or hoi Kares (the latter being also under Persian rule). Through these denominations these people living in one place referred to themselves not as a group with a common origin but as a political group disassociated from all other descendants of a common origin. In the same way the term haYehudim, with the definite article, enabled the exiled who returned to the land of Zion to designate themselves politically. It reflected the same difference that the Greeks made between political and ethnic grouping, between “the Athenians” and “the Greeks.” By referring to themselves as haYehudim they were able to completely ignore any common historical origin that they might have shared with others in favor of a political denomination that started from the moment of their Achaemenid return. In other words, and if we continue with the Greek parallelism, haYehudim was used in contrast to Bney Israel just as hoi Athenaioi was used in contrast to hoi Hellenes.¹⁶

Although we find the term Yehudi used in other documents of the Babylonian and Egyptian diasporas, it does not serve there as a collective denomination in the Ezra-Nehemiah form of haYehudim.¹⁷ The epistles of the Jews from Elephantine to Jerusalem for example, concerning their relation with Jerusalem, reveal a demand to link their temple to the temple in Jerusalem in a manner similar to the way in which a Greek colony is attached in its cults to its metropolis.¹⁸ However, this did not imply that they were in any way included in the political culture that developed in Judaea. In fact their unanswered appeals to Jerusalem to get help to rebuild their temple imply a deliberate ignorance on the part of Jerusalem.¹⁹ haYehudim or ‘am haYehudim (literally “the people of the Judaeans/Jews”) with its distinctive civic institutions such as the elders (Ezra 9:1, 10:8, Nehemiah 8:13), a general assembly (Ezra 3:1, 10:7, Nehemiah 4:8, 5:13, 8–9), a council and ministers (Ezra 4:3, 9:1, 10:5, 10:8, Nehemiah 2:16, 4:8, 5:7, 7:2, 11) and a head who is the juridical, economic and military authority (Ezra 7–9, Nehemiah 3–7, 10) evokes immediately a political entity that is constructed in contrast to any possible ethnic concept of a bygone Israelite past.²⁰ The same political objective determined the realpolitik of the Hasmoneans.

The Hasmonean Politeia – Methods of Political Inclusion

In his book The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (1999) Shaye Cohen has presented a daring thesis regarding the definition of Judaism in Hasmonean time. According to his reading, Judaism acquired a new meaning as a religion to accommodate the Hasmonean policy, which separated the term from its previous ethnic meaning: to be Judaean. Cohen based his thesis on the definition of the religious process of conversion through which one can become a Jew: proselytism – giyur, and argued that this was used as a policy by the Hasmoneans in order to construct a new sense of collectivity for a new state.²¹

According to Cohen, “a Jew” has become whoever worships the God whose temple is in Jerusalem: a religious and mutable definition. Cohen sees this conversion through circumcision as a process of “Judaization.” This was used as a strategy by the Hasmoneans, especially by John Hyrcanus and Judah Aristobulus in regard to the Idumeans and the Itureans.²² “Judaization” has here a political meaning – to ally with the Hasmonean government.²³ Borrowing Polybius’ description of the Achaean League, Cohen names the Hasmonean state “the Judaean League.”²⁴ This complies much more to the mutability of a religious conversion than any ethnic definition of Judaism that preceded it. In his words a religious definition of Judaism replaced the ethnical definition as a means to construct an independent politeia. This thesis is based on a rigid separation between religion and ethnicity according to modern terminology, applied here to ancient sources. In a recent study on Jewish ethnicity in Hellenistic Egypt, Stewart Moore (2015), following Barth’s threads of analysis, has proposed to consider religious attributes as boundary markers needed to construct a notion of ethnicity. His thesis invites us to consider the elasticity of ethnicity in Hellenistic politics, which was the subject of recent research.

In their studies about the way in which ethnic denomination functioned in Ptolemaic Egypt, Dorothy Thompson and Sylvie Honigman have shown that the so-called ethnic labels denoted juridical and fiscal statuses.²⁵ They revealed how a person’s ethnic identity, in the words of Thompson, may vary in different contexts.²⁶ Hellenes, for example, was a fiscal and a juridical status that could be applied to individuals and groups of various ethnic affiliation, like Ioudaioi. The term “Macedonians,” on the other hand, designated a certain category of soldiers.²⁷ These denominative attributes were part of a social and political organization of the Ptolemaic state and provided a criterion to distinguish between its elite and any other population, in contrast to religion and culture. If religious cult may have offered a way of consolidation, military and juridical statuses provided a way to categorize society into groups of distinct civic statuses, under the jurisdiction of their particular archons.²⁸ But what do we mean by “civic status”?²⁹

We are maybe too inclined to think in terms of Greek citizenship bestowed on members of poleis who were granted distinguished status. We should at the same time consider those who did not benefit from an equal status as also having a civic status, a politeia, different from the first and less privileged, but a status nonetheless. The analysis of the use in ethnic denominations in Hellenistic times reveals an array of statuses. It does not follow that these groups were separated by distinct laws. In fact, the Ptolemaic documents suggest that it was not the nomos itself that was necessarily different but the fact that it was used and controlled by different magistrates appointed for different groups. In other words, the main issue was not really the particular politeia of each group but the division into groups.

Benjamin Isaac has shown that categorization, especially in regard to origins, does not occur without a reason.³⁰ Indeed, the Ptolemaic categorization into “Macedonians,” “Jews,” “Egyptians,” “Boeotians,” “Idumeans,” “Persians” and so on established a social stratification.³¹ The fact that soldiers could move from one group to another according to not only their origin but also their occupation (i.e., their status) created a civic status out of ethnos.³² In regard to Hellenistic Syria too, recent studies by Omar Coloru, Laurent Capdetrey and Nathanael Andrade show the different ways in which ethnicity was used by the Seleucids in their social organization.³³ The separation into Macedonians, Carians, Syrians, Jews and Babylonians followed the same logic. It was not “us” and “them” (i.e., “Greeks” vs. “Syrians,” or “Greeks” vs. “Egyptians,” or “Greeks” vs. “Jews,” or “Jews” vs. “Egyptians”), but an array of civil statuses realized through juridical distinction, military position or fiscal state.³⁴ The case of the Sidonians of Yavneh-Yam who applied to get a hereditary fiscal status from Antiochus V Eupater based on their military contribution in the time of Antiochus III exemplified it very well.³⁵ They asked for a distinct privileged fiscal status. In this way the Hellenistic ethnical array not only provided a sociopolitical structure but also allowed elasticity. We see this, for instance, in cases where persons move between these groups by acquiring a new ethnic name, thus acquiring a new civic status.³⁶ The same is also evident from juridical cases that were tried outside the court of their respective group.³⁷ This shows that ethnicity itself became elastic through its significance as a civic status.³⁸ The creation of the position of ethnarch as a juridical and fiscal magistrate, whose origin is still debatable, follows the same logic.³⁹

In relation to the Jews of Egypt, Josephus cites Strabo in describing the great esteem in which Jews were held under Cleopatra III, who entrusted her armies to her generals Chelkias and Ananias, sons of Onias. Although “the majority of the Jews immediately went over to Ptolemy (Lathyrus, her son), only the Jews of the district named for Onias remained faithful to her because their fellow-politai (hoi politai autōn) Chelkias and Ananias were held in special favor by the queen.”⁴⁰ What Strabo says has to do with the military organization of Ptolemaic Egypt, where different groups were defined using their so-called ethnic origin.⁴¹ However, ethnos proved to be an identifier of status rather than the other way around. To put it differently, ethnicity seemed a means to construct civic statuses.⁴² The main collective identity was civic and controlled by the Hellenistic state. The use of the denomination “Greeks” – Hellenes – and the naming of Greek names are extremely revealing, as Thompson and Clarysse have shown in relation to the Ptolemaic organization of Egypt.⁴³ Attributing a Hellenic status changed the fiscal and consequently the civic status.⁴⁴ If being a Greek became in that period a status, what about being a Jew? If a Persian, an Idumean or a Jew could become Hellenēs according to his position, can a Greek become a Jew by status? We have no evidence for that in the Egyptian sources, unless we turn to Hasmonean Judaea.⁴⁵

Regarding the Hasmonean kingdom, we can maybe change the perspective of religion versus ethnos, so fixed in our mind. In view of the “elasticity of ethnicity” in the Hellenistic world, especially in relation to the status of Hellenes, we can consider the Hasmonean integration of the Idumeans and the Itureans not as a conversion to the Jewish faith, or simply as citizenship as Cohen would have it, but as their promotion to the ethnicity and civic status of Jews, their integration into the Hasmonean Jewish politeia depended on them becoming Jews. In a word, the elasticity of being a Jew under the Hasmoneans corresponded perfectly with the elasticity of being Greek in the Ptolemaic and the Seleucid kingdoms in the second century BCE.⁴⁶ Josephus emphasizes two things required from the Idumeans and Itureans: to live according to the laws of the Jews and circumcision.⁴⁷ Note that the worship of the one God and the temple in Jerusalem are not mentioned here. To live according to the laws of the Jews meant the laws of the Hasmonean state just as much as the Jewish ancestral law. It meant to be subject to the Hasmonean juridical system (i.e., to the Jewish juridical courts), with the result of “being Jews from that time on.”⁴⁸

Indeed, the Hasmoneans apply this policy of inclusion not only in regard to the Idumeans and Itureans. In his description of Alexander Jannaeus’ conquests in Transjordan, Josephus narrates the incorporation of a list of cities, amongst which was the city of Pella. Pella was destroyed because its inhabitants refused to adhere to the ancestral customs of the Jews.⁴⁹ The authenticity of this description and the question why in this case Josephus did not mention circumcision were studied in depth by Daniel Schwartz.⁵⁰ Revealing the entire philological and historical background of Josephus’ description and comparing it with the descriptions of the Idumeans and Itureans and the attitude toward circumcision of Gentiles in Qumranic texts, he concluded that Jannaeus did not apply circumcision in this case because of his adherence to the Sadducee attitude not to accept any form of integration of Gentiles by conversion. Schwartz brings Qumranic texts against circumcision of Gentiles and regards their conversion to Judaism in the same way Cohen does. However, conversion is not attested as a Halachic process for this period.⁵¹ In fact, if we leave aside the definition of circumcision as conversion, we can consider it as a marker of integration into the Jewish politeia, not as citizenship but as receiving the status of Jews. Nonetheless, circumcision aimed to turn it into a permanent status. In all these cases the essential was adhering to the Jewish laws and judges, in a word, having the civic status of being a Jew meant to be a Jew. But why did the inhabitants of Pella refuse to become Jews if it simply meant having the status of Jews? In contrast to the Idumean and the Iturean cities, Pella was a Greek city.⁵² Becoming Jews meant for them to stop being Greeks (i.e., stop having the civil Hellenistic status of Greeks). In Seleucid eyes, however, being Hellenes meant a higher civic status than being Jews. According to the Hasmonean perspective, incorporating Pella’s inhabitants into their state as Jews was a civic promotion. In the Seleucid perspective, it meant demotion.

If being a Jew under the Hasmoneans was equivalent to being Greek under the Seleucids,⁵³ we can reflect in a new way on 2 Maccabees and the distinction that it establishes between the neologisms ioudaismos and hellenismos. Honigman has recently argued that these refer to two different political cultures and two different types of social organization, in sum to two distinct types of politeia, two distinct civil statuses. Jason’s reforms aimed to politicize Jerusalem according to the Seleucid political culture with a Seleucid blessing.⁵⁴ And this meant enlisting Jews as Antiocheans (2 Mac. 4:9), or rather establishing a group of persons elevated to the status of Antiocheans, as an independent Seleucid politeia in Jerusalem. In Hellenistic terms this meant bestowing on them the highest civic status, as was done, for instance, in different cities in the kingdom.⁵⁵ But this also meant separating the Jews of Jerusalem through a distinct civic status from their fellow-politai, and the exclusion of many Jews, especially those living outside the city, who refused to accept being demoted. For the second it meant abiding to a new political culture in which their civic status would be inferior to a group of their co-patriots of the same civic rights, who now acquired new privileges at their expense.

The Hasmonean revolt came as a response to civic reforms that threatened to change the common civic status of the Jews who lived in Seleucid Judaea. Naturally being Greek meant adhering to Greek cultural and religious marks. The Hasmoneans, in contrast, used this situation to build their own politeia by considering as Jews whomever they wished to include in their politeia. The integration of the Idumeans and the Itureans meant strengthening the Hasmonean elite by joining them in. In times of internal strife, this was indeed much needed. In other words, the Hasmonean internal policy toward the Idumeans resembles very much the Seleucid policy in regard to the Jews of Jerusalem under Antiochus IV Epiphanes. In contrast to the Samaritans and the Greeks who were left outside the Hasmonean politeia, the Idumeans became proselytes who dwelled with the Jews, benefiting from the same civic status (i.e., Jews as the Hasmoneans defined them). Their so called “conversion,” (i.e., their circumcision) meant de facto exactly what Josephus tells us: being Jews according to the nomoi of the Jews in the Hasmonean formula. We should consider circumcision not as a conversion ritual but as a marker of the politeia of the ruling class.⁵⁶ This process of inclusion opened the way to power to Antipas’ family. Whether they were considered Jews or not was a question that was debated in antiquity. But it was debated in a later period, when rabbinic conversion did exist.⁵⁷ In this way proselytism was not a religious conversion but exactly what the Greek word prosēlutos meant: arriving to dwell with (Hebrew: ger). In other words, the prosēlutoi that the Hasmoneans created were akin with those who became Hellenes under the Seleucids and the Ptolemies. Once the Hellenistic world was conquered by Rome, this ethnic elasticity was no longer in the hands of Greeks and Jews.

The Mutability of Being a Jew

Following the Roman conquests of the Near East, the civic organization moved to the hands of the Roman authorities, who used the elasticity of ethnicity to their benefit. The Romans managed to become a conquering state by expanding their definition of civitas to the people whom they conquered. Granting Roman citizenship to the inhabitants of Latium and to all the Italian peoples turned the Roman civitas from a city-state to a state, and made the definition of being Roman political and mutable. The Romans applied a politics of similar dynamics in regard to the people they subjugated.⁵⁸ Nathanael Andrade has recently shown how the civic markers of being Greek, Syrian and also Arab, and their political elasticity within the civic organization in Syria under the Romans were an essential element of the local Roman imperial strategy. “Being Greek” has gained even more elasticity as a status under the Romans. If we read the constant strife between Jews and Greeks in Roman Alexandria over civic privileges against the background of Andrade’s analysis in contemporary Syria, it makes sense that what the Greek councils objected to was the Roman manipulation of their status.⁵⁹ In a word, under the Romans the civic status of a Greek was no more in the hands of Greeks. The Romans determined who was and who was not a Roman, a Greek, a Syrian and a Jew, and what de jure these terms meant.⁶⁰ This was an essential part of their imperialism.

Nadav Sharon, who argued for the Roman origin of a Jewish ethnarch, has revealed how it was used in Roman politics in Judaea. As is obvious from Josephus’ descriptions, the Romans considered the ethnarch of the Jews (Hyrcanus II) as a juridical authority over the ethnos of the Jews.⁶¹ Just like in Hasmonean times, this status also had religious aspects. Josephus quotes Claudius when he grants the Jews their high priest’s vestments for reason of reverence and observance of their ancestral religious rites.⁶² The Roman control of the jurisdiction of the ethnarch from a non-territorial to a territorial jurisdiction, if Sharon’s interpretation is indeed correct, assured in every way that the Roman authorities determined who was under his jurisdiction. In the same way, the Roman authorities confirmed the civil rights of Jewish communities in different locations.⁶³ This also meant that Jews were entitled to perform their “divinatory practice,” their superstitio, and to collect a special tribute to their temple in Jerusalem.⁶⁴ But could they decide who was a Jew and who was not? For this purpose, the equality between religion and juridical authority became essential.

Josephus puts in Claudius’ mouth a definition of the Jewish ancestral ways (ta patria) as eusebeia and thrēskia. In fact, literally he says that everyone should observe the ancestral ways or practices.⁶⁵ The relation between the reverence of the religious cult (eusebeia), the way of living (politeia, tōi patriōi politeuein nomōi) and the ethnos is stressed in 4 Maccabees repeatedly (4 Mac. 3:20, 4:23, 5:16–18) as the essence of hos ioudaismos (4 Mac. 4:26).⁶⁶ This identification of religion with politeia opened for Jews the way to keep the elasticity of ethnicity in their hands. On the one hand, they could continue to perform their rites and customs even if they became Romans.⁶⁷ On the other hand, as Cassius Dio later states, they applied the term Ioudaioi also to people of alien descent who adopted their customs.⁶⁸ The Romans complied up to a point.

Cases of people, especially women, who adopted Jewish customs and religious rites are attested for the first century CE. The most famous of them was Helena, who was followed by her son Izates, the king of Adiabene. Josephus dedicates a long description to the event.⁶⁹ He narrates how everybody feared Izates’ circumcision as the sign of the ultimate adoption of Jewish sebeia and etē, including the Jew who induced his mother. They feared punishment as well as the refusal of his people to have a Jew as a king. Adoption of the Jewish faith and rite is also attributed to Roman women of status.⁷⁰ The fact that all of these cases were women was, of course, noted.⁷¹ The only case where a possible punishment is mentioned is that of Izates. In contrast to the cases of women, his circumcision, which he performed privately with the help of his physician, was irreversible.⁷² In any case, from a Roman point of view, a person could not independently take on what was considered a political act: joining the Jewish entity by becoming a Jew. In regard to women, their ethnicity was in any case determined by their male relatives.⁷³ Therefore, for women any independent act toward becoming a Jew was not really actualized within the political sphere, and had no political meaning. Yet Roman authors do mention proselytes and refer to their circumcision.⁷⁴ So the question should not be who was a Jew and who was not, but who determined who was a Jew and who was not?

The perception of proselytes as converts is related to the question of whether antique Judaism knew an equivalence of the early Christian missionary movement, or was even its archetype.⁷⁵ As I argued, the Judaization of the Idumeans and Itureans under the Hasmoneans was not related to a possible religious missionary movement but was a Hellenistic political measure. Although rabbinic sources were scrutinized in order to place the origin of giyur – proselytism as a religious conversion – in Judaism of the Hasmonean period, no specific process of conversion is attested for that period except of circumcision. The Mishnah does refer to proselytes (ger, gioret) but does not mention the process of conversion itself.⁷⁶ The Tosefta (Shabbat 15:9) on the other hand brings a Tannaic discussion and cites Shime‘on ben El‘azar in relation to the question of circumcision when the ger is already circumcised. Only in the Babylonian Talmud (Yebamot 47a-b) do we get a full definition of the process, in a passage that comprises a second-century beraita.⁷⁷ As was observed, no anathema is mentioned here, but only the conviction of the candidate to abide by the law of the Jews with reference to immersion and circumcision. The text emphasizes particularly the fact that this process is invalid unless performed as a juridical act: in front of a juridical court or three witnesses. What the attitude of the Roman authority was to such a juridical conversion process is not mentioned. However, the legislation of the second and third centuries against circumcision should be taken here in consideration as a measure against proselytism.⁷⁸ In a word, if Jews found a way to define the mutability of their boundary as a people by employing a physical marker as a religious marker, and used it as a means to enlarging their civic definition of Jews to include Gentiles, especially Romans, the Roman authorities responded by prohibiting such mutability.⁷⁹ This should explain why the Tannatic collections do not refer to the process of giyur and why the actual definition of the process has survived in a Babylonian text. Such a process was illegal in the Roman Empire, and in any case not in the hands of Jews.⁸⁰ This could also explain the elaborate discussion on whether the status of being a Jew is matrilineal or patrilineal.⁸¹ Such measures left, however, other forms of sharing in Jewish rites open for sympathizers and God-fearers, without going through an actual process of “conversion.”⁸² The act of conversion for which, it should be noted, we employ a modern term with a long history, could not be a legal Roman procedure since it contradicted the common perspective in antiquity that individuals cannot determine their ethnic/juridical/civic status themselves; that is, unless there could be yet another definition of ethnos.

In her book Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity, Denise Kimber Buell has argued that a concept of fixed–fluid dialectic regarding ancient ethno-racial discourse can shed new light on the way early Christian authors have constructed the identity of Christianity as an ethnos and as a race (genos). In a Roman world that did not recognize new ethnicities, they invented a genealogy for an invented people and constructed its legitimacy a contrario to the legitimate genealogy of the Jews.⁸³ To cut the cord that connected Jewish law to Jewish religiosity, Christians defined new interpretations of the law and made it universal. The means to create a new ethnos was conversion: the complete transformation of values. This was an individual psychological process of transformation, but it was at the same time a social and political act. Buell shows how Christian ideas of universalism were predicated on what she calls “ethnic reasoning.”⁸⁴ Christians defined themselves as a new ethnos and a new genos, “the genos of the righteous” (to genos tōn dikaiōn), in contrast to two groups: the Jews and the Hellenes. Hellenes was the term used by pagans who adhered to Greek philosophy and religious rites.⁸⁵ Conversion became the means to move from one group to the other disregarding the Roman authority simply by portraying religion as ethnicity. Christians have positioned themselves as a political collectivity by using Roman ethnic terms to name themselves and by defining the ways to cross boundaries by themselves. Conversion was not only a form of cultural identity, it also enabled making Christianity a politeia whose marker was a newly created superstitio. In other words, the people who called themselves Christians took in their hands the Roman authority to revoke the status of being a Roman, which was a Roman juridical matter. Jews tried to do the same thing in order to keep the boundaries of their own politeia in their hands.

To Be a People de jure

Much attention was given in modern scholarship to the process of proselytism in Roman times, as both a halachic process and a historical phenomenon. We have proposed here to understand the meaning of proselytism against the background of the Roman strategy of incorporation of non-Romans into the Roman civitas. The transition period of civil war between the Republic and the Principate necessitated a change of a political character of the internal structure of the Roman state. For that purpose the term populus became a useful means. Giovannella Cresci Marrone and Alberto Grilli have shown how the rhetorical use of this term reflected the changes that the political structure of the Roman state underwent between the Republic and the early Principate.⁸⁶ If Caesar changed the status of the army in order to make an oppositional power to the authority of the Senate, Augustus did exactly the opposite. He used a new sense of populus, as it were a populus “shared with the princeps,” to challenge the power of the political Roman elite. The same political sense of Latin terminology is also apparent in the Roman writers from Cicero to Plutarch.⁸⁷ For them too, the term populus romanus came to designate the way in which they formulated their political thought. The means to control the definition of populus romanus was Roman law. Bestowing Roman citizenship to non-Romans and revoking it from others was handled by changing the juridical status. Bestowing and revoking a person’s a juridical personality made him a Roman, and could stop him from being one. This was the case with criminals, traitors and prisoners of war. Having lost their Roman juridical personality, they were de jure “exterminated” in the sense of being placed outside (ex) the Roman terminus. Not having a Roman juridical personality meant that their marriage was declared null and void, and that they lost all property within the Empire. Rabbinic Judaism adopted the same perspective and put it into practice in order to create a political definition of who was a Jew and who was not by creating a new juridical term.

The Hebrew root sh-m-d provides a well-defined linguistic framework for the Jewish trope of extermination ever since the Bible. However, in the late antique rabbinic literature we find the same root used in the medial mode – meshumad – in reference to the apostate Jew. A priori, applying the term meshumad – the one who was exterminated – is a paradox: How can a person still be alive after an act of extermination – hashmada? This, however, makes sense if we consider Judaism to be a political term and a civic status that could be bestowed and revoked. In this way a person can be metaphorically exterminated from the point of view of the Jewish community, exterminated in the sense of the Latin meaning of extermination: the one who has gone out – ex of the Jewish terminus (i.e., excommunicated), in the same way that a Roman citizen could stop being Roman.⁸⁸ Nevertheless, the fact that this is a new term that was invented in a specific historical moment calls for an examination of the circumstances and rationale of this invention, which is connected to the political sense of being a Jew.

The first references to the use of the term meshumad are found in the Tosefta.⁸⁹ The meshumadim appear here next to the heretics (minim), betrayers (moserot), those who deny God (epikorsin), as well as those who denied the Torah (sheKafru baTorah), those who separate themselves from the community, those who deny the resurrection of the dead, and those who sinned and caused the public to sin. All these are not considered to be part of the Jewish community. But who exactly were these meshumadim? One example that the Tosefta brings is Miryam from the Priest family of Blaga, who is called mishtamedet (here in the reflexive mode) because she married a Greek king.⁹⁰ All the other references to meshumadim (in the medial mode) are about Jews who disobeyed the Halakha. As an example we read in Tosefta Horaiot: “He who eats abominations – he is meshumad. He who eats pork and he who drinks libation-wine, he who desecrates the Shabbat, and he who draws up the foreskin. Rabbi Yose ben Rabbi Judah says: also he who is clothed in mixed species. Rabbi Shim‘eon ben Ele‘azar says: also he who does something after which his passion/drive does not lust.”⁹¹ In these cases, the actual Jewish faith in one God, the God of Israel, as well as apostasy from the Jewish faith are not mentioned. We can therefore conclude that the second- and third-century use of the term meshumad did not refer to renegades, Jews who left Judaism by converting to another religion, but simply to Jews who did not follow Jewish law. Whether they were forced to it under persecutions (shmad) or not, their acts of defying Jewish law excluded them from the Jewish way of life and the Jewish community, in sum the Jewish politeia along with betrayers, epicureans (i.e. people denying God’s providence) and Christians. What all such cases have in common is disobedience to both Jewish law and rabbinic authority.

The measures taken against these meshumadim were therefore aimed to stop Jews from approaching other cults by defining them as “exterminated – meshumadim to the Jewish community.” Whether such Jews really wanted to leave Judaism or not, any transgression of rabbinic authority in relation to the precepts was defined as their metaphoric extermination. This had a rationale within a pagan Roman world. In a civilization where a pagan could also be a God-fearer or sympathizer of the Jewish God, the denomination meshumad enabled the rabbis to stop the reverse phenomenon: by declaring that any Jew who disobeys their authority becomes “exterminated.” With this juridical definition, the gray area of who was a Jew could be mapped and a clear demarcation set; whoever passed it stopped being a Jew.

Shlomo Pines pointed out the resemblance between the Hebrew root sh-m-d and the Syriac root sh-m-t, whose meaning is excommunication by curse: ḥerem/nidui (shamta being an evil spirit, demon).⁹² We find this in BT Kidushin, 72a, where rabbi Achai ben Rabbi Yoshiya excommunicates (shametihu) the Jews who fished in the pond on Shabbat, who, then, ishtamud. They thus become apostate because they are excommunicated by the local rabbi for not observing the Shabbat. In no way do we find here the issue of conversion to another religion, only the definition of transgression of Jewish law as apostasy. This makes much sense against the background of the historical circumstances following the suppression of the Judaean revolts. Jews no longer had a unifying cult, and more problematic, they did not have a state with either a political or a religious authority. The objective of the rabbis’ jurisprudence was to set their law as the actual definition of who was a Jew and who was not. And the rabbinic authority decided that whoever transgresses it will no longer be a Jew. Of course, in the period under discussion, Christianity presented a concrete threat to the rabbinic authorities by attracting Jewish believers. The rabbis used excommunication for Jews who did not adhere to rabbinic law and rabbinic authority, but distinguished terminologically between a Jew who did it out of apostasy and became a Christian, and a Jew who did not convert but simply disobeyed rabbinic authority. The first was a min, the second a meshumad.

The distinction between meshumad and converted Jew is the subject of an elaborate discussion in the BT ‘Aovdah Zara 26b. It concerns foreign cult and the way to draw a clear demarcation to separate Jews from it. The text comments on the distinction between goyim – Gentiles in general, and “Shepherds of small animals” (ro‘ei behemah daka) on the one hand, and those considered as enemy. It states that in regard to foreigners, Jews should neither help them nor push them to death: “one should not raise them up from a pit (if they fall into it), nor throw/lower them into a pit.” In contrast, in regard to the other group, which includes minim (Christians), masorot (traitors) and meshumadim (“exterminated”), Jews should take the opportunity to put them in risky situations: to lower them down into pits, and not help them by raising them from the pits into which they fall, clearly an act against enemies. This distinction between the two groups is followed by an elaborate discussion in the Babylonian Talmud about who is a meshumad. There are two types of meshumad, the Talmud says: the one who eats nevelot (dead animals that were not slaughtered and are forbidden to eat) because of an appetite for them (leTeavon), and the one who eats it to spite/in defiance (leHakh‘is). The first is a meshumad, but the second is min, since he does what he does in order to defy the Torah. The Talmud then challenges this by bringing the case of a man who eats a flea or a mosquito and is called meshumad. How then, could he be considered eating a flea for pleasure (i.e., as a meshumad)? Shouldn’t he be considered a min? Yet the Talmud settles this by saying that the one who eats a flea does it to taste a forbidden taste, and not in defiance. “Then, who is a min?” it is asked, and the reply: the one who practices a foreign cult. This is a clear indication that a meshumad is not a renegade or a convert, but the one who transgresses the law without adhering to a different faith. The rabbinic authority is nevertheless very severe and excommunicates him just as if he were a min. In fact, this should be considered as a means to execute a Jew de jure.

The fact that this was not just a theoretical discussion but a juridical practice is attested in a law promulgated in 392, in which Theodosius I, Arcadius and Honorius prohibit the readmission of Jews once “the Primates of their law (legis suae primates) banished (proiciunt) them.”⁹³ I would like to relate this to Jews who were “exterminated” de jure (i.e., meshumadim) and who had no option but to turn to different judges in their matters. The law affirms that the authority of the primates is binding in matters of religio. In other words, the three Augusti declare here that the boundary of who is a Jew and who is not, is in the sole hands of the legal authorities. In other words, a meshumad remains with no juridical personality. He is “exterminated” de jure in reference not only to the rabbis’ authority, but to any authority. Thus, the definition by the rabbis in the matter of life and death, although not in their hands, seems to find here a solution according to which they are authorized to revoke the juridical personality of a Jew, making him “exterminated” de jure. This means that being a Jew is kept a civic status, not just a juridical and a religious one. In fact, this law clearly connects the two by equating juridical authority to matters of the Jews’ religio. The civic status is affirmed by the Roman delegation of this authority to the primates and to them only. In a word, the fact that a Jew has juridical personality, that he exists de jure, is completely in the hands of those who can determine if he is a Jew or not. To be a Jew is here to be, to exist de jure: to have a juridical personality of a Jew.

Conclusion

We have followed the ways in which certain groups of Jews designated themselves by defining their borderline, their limes. We have focused here on two sides of this definition: exclusion from the inside out and inclusion from the outside in. We did not refer to a global definition of Jews in the Greco-Roman world, but examined how certain groups referred to themselves as entities by employing the definition of who was a Jew and who was not as a political means. At the basis of all cases we find a political objective: a group of people who insist on defining themselves as a civic entity in order to become one, and to portray themselves as active agents, no matter what the circumstances are.

13 Local Identities of Synagogue Communities in the Roman Empire

Jonathan J. Price

A recently published volume of essays, under the title Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World,¹ explores an issue central to the theme of this volume, “Empire of Many Nations.” The book examines, from different perspectives, what happened to Greek culture and “identities” when the lands of paideia were incorporated into the Roman Empire. Like many other books on ancient history, this one was inspired or suggested by current trends, in this case, globalization. The Roman Empire is viewed as an all-encompassing, globalizing, “translocal” or “supralocal” force. The collective argument of the essays is that the subsumption of the Greek world into the Roman Empire emphasized and sharpened local identities while at the same time providing material for Rome to build its own imperial identity, so that “the local and imperial are mutually reliant.”² Aelius Aristides exalted the unity of a vast, diverse world under the rubric “Roman,” but the imposition of Rome compelled local communities towards “an increased awareness, even questioning of, the power dynamics between the local and non-local.” Thus local identities were “in constant dialogue with the translocal.”³

The illuminating treatments of “micro-identities” in the volume do not include the Jews in the Roman Empire, either synagogues or predominantly Jewish settlements, as localized communities or identities.⁴ There is no reason that the Jews had to be included. The essays in the collection are informed by the lingering issues from the furious debates about the Second Sophistic, and there should be no expectation that Jewish communities would find a natural place even in a composite study of different, particular manifestations of Greek cultural knowledge and localizations within the Roman sphere of influence. Moreover, Jewish status and identity in a “supralocal” context are inherently ambiguous, presenting both a strong, unifying, national/ethnic identity – their most-noticed feature in antiquity and also in most modern treatments – and widely varied local attachments and languages.⁵

It is this latter, less-studied element, videlicet, Jews’ local identities in the Roman Empire, that is the subject of the present limited investigation, informed inter alia by the setting of the conference from which the present volume arose – Tel Aviv. Other chapters in the present volume deal with the Jews as an undifferentiated ethnos across the empire – with regard to “pluralism” (Gruen), law (Rotman), imperial policy (Yakobson), relations with emperors and Jewish attitudes to Romans (Shahar, Oppenheimer) – but the Jews’ lived reality in their immediate settings in the city or countryside, in larger regional identities and in the Roman Empire itself would have forced Jewish communities – both in Iudaea/Palaestina and in the Diaspora – to face similar challenges of self-definition vis-à-vis their micro-environment (village, city) and larger regional environment.

Thus it may be asked – even if a full and detailed answer cannot be expected – whether individual, localized Jewish communities, without any obvious connection to each other across the ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse Roman Empire,⁶ can be said to have had, or displayed, a “micro-identity” in addition to their nonlocal ethnic one, or whether this feature, if not entirely absent in some cases, was indeed overshadowed by their shared history and ethnic origins.⁷ Let me reveal at the outset that my answer to this question here is partial and inconclusive, but not entirely negative.

The question will be approached by concentrating on synagogues, which, as time went on, especially from the third century CE to the end of antiquity, were the focal point of whole Jewish communities – communities within cities and villages, or (most noticeably in Iudaea/Palaestina) the whole village itself – and not just ancillary buildings for worship or specific activities separate from civic life. Synagogues could represent the identity of a community, and were used, in addition to worship and study, for community gatherings and public meetings, schools, communal meals, courts and other legal procedures, rudimentary banking functions, lodging – everything connected with civic life, and even some aspects of private life.⁸ A synagogue could be referred to as בית עם, lit. “house of the people” (bShabb. 32a).

While it is true that the synagogue buildings can be suggestive of the activities of communities and their extent – the presence of multiuse halls and side chambers, for example – the most useful evidence on the question of the localized or micro-identities of synagogues will be the several hundred inscriptions surviving from the floors, columns and walls of the ancient structures. This methodological choice is dictated not only by the real differences between literary and epigraphical attestations of synagogue communities. The inscriptions are the only unmediated written self-expression of the communities that built and used the synagogues. The inscriptions in synagogues are, despite their apparent public nature, directed to visitors to the synagogue, mostly (but not exclusively) Jews. They are valuable, internally focused evidence. Inscriptions are, moreover, the sole self-documentation of most Jewish communities otherwise undocumented in the literary sources. That is, the more than 200 surviving or partially surviving synagogue buildings from Roman antiquity (including those outside the bounds of direct Roman rule) represent the only evidence for almost all of those synagogal communities. Although there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of references to synagogues in literary sources (rabbinic and Christian literature), it is possible in only a very few instances to match up a literarily attested synagogal community to the actual physical remains of an ancient building (e.g., Beth She’an/ Scythopolis, Capernaum, possibly Caesarea and Sepphoris).⁹ Occasionally, inscriptional evidence demonstrates that some synagogues served as focal points for whole regions, such as the building at Ḥammat Gader, which records donations and participation by individuals from Sepphoris, Capernaum, Arbel and other places – some of which places had their own synagogues. The relationship between the synagogues, and the affiliation or citizenship of individuals in each, can only be guessed, since the inscriptions are the only evidence for the synagogue at Ḥammat Gader.

Naturally, the authors of synagogue inscriptions – the texts are mostly dedications, vows and acclamations (e.g., hyper soterias), and labels for art – did not have the purpose of directly answering the questions asked here. It could be that community charter or rules were inscribed on the walls of some synagogues, as at Ein Gedi and Reḥov (see next). Even were it possible to translate “micro-identities” into Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic, no one in the ancient period would have understood it in the same way as the scholar equipped with (burdened by?) heavy modern theoretical apparatus.

This chapter will be primarily concerned with aspects of localized identities that can be assumed to have existed at a higher rate than they are actually found in the evidence. Yet one mark of localized identity can be said at the outset not to be found because it did not exist: a particular language or set of symbols, any kind of unique mode of expression that focuses or reflects how the members of community perceived themselves. As Woolf points out in the last essay in Whitmarsh’s volume,¹⁰ both isolation and connection can account for localism. There was no separate, Jewish epigraphic language in any region of the Roman Empire. As a rule, Jews adopted and adapted local epigraphic idioms in both their public and private inscriptions. Synagogues are identified by architectural elements, Jewish symbols, the content of the inscriptions rather than any peculiar idiom. Thus the distinctly local and imitative character of Jewish inscriptions can be interpreted both as the failure of the Jews in any particular place to create a localized linguistic idiom of their own, but also, on the contrary, their identification with and participation in the local epigraphic culture.¹¹

We shall be paying close attention to an aspect of the evidence not normally noticed in discussions of ancient Jewish communities, highlighted in Whitmarsh’s anthology: the origins of the communities, including foundation stories and myths. It has been well established, from the standard discussions,¹² that in Roman antiquity, synagogues and Jewish communities – which, as stated, were sometimes but not always coextensive – had internal structures, often particular laws and regulations, magistrates, treasuries, which made them communities within communities in every respect. It has been clearly demonstrated that the internal structures and magistracies of the Jewish communities mimicked those where the Jews lived, and synagogues have been compared to civic guilds, which accounted for so much of citizens’ private and social lives.¹³ What is less clear is how Jews explained how and why they got to their particular location, and how important that explanation was to their identity.

The chosen corpus of evidence for this study presents a picture of inwardly focused communities, even for the more cosmopolitan synagogues like those along the coast of Iudaea/ Palaestina: most officials mentioned are those of the synagogue or Jewish community, and all benefactions mentioned are for Jews or the Jewish community at large. This may seem a self-evident fact; the point is that any contributions Jews made to the larger civic structures to which they belonged were recorded in other public places, not the synagogue.¹⁴

Mentions of synagogues in rabbinic literature seem routinely to assume that the population of a town and membership of the synagogue were coterminous.¹⁵ Such cases would involve small towns with one synagogue and a predominantly or exclusively Jewish population, even if the leaders of the synagogues were different from a town’s civic leaders. The impression in rabbinic sources of insular, self-sufficient and self-administered Jewish communities is reinforced by the exemptions from curial service given to some Jews in the Theodosian Code.¹⁶

Three Aramaic synagogue inscriptions – but strikingly, none in Greek – mention “the town” קרתה in which the synagogue is located, but not by name.¹⁷ The large mosaic inscription at Ein Gedi contains sanctions against anyone who inter alia reveals “the secret of the town” רזה דקרתה to the Gentiles (CIIP IV, 3851); here the town seems to be coterminous with the synagogue community, especially in light of the second mosaic inscription from there (CIIP IV, 3852):

דכירין לטב כל בני קרתה דיהב גרמהון | וח>ז<קין כנישתה

Be remembered for the good all the residents of the town who gave from their own property and support the synagogue.

The two entities are different, but the membership is the same, so that a prohibition published in the synagogue applies to all citizens of the town. The same picture emerges from the fragmentary chancel-screen inscriptions in Susiya, which use identical language to commemorate “[members of] the holy congregation” (קה]לה קדישה דאתחזק[ין …]) and “members of the town” (דכיר]ין לטב [כ]ל בני קרתה [ד]מתחזק[ין]), synagogue and town being separate physical entities with the same membership.¹⁸ And the same can be said for the blessing on all בני קרתה in the mosaic inscription at Ḥuseifa.¹⁹ An extremely impressive example of a synagogue inscription that seems to represent an entire community tightly organized around a specific purpose and area is the halakhic inscription from Reḥov,²⁰ though naturally the community using the Reḥov synagogue was not the only one which strictly observed agricultural laws in the Land of Israel, and laws spelled out in the inscription had regional relevance and application. Roman citizenship, or really any form of participation in the Roman Empire, seems to have had little part in their identity and daily lives.

The formula דכיר לטב dekir letav, was not only the most prevalent formula in Jewish Aramaic dedications but also the most widespread dedicatory formula throughout the Aramaic-speaking world.²¹ The formula is found in synagogue inscriptions in Batanea and Dura Europus in Syria and throughout Iudaea/Palaestina from north to south,²² but its first use predates its first appearance in a Jewish text by centuries. The Jews’ use of the formula differed from their surroundings in important respects: the target audience, for whom the dedicatee was meant to be remembered for the good, was the living community and not a deity, thus there are hardly any Jewish texts with דכיר לטב קדם plus a divine name, unlike, for example, Nabataean uses of the formula.²³ Moreover, the dedicatee in Jewish texts was a living person; the Jewish dedications were not, as in other non-Jewish contexts, memorials for the deceased.²⁴ The dekir letav synagogue dedications seem to reinforce the community from within, by commemorating, either by name or anonymously, contributions by particularly generous members of the community.²⁵ Jews’ adaptation of the formula stressed community recognition of the dedicatee rather than divine confirmation; but a formula, even modified, is not a distinctive language, and the Jews’ adaptation of it was similar throughout the East and cannot be read as a linguistic peculiarity of a particular city or region.

The commemorations of members of the town or congregation are collective and anonymous, stressing the importance of the community above the generosity of any individual, even if some anonymous benefactions are recorded together with named contributions, including another inscription at Ḥuseifa.²⁶ As Stemberger noted, “worship was a common responsibility of all members of the community.”²⁷ The use of the formula dekir letav and the anonymity of a relatively large number of Aramaic dedications in synagogues are evidence of local knowledge, since the local community knew and recognized even their unnamed benefactors, but that local knowledge is not communicated to the outside world, or even to the next generations, in the inscriptions. The extent to which that knowledge was preserved in the oral tradition of the communities is a fascinating, unanswerable question.

Thus, according to the standard conception of Jewish communities under Roman rule, they could function as independent entities that provided and strengthened the Jews’ local identity, their separation from but also connection to the larger urban or regional setting. This does not precisely answer the specific questions of micro-identities in the ancient equivalent of a globalizing imperial power. For that, we turn our attention to Jewish communities’ account of their own origins and possibly distinctive features in their identity and self-accounting.

There is some evidence, if scrappy, suggesting that some Jewish communities had, aside from their shared national story of origins derived from the Bible, additional stories to explain how they got to their present location and why their community exists. In some cases, certainly more than the evidence shows, members of a synagogue would have had an interesting and unique answer to the question: Why are you in this particular spot?

Ancient synagogue communities, in contrast to the modern practice, did not inscribe their names or identities on their lintels or mosaic floors – at least, no epigraphical instance has been found so far, although synagogues are given distinct names in literary sources, such as the Synagogue of Rebellion (כנישתא מרדתא דקיסרין) in Caesarea;²⁸ the name is suggestive of both “local knowledge” and “micro-community,” but nothing is known beyond the evocative name. Slightly more insight – if very slightly more – may be gained from the synagogue names indicating origins elsewhere. The many epitaphs recovered from the Jewish catacombs in Rome mention synagogues with names suggesting communities,²⁹ such as the συναγωγὴ Τριπολειτῶν,³⁰ whose meaning seems straightforward, even if the foundational story is not revealed in the name, nor can it be known which Tripolis is referred to. Similarly, the synagogues Ἐλέας and Σεκηνῶν at Rome refer to places that can be variously identified.³¹ In all such cases, one wonders how long, after the original founding of the synagogue by Tripolitans, Sekenoi, and others, the membership remained identified with their city of origin, or even ethnically insulated from Jews of other origins (was there a custom against “intermarriage” with Jews from different backgrounds, as in some ethnically tight Jewish communities today?). So far as this last point is concerned, the συναγωγὴ Αἱβρρέων (Ἑβρέων), as Leon suggests, possibly represents the first synagogue founded in Rome, therefore by Jews from Palestine, speakers of Aramaic and Hebrew, thus several generations before the date of the catacomb inscriptions.³² A similar kind of chauvinism may be represented in συναγωγἠ Βερνάκλων (βερκακλησίων), which has been interpreted as an attempt to distinguish native-born Jews, vernaculi, from all the immigrant communities.³³

Some of the questions arising from these mere mentions of communities, such as their age and longevity, could have been solved by the discovery of the actual buildings where they met, but not one physical structure identified as an ancient synagogue has been discovered in Rome.

In Iudaea/Palaestina, there is similar slight evidence for communities transplanted from abroad. I have recently explored this issue in print, and there is no need to repeat all of the arguments and evidence here.³⁴ I shall only reiterate the conclusion that the literary and epigraphic data are ambiguous at best for any presumed micro-community other than in Jaffa, where one inscription testifies to a community of Cappadocians within the city, even though its origins and history are not revealed by the inscription. Other epitaphs in Jaffa document the presence of many Egyptian Jews in the city, although the history of that transplanted ethnic group is unknown – were they refugees from the second-century rebellion in Egypt, or opportunistic merchants who settled before then (or possibly even afterwards)? – and there is no indication that they organized into a micro-community within the Jewish population of Jaffa. We may suppose that the move of a Jewish community from one distinct different cultural and linguistic environment to another – like the move from Asia Minor or Alexandria to Iudaea/Palaestina – sharpened an idiosyncratic identity as well as their identity as Jews. Fully transplanted communities obviously had – like colonies – corresponding stories about the reasons and circumstances of their transplantation, and those stories would have been part of their particular identities in their specific location.

Another possible topos of origins involves a ktistes – or if not technically a ktistes, then an important and imposing figure who imprinted his personality on the building or community.³⁵ In the Greek world, a ktistes could be divine or semidivine, which is not possible in a Jewish context. Several synagogue inscriptions in fact use the word κτίστης or κτίζειν in connection with a person or persons, but the problem is that in none of the instances does the word mean “founder”; the meaning is, rather, “donor.” This is clear in a dedication from the synagogue at Capernaum, in which the verb ἔκτισαν has a specific direct object: Ἡρώδης Μο[κί?]|μου καὶ Ἰοῦστος | υἱὸς ἅμα τοῖς | τέκνοις ἔκτι|σαν τὸν | κίονα.³⁶ Here, “founded the pillar” must mean “contributed towards construction of the pillar.” In Dura Europus, the two Greek inscriptions on ceiling tiles using the same verb are to be interpreted in the same way:

1. – Σαμουὴλ | Εἰδδέου | πρεσβύτερος | τῶν Ἰουδέ|ων ἔκτισεν.

2. – Σαμουὴλ | Βαρσαφάρα | μνησθη ἔκ|[τ]ισεν ταῦ|τα οὕτως.³⁷

The second of these texts has a direct object that is vague but nonetheless limiting the action of the verb: he did not “found” but contributed toward the construction of this or that element of the new building. Accordingly, the first Samuel was also one of many donors to the synagogue’s construction. The main foundational inscription at Dura, set into the ceiling and written on the same kind of tiles, is in Aramaic and records the specific date during which the entire building was constructed (244–5 CE), the distinguished individuals in charge of the work (the “building committee” in today’s parlance), and blessings on all who worked on and contributed to the building.³⁸

1. (A) This building was erected in the year five hundred and fifty six, which is the second year of Philip Julius Caesar, during the presbyterate of Samuel |5| the priest, son of Yedaya the archon. Now those who stood in charge of this work (were): Abraham [Abram] the treasurer, and Samuel son of Sphara, and …. the proselyte. With a willing spirit they began to build in the fifty-fifty-sixth year, and they sent to |10| …. and they made haste …. and they worked in … Blessing from the elders and from all the children of … they worked and toiled … Peace to them and their wives and all their children.

2. (B) And the 2nd (part). And like all those who worked were their brethren (in Dura?) … all of them who with their money … and in the eager desire of their souls … Their reward, all whatever … that the world which is to come … assured to them … on every Sabbath … spreading out their hands in it

(prayer?).

The date is determined by the Seleucid era, the regnal year of Philip Julius Caesar and the presbyterate of the priest Samuel son of Yedaya שמואל בר ידעי, who is obviously the Samuel in the first Greek inscription here. The Samuel in the second Greek inscription is named as one of those “who stood in charge of this work” (דקמו על עיבידה). Thus the two Samuels at Dura were members in the elite “founders’ circle,” as contemporary fundraisers would say, but they were not ktistai/founders of the community itself in the classical Greek sense, that is, they were not part of the foundational story of the community of people who used the new building; they were not the stuff of local legend or “local knowledge” that contributes to a community’s unique identity.

The same interpretation of the noun κτίστης or verb κτίζειν is necessary for all but one of the remaining synagogue texts using those words. The many donors listed on one side of the inscribed stele at Aphrodisias are the collective subject of ἔκτισαν,³⁹ meaning that they were the ones who provided the necessary funds. In Ḥulda, the dedication to Εὐτυχῶς | Εὐστοχίῳ | καὶ Ἡσυχίῳ | καὶ Εοὐαγρίῳ | τοῖς κτίσ|τες⁴⁰ records their financial benefaction to the building; they could be either the exclusive, or just the major funders, but not “founders” in any other sense. In Daburra (Golan), [Ῥο]ύστικος ἔκτισεν[–?] is inscribed on a lintel underneath an Aramaic inscription recording that a certain Eleazar contributed some of the columns in the building.⁴¹ Here, not only is Rusticus’ inscription beneath Eleazar’s dedication, and in smaller letters, but the missing part of the lintel could very well have recorded exactly what Rusticus donated.

All of these instances of ktistai as donors but not founders influence the interpretation of the complete inscription from the broken mosaic floor in Tiberias: Πρόκλος | Κρίσπου | ἔκτισεν.⁴² Published translations of the text have Proclus son of Crispus as actual founder of the synagogue.⁴³ But in light of the many clear parallels, the inscription must indicate that Proclus contributed the funds for the mosaic, without the far-reaching implications of his being the founder of the building, much less the community. In fact, there is no word or expression in any surviving Greek synagogue inscription signifying “founding” in the sense required by the theory of local knowledge and micro-community.

Thus the κτίσται in synagogue inscriptions are major donors, and as such do not bring us any closer to discovering local knowledge or micro-identities. The same goes for the few instances of the individuals who claim responsibility in inscriptions for construction or renovation of a synagogue without being called κτίσται. A certain Leontis funded the lavish mosaic floor of the synagogue (or is it just a building next to the synagogue?) in Beth She’an and thereby purchased the right to advertise his benefaction in almost exclusive terms, but even if the building was known locally as “the Leontis synagogue,” as it is in modern scholarship – perhaps even because it was in fact his private house? – that would describe the building and not the identity of the worshippers.

The most extravagant example of a single benefactor giving himself public credit for the synagogue building is, of course, the donation of Tiberius Claudius Polycharmus at Stobi.⁴⁴ That long text begins in this way:

[Κλ.] Τιβέριος Πολύ|χαρμος ὁ καὶ Ἀχύρι|ος ὁ πατὴρ τῆς ἐν | [5] Στόβοις συναγωγῆς. | ὅς πολιτευσάμε|νος πᾶσαν πολειτεί|αν κατὰ τὸν Ἰουδαῑ|σμὸν

κτλ.

There follows a list of the parts of the building that he subsidized, and provisions for keeping ownership within his family. In return for his benefaction, Polycharmos received the honorary title “Father of the synagogue in Stobi,” obviously granted to him by the grateful, already existing community, which the wording suggests was organized around the only synagogue in Stobi. The expression πολιτευσάμενος πᾶσαν πολειτείαν κατὰ τὸν Ἰουδαῑσμὸν in ll. 5–8 means that he lived his entire public life according to the precepts of Judaism. Thus Polycharmos’ rather typical and formulaic euergetistic inscription, if untypically long for a synagogue, perpetuates benefaction but does not represent or record the community’s identity as such. It could even be said that, in contrast to other Jewish synagogue donor inscriptions, Polycharmos’ does not contain explicit expressions of his personal devotion to the community but is really all about himself.

The one possible record of a Jewish ktistes as being a real founder is a dedicatory inscription from Sidibunda in Asia Minor.⁴⁵

θεῷ ὑψίστωι καὶ | ἁγείᾳ καταφυγῇ | Ἀρτιμᾶς υἱὸς Ἀρ|τίμου Μομμίου | καὶ [Μ]αρκίας, ὁ αὐ|τὸς κτίστης, ἀ|νέστησεν καὶ | τὸν θυμιατίσ|τηρον καὶ κέον<α> | ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων

To the highest God and the holy refuge, Artimas son of Artimos Mommios and Markia, who himself is the founder (ktistes), donated the censer and column.

Here Artimas stresses that he is the κτίστης himself, and he uses an unrelated verb for the parts of the building he funded. There is not enough evidence in the short text to assert that Artimas’ “foundation” gave the synagogue an exclusive identity or personal story, or that he really is not a κτίστης like Polycharmos and took special interest in these two components of the building; anything is possible, but not every possibility is likely. The inscription prima facie is a typical donor inscription, recording parts of the building for which Artimas provided all or most of the funds. This text is the only evidence of Jews in this city; but even its Jewishness is not certain.⁴⁶

Before moving on to the next type of possible Jewish micro-community, we should briefly consider the basalt lintel from Dabbura, similar to the one cited previously, inscribed in Hebrew:⁴⁷

זה בית | מדרשו | של רבי | אליעזר | הקפר

This is the beth midrash of Rabbi Eliezer Ha-Qappar.

Here the rabbinic figure mentioned seems not to have been a founder but the main pedagogical or spiritual figure, and indeed the building could have been used exclusively by and identified with a small circle of R. Eliezer’s students and followers. There is some doubt as to whether the rabbi of this inscription is the famous Talmudic sage,⁴⁸ but the question concerning us here is whether a school or academy is useful in consideration of a micro-community. A beth midrash was not a synagogue or a constituted community.⁴⁹ It is true that a teacher plus group of disciples could turn into a religio-social movement or the sort of “community” that provided its members a stronger sense of identity and belonging than their locality, city or Empire; Christianity is only the most obvious example. But a single beth midrash is not a religious movement, and furthermore it cannot be known from this single inscription how long the academy continued to function, with the strong identity of its intellectual leader, after his death. A stone building and carved inscription would presume such a continuation, no matter whether the foundation of the building, or the group that later moved into the building, can be dated to the lifetime of the sage. In this specific case, it seems the lintel is to be dated much later than the lifetime of the tanna R. Eliezer. But we are again poking around in the dark, and without further light from another source, the rabbi’s academy remains an academy, not a full-blown community.

The cases adduced suggest that while some synagogues both in Iudaea/ Palaestina and the Diaspora may have had founders and founders’ stories that afforded them a particular local identity distinguishing them both from their immediate surroundings and all other Jewish synagogues, no clear case emerges from any synagogue’s self-documentation. The dim and partial picture is a matter of chance: fuller evidence, both epigraphical and literary, could reveal a wider, richer phenomenon. A few names of congregations and founders suggest that there were once many more, with their own unique stories.

Notably missing from the Jewish evidence – given the importance of Greek and Roman myths in the foundation of colonies and the identification of micro-identities in the Graeco-Roman world – is any connection between a certain Jewish community and a story or character from the Bible. It is true that the Jews of Babylonia traced their origins to the expulsion after the destruction of the First Temple in the sixth century BCE – a humble origin which became a mark of honor – and the Egyptian Jews of the Hellenistic period, as well, related that the founding members of their large population were first brought to Egypt by the Persians and then by Ptolemy I.⁵⁰ So far as the Babylonian Jews are concerned, it would be instructive to have even one synagogue from there; there is no physical or epigraphical evidence for the phenomenon we seek. Egypt is a more complex case, not only because of the very clear, legitimizing aetiological legends involving as well the translation of the Bible into Greek, and the vigorously assertive Jewish community in Alexandria, but also because of the Jewish politeumata, which functioned more or less as independent or semi-independent communities, as well as the Temple of Onias at the center of a very particular self-defining community.⁵¹ Yet we can preempt further discussion by noting that the Temple of Onias was destroyed in 73 CE, and the Jewish communities in Egypt were destroyed and dwindled to practically nothing in the second century CE, so that there is no real comparative evidence for the period under consideration here.

While much synagogue figurative art consists of nonlocalized images like the zodiac or – most prominently – depictions of shared national symbols like the Temple and its implements and symbols of Jewish holidays like the lulav and etrog, some synagogue floors and walls were illustrated with narrative scenes and figures from the Bible.⁵² Do any of these figures or stories appear in a place connected with them in the Bible, thus providing a local connection to the national story? The answer is no. The usefulness of this observation is limited, since most surviving synagogue buildings are located in places not mentioned in the Bible, or where no important events occurred; and most important locations in the Biblical patriarchal and monarchical narratives, such as they were identified in antiquity, do not have the remains of Jewish synagogues.⁵³ Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that the main figures, the primary formative moments and the famous instances of heroism in synagogue art – Abraham (the binding of Isaac), King David, Daniel in the lions’ den, Noah, Samson, the investment of Aaron and the priests, the panoply of unique figures and scenes in the Dura Europus paintings – have no textual connection with their place. Samson, for example, is depicted in the Lower Galilee, in one scene even carrying the Gate of Gaza on his shoulders, but not in any surviving part of the Gaza floor.⁵⁴ David, who is depicted at Gaza, is not named in the long inscription at Ein Gedi; and other main locations of David’s biblical story do not preserve the remains of synagogues.⁵⁵ It is just possible that the “Purim panel” in the Dura frescoes – a unique scene in synagogue art, placed significantly just to the left of the Torah shrine – highlights a presumed local association with the heroes Mordecai and Esther; some residents of Dura could very well have felt themselves to be more a part of Parthia/Persia than the Roman world, even at a great distance from the royal capital.⁵⁶ But since Dura is, of course, not mentioned in the Scroll of Esther, only a local text or tradition – not the Biblical one – would secure this connection.

This, of course, does not rule out for any synagogue some extrabiblical association with a figure, story or verse, such as a special association of the Sepphoris synagogue with priests, which could have been part of the community’s local identity: the consecration of Aaron and his sons is portrayed there in a unique scene.⁵⁷ The locals knew.

In conclusion, this chapter took up a limited task within a limited set of evidence. It is somewhat artificial but nonetheless (hopefully) instructive to measure an aspect of ancient Judaism mainly by inscriptions in the ritual and civic centers in which they actually lived, without interference of partisan or particularistic literary sources. The phenomenon we are hunting probably had a stronger existence than what we have been able to uncover, but the evidence is too ambiguous – and the synagogal communities so uninterested in communicating it – that no clear and detailed instances can be added to the larger study of it. If you asked any Jewish community represented wholly by their synagogue – how did you get to this particular place? when were you founded, by whom and why? – they probably had answers, but none are advertised or perpetuated in mosaic or stone. The physical remains of Jewish synagogue communities show a connection to the shared Jewish story rather than any particularistic story connecting them to their actual location. When the members of the synagogues – or the synagogues themselves, as the collective donations show – erected inscriptions, they were talking more to themselves and perhaps other Jews and interested visitors than to random outsiders or the Roman authorities.

The cases of Ein Gedi and Reḥov reveal extremely inward-looking communities who saw fit to publish in their synagogue floors and walls regulations and laws regulating their local society, in a particular, nonformulaic language. This inward focus, this identification with, if anything, the collective Jewish identity, mean that Jewish synagogal communities did not react to Roman “globalization” in the same way as Greek cultural or political entities.

14 The Good, the Bad and the Middling Roman Emperors in Talmudic Literature^*

Yuval Shahar

R. Naḥman opened his discourse with the text, Therefore fear thou not, O Jacob My servant (Jer. xxx,10). This speaks of Jacob himself, of whom it is written, And he dreamed, and behold, a ladder set up on the earth … and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it (Gen. xxviii,12). These angels … were the guardian princes of the nations … the Holy One, blessed be He, showed our father Jacob the prince of Babylon ascending seventy rungs of the ladder, the prince of Media fifty-two rungs, the prince of Greece one hundred and eighty, while the prince of Edom [= Rome] ascended till Jacob did not know how many rungs. Thereupon our father Jacob was afraid. He thought: is it possible that this one will never be brought down? Said the Holy One, blessed be He, to him: ‘Fear thou not, O Jacob My servant.’ Even if he ascend and sit down by Me, I will bring him down from there!¹

This midrash clearly shows both the unique role of Rome in Jewish history in antiquity and the central place it occupies in Talmudic literature. A comprehensive study of Rome’s role in the Talmudic literature would require us to collect, analyze and categorize all the sources referring to Rome, both directly and indirectly, as a collective political and cultural entity, through Rome as an empire (usually an evil one), down to details of toponomy in the place names from the city of Rome itself to the port of Brindisium, as well as the names of important Roman personae. As far as I know, there is at present no such comprehensive study, which would have to be vast. The present chapter is devoted to a narrow but important part of the Talmudic image of Rome: Roman emperors.

A methodological note: the Talmudic literature is ahistoric. It was created over a millennium, and even its earlier stages in Late Antiquity started at the beginning of the third century and continued to develop up to the seventh. There were two different centers – Palestine and Babylonia – which created two different Talmuds, and in Palestine especially rabbinic literature branched out into different genres. Nevertheless, many narratives and anecdotes about historical events and personae, in our case Roman emperors, were described, related and repeated throughout all the Talmudic literature over many periods. This is why it is so essential to analyze each text carefully in its context. Jewish religious regulations (halakhah) have to be understood in their religious, cultural, sociological and political framework; and when analyzing a tale, our reading should address the different contexts of interpretation: literary, generic, comparative and historical. I cannot, of course, go into every detail of the development of the character of Hadrian, for instance, but only draw the bottom line – or rather lines – of what Jews told themselves about a named emperor, in Palestine on the one hand and in Babylonia on the other. In some cases, usually in the Palestinian literature, we can trace different chronological phases that shift and vary the profile and role of a particular Roman emperor. All the sources which we relate to are from the late second to the early third centuries up to the sixth century CE. The earliest are from the Palestinian tannaitic literature (i.e. up to the middle of the third century), while the rest were produced by the Palestinian Amoraim in the Jerusalem Talmud (which was redacted or came to an end in the seventies of the fourth century), and the early Palestinian midrashei Aggadah, Bereshit Rabbah and Va-Yiqrah Rabbah from the fifth or sixth century. From the other side of the Euphrates we can hear the Jewish Babylonian voice, through the Babylonian Talmud, mainly from the fourth to the sixth centuries.

There are nine named emperors in the whole of the Talmudic literature,² but two of these are barely mentioned and will not concern us: Augustus appears usually as a title,³ and Tiberius is noted because of the city called after him.⁴ This holds true also for Nero in the Palestinian literature, although in Babylonia his role is more significant and positive.⁵ Thus, we are left with six emperors to deal with, who are categorized according to the Talmudic attitude to them and after Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood, as the Good, the Bad (at times they are also ugly …) and the Middling. Historically, we should start with the Bad.

The Bad are those emperors who fought against and crushed the great Jewish revolts in Palestine and the Jewish diaspora during the first and second centuries CE: Vespasian, Titus, Trajan and Hadrian. I shall confine myself here to dealing only with Hadrian.⁶

Hadrian, like the ‘bad’ emperors who preceded him, opens his Talmudic career in the Palestinian literature with a terrible reputation based on very solid historical grounds: he crushed the Bar-Kokhva revolt, causing a great disaster for the Jewish people in their land in antiquity. His cruelty surpassed the deeds and character of Titus, and even those of Trajan and his bloodshed (in Egypt and Cyprus): Hadrian, we are told, devastated the land; killed hundreds of thousands of people; murdered infants; and profaned the bodies of the dead, forbidding their burial right up to his own death:

R. Yose said … [that] Hadrian, the evil one, had come and devastated the entire land.⁷

Said R. Yoḥanan, The voice [= orders] of Hadrian Caesar is killing 80,000 myriads in Beitar; they kept slaughtering [the Jews] until a horse sank into blood up to his nose; they found three hundred babies’ skulls on a single rock; the evil Hadrian had a large vineyard, eighteen miles by eighteen miles. … They surrounded it by a wall made of those who were slain in Beitar. … And he did not decree that they could be buried, until another king came along and decreed that they may be buried.⁸

Unusually, the negative attitude towards Hadrian found its expression even in the halakhic field: Hadrianic earthenware is one of the things that belong to gentiles and is forbidden, and it is forbidden to have any benefit from it.⁹

Thus, fitting the punishment to the crime, Hadrian becomes the subject of the Talmud’s most negative imprecation: ‘May his bones be crushed!’ A special sort of damnatio memoriae.¹⁰

But now comes a surprise. From the late fourth century on, both the Palestinian midrashic literature and the Babylonian Talmud delineate a new Hadrian, an intellectually curious man, who mixes with the mob and talks to ordinary people: ‘Hadrian, may his bones be crushed, was walking on the paths of Tiberias and he saw an old man hew out an area in order to plant. Hadrian said to him: Old man, old man …’,¹¹ and in particular he converses patiently with rabbis. His conversation has a philosophical and theological aura: Hadrian wonders, how was the world created?¹² How was the human being created?¹³ What is the nature of the water of the ocean (okeanus)?¹⁴ In spite of the sharp change in the depiction of his character, this Hadrian is situated in the correct historical time, and usually his partner in dialogue is R. Yehoshua b. Hananiah. What brings this ‘odd couple’ together? Maybe this is a literary meeting between two moderate and enlightened figures, the very modest rabbi, a true successor of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai in the first two decades of the second century, and the enlightened emperor Hadrian, as he is depicted in the classical sources, at least during his first years, up to the middle of the third decade of the same century.¹⁵

The cruel Hadrian, ‘may his bones be crushed’, has not vanished but from now on he has a second face. The sole sign that we are dealing with the same person is the mutual epithet ‘may his bones be crushed’ for both the ‘wicked’ and the ‘enlightened’.¹⁶ What is striking is the similarity between the two faces of the Talmudic Hadrian,¹⁷ and the double face attributed to the emperor in Roman historiography, especially the Vita Hadriani in the Historia Augusta, which is dated either to the time of Diocletian or to the late fourth century.¹⁸ The same characteristics of Hadrian are portrayed again and again throughout the second half of the fourth century up to the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries,¹⁹ in other words, at the same time as the earliest Talmudic traditions of this other, positive face of Hadrian.

The Vita Hadriani characterizes Hadrian clearly as double-faced: ‘He was, in the same person, austere and genial, dignified and playful, dilatory and quick to act, niggardly and generous, deceitful and straightforward, cruel and merciful, and always in all things changeable.’²⁰ In the words of Benario: ‘even a cursory reading of the life reveals a curious mingling of two traditions, one favorable to the emperor, the other quite the opposite. The former is sober and detailed, the latter anecdotal and miscellaneous.’²¹ At the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries, the Epitome de Caesaribus had the same impression: ‘He was changeable, manifold, and multiform; as if a born arbiter with respect to vices and virtues, by some artifice he controlled intellectual impulse. … he simulated restraint, affability, clemency, and conversely disguised the ardor for fame with which he burned.’²²

In two successive sentences the Vita relates to Hadrian’s attitudes and manners towards both ordinary and learned people: (1) ‘Most courteous in his conversations, even with the very humble, he denounced all who, in the belief that they were thereby maintaining the imperial dignity, begrudged him the pleasure of such friendliness. (2) In the museum at Alexandria he propounded many questions to the teachers and answered himself what he had propounded.’²³ The first sentence matches the Talmudic Hadrian who walks through the fields of Tiberias and has a conversation with an old man. The second sentence fits Hadrian’s philosophical and theological dialogues with R. Yehoshua – although here the emperor simply puts the questions and it is the rabbi who gives him the correct, meaningful answers.

The most interesting similarities between Hadrian both in the Vita Hadriani and in the midrash have been proposed and studied by Galit Hasan-Rokem.²⁴ Referring to Hadrian’s generous gifts and his fondness for the public baths, the Roman biographer told a well-known bathing joke, in two scenes. In the first scene, Hadrian sees a veteran, known to him from military service, rubbing his back and the rest of his body on the wall. When he realizes that this is because he does not have a slave of his own, he presents him both with slaves and with the cost of their maintenance. In the second scene, on a different day, several old men imitate the veteran, rubbing themselves on the wall in order to arouse the emperor’s generosity. But this time Hadrian orders them to be called out and rub each other down in turn.²⁵

Midrash Va-Yikra Rabbah tells a similar story, also based on two opposed scenes. In the first scene, Hadrian sees an old man near Tiberias planting a young fig tree and asks him for whom is he planting this tree. The old man answers that if he is fortunate, he will eat the figs himself; if not, his descendants will eat them. Hadrian tells him: ‘If you are fortunate enough to eat of them, let me know.’ When the figs ripen, the old man fills a basket with figs and brings it to Hadrian. The emperor orders his servants to empty his basket and fill it with dinars. In the second scene, a neighbour of the old man, instigated by his wife, imitates the old man, comes before Hadrian and says: ‘I have heard that the king loves figs and reimburses them with dinars.’ Hadrian’s reaction is very similar to his answer to the people in the bath house in the Vita Hadriani: he orders his servants ‘to put him in front of the palace gate and whoever enters or exits should throw [a fig] in his face.’²⁶

The Talmudic Hadrian, then, heads the Roman legions who destroy Palestinian Jewry, on the one hand, while on the other hand, holds philosophical dialogues with R. Yehoshua in the same narrative time. In this context we note that the Historia Augusta concludes its presentation of Hadrian’s dual face with a nice anecdote about an argument between the emperor and the eminent philosopher and sophist Favorinus, which reveals the inequity of such disagreement. Although Favorinus is correct, he gives way to Hadrian, and when rebuked by friends, replies, ‘You advise me badly, friends, since you do not permit me to believe that he who commands thirty legions is the most learned of all.’²⁷

What is the historical background for the ‘enlightened’ Hadrian in Talmudic literature? Many scholars point to the early years of Hadrian’s reign as a period of positive relationship between the new emperor and the Jews, at least with regard to some of his actions that were interpreted by the Jews as being in their favor.²⁸ This sounds logical at first glance, but in fact these scholarly conclusions totally neglect the clear distinction between two different chronological phases in the Talmudic literature which refer to Hadrian: both the tannaitic and amoraic literature up to the end of the Palestinian Talmud in the last quarter of the fourth century delineate only the wicked Hadrian; the enlightened Hadrian is a product of aggadic midrashim only from the early fifth century on.²⁹ There are some similarities between the enlightened Talmudic Hadrian and his depiction in fourth-century Roman literature, especially in his wide education and curiosity. Thus the Talmudic midrashim find him as the most convenient emperor to represent Rome in dialogues with Jewish rabbis of his generation, like Rabbi Yehoshua son of Ḥananiah.

To sum up: first of all, the ‘wicked’ Hadrian, ‘may his bones be crushed’, is a direct and immediate Jewish reaction to the historic role of this emperor in the most catastrophic event in Jewish antiquity. There is no connection between this phase of the Talmudic Hadrian and Roman historiography. On the contrary, Cassius Dio depicts Hadrian’s reactions to the Jewish rebellion and the measures he takes as rational and very cautious. In fact, Hadrian’s reign is usually remembered by the Romans as a period without wars. Secondly, Hadrian is already depicted in Roman literature as double-faced from the second and third centuries, but there is no positive hint about him at all in the contemporary Talmudic works. Thirdly, it is only from the early fifth century on, hundreds of years after the last revolt and its terrible consequences, that Jews could allow themselves to draw another Hadrian as well, an enlightened one, shown as a Roman representative who deals with the rabbis of his time, revealing, explicitly or tacitly, the advantage of Jewish culture and theology. Finally, there are similarities between the variegated and even unpredictable character of Hadrian in both the Vita Hadriani (and later fourth-century Roman history and biography) and the later Talmudic stories which were told from the early fifth century on.

We move now to consider the figure of the good emperor in the Talmudic literature. The one perfectly good emperor is called ‘Antoninus’, and he is usually identified with Caracalla.³⁰ He is presented as the intimate friend of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, the renowned Jewish patriarch of the late second and early third centuries (i.e. during the Severan period). Together they discuss business, politics and pleasure, to their mutual benefit, using biblical verses and hermeneutics. There are twenty-nine different Talmudic traditions, twenty-one Palestinian and eight Babylonian,³¹ which characterize their very positive relationship and their dialogues, shaping ‘Antoninus’ as a clever, learned and moderate man and emperor.

Thematically there are three groups of traditions:

1. I. A concrete relationship, usually in the field of economics, where Rabbi benefits from the emperor.

2. II. Rabbi as the political advisor of Antoninus. The emperor consults him as to whether or not to go to Alexandria, how to fill his treasury, how to manipulate the Roman aristocracy in order to achieve his goals, and so forth.

3. III. Philosophical and theological dialogues, where Antoninus is not only intellectually curious, learned, clever and witty, but also well versed in the Bible, Jewish regulations and hermeneutics.

Finally, one late Palestinian tradition even discusses the possibility that Antoninus became Jewish. This possibility is rejected, but Antoninus is still the non-Jew who nevertheless deserves the World to Come.³²

Generally speaking, the earlier traditions are closer to the historical arena and characters. Antoninus seems to be much more of a political figure who benefits Rabbi as his client, and his interest in Judaism is very simplistic. Over time he becomes a true philosopher and in consequence nearly a Jewish sage. As I shall try to argue, his character, as depicted in the Talmudic sources, develops into a hybrid of two different emperors who were both called Antoninus, Caracalla and Elagabalus. I should note here, however, that there are some scholars who fiercely refute, both methodologically and empirically, any historical identification with any historical emperor.³³

Now, within our very selective and narrow scope, I wish to point out another striking phenomenon: the way in which the Talmudic Antoninus (= Caracalla, as distinct from other candidates like Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius) is the complete opposite of the portrait of this emperor in Roman historiography, mainly characterized by the epitome of Cassius Dio, and by Herodian, both of whom were active during the years of Caracalla’s reign, and later on in the Historia Augusta. In these Roman sources, Antoninus Caracalla is capricious, cruel, bloodthirsty, anti-intellectual, and deaf to any advice and advisor.

Antoninus as Caracalla: There are at least three Talmudic traditions about Antoninus that have many resemblances to characteristics, anecdotes and events which are peculiar to the emperor Caracalla in the Roman historiography and biography of the third and fourth centuries.

The earliest traditions in the tannaitic Midrash known as the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, redacted in the mid-third century (i.e. a short time after Rabbi’s death),³⁴ associate Antoninus twice (out of four instances) with Alexandria, Egypt and Pharaoh.

Antoninus asked our Holy Rabbi, I want to go to Alexandria, but will a king stand there and defeat me? He answered, I do not know, at any rate it is written that Egypt could not appoint a king or a minister.³⁵

Rabbi gives Antoninus an indirect answer, and the whole issue appears innocent. But according to the Roman historians, Antoninus turned Alexandria into a bloodbath, as Dio writes:

1. (1) Now Antoninus, in spite of the immense affection which he professed to cherish for Alexander, all but utterly destroyed the whole of his [i.e Alexander’s] city. … (3) He slaughtered so many persons that he did not even venture to say anything about their number, but wrote to the senate that it was of no interest how many of them or who had died, since all had deserved to suffer this fate. 23,2: Antoninus was present at most of this slaughter and pillaging, both looking on and taking a hand.³⁶

In the Mekhilta, Antoninus is afraid lest ‘a king will stand there [in Alexandria] and defeat me’, which could be an echo to the story in Dio that a short time before the assassination of Caracalla a certain Egyptian, Serapio, had told the emperor that he would be short-lived and that Macrinus would succeed him.³⁷

Again, the Mekhilta, in the name of Rabbi himself, makes Antoninus the true successor of Pharaoh, at least in chariot warfare.

And shalishim over all of them [Shalishim means] that they were triply armed. Rabban Simon the son of Gamaliel says: It refers to the third man on the chariot. Formerly there had been only two who drove the chariot, but Pharaoh added one more so as to pursue Israel faster. Rabbi says: Antoninus added one more to them so that there were four.³⁸

It is interesting to note here that Caracalla is the Roman emperor par excellence who was portrayed as a Pharaoh, and four monumental ‘Pharaonic’ statues of him have been discovered in Egypt.³⁹ This was due to the fact that his favourite deity was the Egyptian god Serapis, whose son or brother he claimed to be.

One tradition from the Babylonian Talmud also connects ‘Antoninus son of Aseverus’ with Egypt:

R. Ḥama son of R. Ḥanina said: Three treasures did Joseph hide in Egypt: one was revealed to Korah; one to Antoninus the son of Aseverus; and the third is stored up for the righteous for the future time.⁴⁰

If we can rely here upon the name of the Rabbi R. Ḥama son of R. Ḥanina, and the pure Hebrew language (i.e. not Aramaic) attributed to him, this would seem to be an original Palestinian tradition from the middle of the third century, the same time as the Mekhilta, and only one generation after the death of both Caracalla and Rabbi Judah the Prince.

In several Talmudic traditions, the background of Antoninus’ consultations with Rabbi, as his political advisor and confidant, is the hostile relationship between the emperor and ‘the prominent Romans’ (i.e. the senators).⁴¹ Thus one Babylonian tradition tells about a hidden tunnel through which Antoninus used to come secretly from his house in Rome to Rabbi’s house in Palestine. In order to keep this completely secret, he would place two slaves, one at the Roman end of the tunnel, the other at the Jewish end, and when he accomplished his mission he would kill both of them.⁴²

Dio tells a story about Caracalla with very similar elements: the emperor had a special relationship with the Scythians and Germans, whom he trusted more than his own soldiers. He often conversed with Scythian and German envoys when no one else but the interpreters were present, and instructed them, in case anything happened to him, to invade Italy and march upon Rome.

‘To prevent any inkling of his conversation from getting to our ears’, writes Dio, adding his own personal voice and testament, ‘he would immediately put the interpreters to death.’⁴³

But contrary to the totally negative tone of Dio, the Talmudic tradition elaborates the ‘secret tunnel’ story into a very positive view of Antoninus and his attitude towards the Jews. Thus on one occasion, when Antoninus comes to meet Rabbi he found R. Ḥaninah b. Ḥama there. Antoninus sends him out to ask the sleeping slave outside to come in. The slave is, of course, already slain. R. Ḥaninah prays for him, he is restored to life, and Antoninus concludes: ‘I am well aware that the least one among you can bring the dead to life, still, when I call, let no one be found with thee.’⁴⁴

This is typical of the difference between the Roman stories, anecdotes and rumours about the most negative figure of Antoninus Caracalla and its mostly positive shift as seen in the Talmudic Antoninus.

In one Babylonian tradition, probably from the first half of the fourth century, Antoninus consults for the last time with his personal Jewish advisor,

This was the case with Aseverus the son of Antoninus who reigned [in his father’s place]. Antoninus once said to Rabbi: it is my desire that my son Aseverus should reign instead of me and that Tiberias should be declared a colonia. Were I to ask [the Senate] one of these things it would be granted, but both would not be granted. Rabbi thereupon brought a man, and having made him ride on the shoulders of another, handed him a dove bidding the one who carried him to order the one on his shoulders to liberate it. [Antoninus] perceived this to mean that he was advised to ask to appoint his son Aseverus to reign in his stead, and that subsequently he might get Aseverus to make Tiberias a colonia.⁴⁵

What is interesting here is not only the question whether and when Tiberias became a Roman colonia (which is beyond the scope of this chapter),⁴⁶ but the problematic consequences of the end of Caracalla’s life and reign and the succession of the Severan dynasty. We can see here, once again, the tension between the emperor and the Senate. Caracalla was murdered by Macrinus, the Praetorian prefect, who did not belong to the Severan family. He deported the family of Avitus, Caracalla’s cousin who later became the Emperor Elagabalus, to Emesa in Syria. From there his grandmother guided a successful campaign against Macrinus, which at last saw Avitus as Emperor. Now, Dio consistently calls Avitus/Elagabalus a false Antonine, and argues that the alleged connection between Caracalla/Antoninus and between Avitus, the false Antoninus, was simply propaganda from Avitus and his family.⁴⁷

But who is ‘Aseverus son of Antoninus’ in our story? The most plausible identification is Severus Alexander. According to Herodian, when Maesa realized that Elagabalus could not serve as an emperor she persuaded him to adopt his cousin Alexienus/Alexander as a co-emperor and successor and ‘invented’ the story that not only Elagabalus but also Alexander was born to Caracalla.

Alexianus changed his name from that inherited from his grandfather to Alexander, the name of the Macedonian so admired and honored by the alleged father of the two cousins. Both the daughter of Maesa, and the old lady herself, used to boast of the adultery of Antoninus (Severus’ son), to make the troops think the boys were his sons and so favour them.⁴⁸

It is important to note that the classical Talmudic traditions about the Severii never confuse the dynastic sequence: the regnal years of (Septimius) [A]severus are counted as eighteen years; most traditions refer to Antoninus, whom the Babylonian Talmud calls twice ‘Antoninus son of Aseverus’, and finally we find ‘Aseverus son of Antoninus’.⁴⁹

Many Talmudic traditions point to the interest of Antoninus in Judaism, his knowledge about it, and his ability to follow hermeneutic discussions and even to contribute his own independent insight.⁵⁰ Over time he becomes the ideal and most prominent gentile figure, and the only Roman leader, who is said to deserve the ‘World to come’. Again, it is the Babylonian Talmud that gives his full name: ‘Antoninus son of Aseverus’.⁵¹ But the next and last step is to be found quite surprisingly in the late Aramaic tradition, probably invented by the anonymous redactors of the Jerusalem Talmud, not earlier than the late fourth century.

[There are some indications that Antoninus converted, and some that he did not convert] Antoninus said to Rabbi: Will you let me eat of the Leviathan in the world to come? He [R.] said to him: Yes. He [Ant.] said to him: From the Paschal lamb you will not let me eat, but you let me eat Leviathan? He [R.] said to him: What can I do for you, when concerning the Paschal lamb it is written (Ex. 12:48) But no uncircumcised person may eat of it. When he heard this, he [Ant.] went and was circumcised [אזל וגזר]. He [Ant.] came back to him (and) said to him: My master, look at my circumcision [חמי גזורתי]. He [R.] said to him: Never in my life have I looked at my own; (shall I look) at yours? And why was he [R.] called by the name ‘Our holy master’? Because never in his life did he look at his circumcision [הביט במילתו].⁵²

At this point, historians usually refer to a single sentence in the Historia Augusta’s life of Caracalla.

Once, when a child of seven, hearing that a certain playmate of his had been severely scourged for adopting the religion of the Jews, he long refused to look at either the boy’s father or his own, because he regarded them as responsible for the scourging.⁵³

But this should be read carefully, because the context is the excessive humanity and tenderness of the younger Antoninus, who in the previous sentence cried whenever he saw criminals ‘pitted against wild beasts’, while in the next sentence he restores their ancient rights to the people of Antioch and Byzantium, after his father had punished them because they supported Niger.

Much more convincing is the plain circumcision that Dio related to Elagabalus, as showing what he saw as his absurd behavior, in both his religious policy and gender matters.

Closely related to these irregularities was his [i.e. Elagabalus the emperor’s] conduct in the matter of Elagabalus [i.e. the god]. The offence consisted, not in his [i.e the emperor] introducing a foreign god into Rome or in his exalting him [i.e. the god] in very strange ways, but in his placing him even before Jupiter himself and causing himself to be voted his priest, also in his circumcising himself and abstaining from swine’s flesh, on the ground that his devotion would thereby be purer. He had planned, indeed, to cut off his genitals altogether, but that desire was prompted solely by his effeminacy; the circumcision which he actually carried out was a part of the priestly requirements of Elagabalus [i.e. the god], and he accordingly mutilated many of his companions in like manner.⁵⁴

In the light of this, it seems to me that we can hear the sarcasm in the tone of the Talmudic account. The redactors of the Jerusalem Talmud do not seem to see the circumcision of Antoninus as a point in his favor, but they present it with much more gentle implied criticism than Dio.

If the comparison here between the Talmudic circumcision of ‘Antoninus’ and between the same action of Dio’s ‘false Antoninus’ is valid, then we can point towards a hybrid Talmudic Antoninus, which combines Elagabalus with Caracalla.

Dio, and most Roman writers of the third and fourth centuries, sincerely lament the brutality of Antoninus against the Roman aristocracy, especially the senators;⁵⁵ at the same time, the Jewish aristocracy presents us with an elevated and enlightened Antoninus. Whose history is right? Whose history is it? Maybe the histories of Rome – an empire of many nations.

The middling emperor is represented by Diocletian. There are several Talmudic traditions, all of them in the Palestinian literature, which deal with this emperor. They give us information about the emperor, which usually ties in with other historical, epigraphical and archaeological data. I shall sum up the main points.

The Jerusalem Talmud notes that Diocletian was linked to the city of Tiberias, telling us that in his youth his name was Diclot, and he was a swineherd in Tiberias. He got the name Diocletian only when he was crowned:

The children of R. Yehudah Nesiah scorned Diclot the swine[herd]. He became a king and went down to Paneas. He sent letters to the rabbis that they should be at his place immediately after the end of the Sabbath. … They said to him: We treated Diclot, the swine, with contempt. We do not treat Di[o]cletianus, the king, with contempt.⁵⁶

All the historiographical sources agree that Diocletian’s origins were lower class. See, for instance, the Anonymous Epitome about the Caesars (late fourth century):

Diocletian of Dalmatia, a freedman of the senator Anulinus, ruled for twenty-five years. His mother and hometown were both called Dioclea, from which name he was called Diocles until he took power; when he took control of the Roman world, he converted the Greek name to the Roman fashion.⁵⁷

Diocletian actually visited Tiberias in person on 31 May 286, and on 14 July in the same year, and again on 31 August when he and Maximianus were both consuls, namely in 287 or 290.⁵⁸ Two different Talmudic sources connect Diocletian with Paneas, the above-mentioned, and the following:

Diocletian oppressed the people of Paneas. They told him: We will leave. A sophist said to him: They will not go, but if they do go they will return. If you want to check, bring deer and send them to a distant land; in the end they will return to their [original] places. He did so, brought deer, covered their antlers with silver, and sent them to Africa. At the end of thirteen years they returned to their places.⁵⁹

There is no direct evidence that Diocletian was ever in Paneas, but there is an indirect link: inscriptions of the Tetrarchic land surveyors were discovered in the region of Paneas. As Millar has noted: ‘The erection of these inscriptions clearly reflects the Tetrarchic taxation-reform of AD 297’,⁶⁰ and it seems plausible that this tax reform is the background to the Talmudic statement: ‘Diocletian oppressed the people of Paneas.’

Two Talmudic sources connect Diocletian to Tyre. One mentions an inscription of his, dedicated to his partner Maximianus, whose religious title was Herculius:

R. Shimon b. Yoḥanan sent and asked R. Shimon b. Yoẓadak: Have you ever looked into the character of the fair held at Tyre? … He went up and found written there: I, Diocletian the king, have founded the fair of Tyre in honour of Herculi[u]s my brother, for eight days.⁶¹

Greenfield convincingly verifies the authenticity of this Talmudic passage as a reliable reflection of a formal inscription in Tyre.⁶²

The other source mentions R. Hiyya, an important rabbi who was also a priest, who was so eager to see Diocletian in Tyre that he even went through a graveyard to get to him:

R. Yannai said, A priest [may] defile himself in order to see a king. When King Diocletian came here, R. Ḥiyya was seen stepping over graves at Tyre in order to see him.⁶³

Avi-Yonah, followed by Barnes, dates the visit of Diocletian to Tyre to the early years of his rule, prior to 293 CE; Greenfield tends to the later period, 296–302 CE, when Diocletian spent most of his time in the Roman East.⁶⁴

Another source in the JT notes that Diocletian controlled the water source known as the lake of Emesa, probably the present-day Qattina lake on the Orontes to the south-west of Emesa:

Seven seas surrounded the Land of Israel: the Great Sea, Lake Tiberias, Lake Semakho, the Salt Sea, Lake Ḥulata, Lake Sheliat, Lake Apamea. But is there not also a lake at Ḥomṣ? Diocletian dammed up rivers and created it.⁶⁵

This is mentioned together with Hulata, Daphne of Antioch and the lake of Apamea. There is evidence that Diocletian was very active in this region: on 6 May 290 he was in Antioch, where he spent most of his time from 299 CE till 302 or 303, and four days later, on 10 May, he reached Emesa.⁶⁶

In connection with monetary matters, the Jerusalem Talmud discusses different kinds of gold, and ends with the Diocletian denarius. This appears to refer to his reform of the currency, which stabilized the imperial coinage and fixed the denarius, instead of the sestertius, as the common coin. The first phase of the reform dates to 286 CE and does indeed apply to the gold coins.⁶⁷

As an aside in a discussion about vows, the Talmud talks about a huge army headed by Diocletian, which it compares to the large number of Israelites who came out of Egypt in the biblical Exodus:

This is a vain oath: … if one said, (may I be punished) if I did not see walking on this road as many as went out of Egypt. … When Diocletian went down there, one hundred twenty myriads went down with him.⁶⁸

This may refer to Diocletian’s campaign against the revolt in Egypt in 297–8 CE, which included a long siege of Alexandria.

Turning now to Diocletian’s religious policy, the Jerusalem Talmud writes:

R. Abbahu prohibited their [Samaritan] wine. … When Di[o]cletian the king came up here, he issued a decree, saying, ‘Every nation must offer a libation, except for the Jews.’ So the Samaritans made a libation, and [that is why] their wine was prohibited.⁶⁹

This clearly refers to the anti-Christian persecutions, and it is very similar in wording to the original decrees, especially the Fourth Edict, which was published by Diocletian in spring 304 and reported by Eusebius in the long recension of the Martyrs of Palestine, composed in April 311 and preserved in a Syriac manuscript of 411:

There came then again the second time edicts from the emperor, … which compelled all persons equally: that the entire population of every city, both men and women, should sacrifice to dead idols, and a law was imposed upon them to offer libations to devils.⁷⁰

The Jews alone were exempted from the pagan libation, while the Samaritans (or some of them) offered libations like the gentiles. What is striking here is the fact that the Talmudic passage does not even mention the Christians. I shall return to this point at the end of my chapter.

To sum up: Diocletian did nothing exceptional, either for or against the Jews.⁷¹ Probably this is the reason why the Babylonian Talmud and the later Talmudic compilations ignore him almost completely. He is presented as the new broom who came to Palestine, restored order, initiated significant administrative, economic and fiscal reforms, and headed a huge army. He visited the local polis of Tiberias (probably a Roman colony), and the center of the most important Jewish institutions – the patriarchate and the central rabbinic academy – and stayed for a long time in the adjacent provinces. His name is carved on the coins and engraved in Greek, the lingua franca of the Roman East, on milestones and inscriptions of the land surveyors, so he left his mark on both urban centers and the rural environment. He is the middling Roman emperor of the Talmudic literature, between the ‘bad’ and the ‘good’.

But ‘middling’ or moderate is also the proper adjective for the Talmudic voice which characterizes Diocletian. This emperor and his modern scholars are trapped between Christian anti-Diocletian historiography and between his admirers, the so-called pagan anti-Christian historians.⁷² The Talmudic voice is much more temperate and moderate. In Tacitean mode, it is a good example of a tale told sine ira et studio.

Thus we come to the following preliminary conclusions.

The Roman emperors mentioned by name in Talmudic literature belong to three different periods of relations between Judaea and Rome, from the late Second Temple period up to the early fourth century: the ‘Bad’ belong to the time of the great Jewish revolts (66–136 CE); the ‘Good’ reflect the honeymoon of the Severan period, with Rabbi and Antoninus/Caracalla; while the middling relations that were neither very bad nor very good are represented by Diocletian.

The shifts and changes in the Talmudic images of each emperor over the generations are the products of the political and social world of these different generations which retell and reshape the traditions. The ‘Bad’ emperors (with the exception of Titus) are usually presented much more positively in the Babylonian Talmud, as part of the agenda of the Babylonian amoraim discouraging Jewish rebellion. Over time, the Palestinian literature also softens the character of the ‘Bad’, as the contributors get further away from the revolts themselves and their harsh consequences.

The wording of the narrative may also be affected, probably indirectly, by stories about the emperors which were current throughout the empire, such as those which found their expression in the Historia Augusta.

Roman emperors who figure in the Talmudic literature are generally those who were very active and effective in the Jewish arena, especially in Palestine, but also, as in the case of Trajan, in the Hellenistic diaspora – Egypt and Cyprus. This is true in particular of emperors who came to the area in person, leaving their own mark on Jewish territory and the immediate vicinity.

Who are missing from the picture? First of all, the Julio-Claudians before Nero. At first glance, it seems as if the reason for this is the length of time which elapsed between Augustus and his successors, and the creation of the Talmudic literature. But the fact that Hellenistic kings and dramatic events at the end of the Hasmonean and early Roman periods found their expression in Talmudic literature makes this answer hardly satisfactory. It is more likely that their absence is due to the significant representation of the Herodian dynasty in the Talmudic literature. Thus this Roman client kingdom and its kings served as a membrane between the empire and the Jews, so that the emperors of their time, who had no direct contact with Jews, do not appear in Talmudic literature. It is when we come to the direct confrontation between the Roman legions headed by Vespasian and Titus, and the Jews that the future emperors came to the fore. Josephus’ Bellum Iudaicum becomes the ‘polemos of Aspasianus’ for the Mishnah and all the later Talmudic traditions. After Agrippa II dies (between 86/7 and 100 CE), there is direct contact between Judaea and Rome, and the cooperation or confrontation is headed by the emperor, on the Roman side, and by the Jewish patriarchate and central aristocracy and the rabbis, on the Jewish side. Thus all the other emperors who did not come into direct contact with Jews and did not legislate to affect the life of the Jewish community were of no interest to the compliers of the Talmudic literature. And this is true for the majority of the Roman emperors.

Most significant by their absence are the Christian emperors, especially Constantine. This silence is all the more noteworthy because the Constantinian revolution is contemporary with the late and very intensive phases of the creative process of the Palestinian Talmud. On the other hand, it suits the Talmudic references to the religious policies of Diocletian only as a background to the Jewish ban upon Samaritan wine, without mentioning the Christians, the true target of Diocletian’s persecutions. There is a very strong scholarly tendency to search for any hint of Christians and Christianity in the Talmudic literature, especially the Palestinian literature, in order to stress their presence there, based on the supposition that Christians and Christianity played a significant role in the Jewish agenda. On the other side stand scholars who argue that the low profile of Christianity in the Tannaitic and Amoraic literature is a true representation of the limited role of Christians in the world of Palestinian Jewry during the third and fourth centuries.⁷³ I agree with this view, and the absence of Constantine and his successors from the Talmudic literature supports these conclusions.

15 The Severans and Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi

Aharon Oppenheimer

Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi’s patriarchate was a golden age for Jewish life in Roman Palestine. The main reason for this was the excellent relationship with the Roman authorities. Before his time the Antonine emperors had been in power, and while they had allowed the leadership institutions to rehabilitate themselves after the persecutions which followed in the wake of the Bar Kokhba revolt, Roman policy in the province had still been a policy of repression. One of the factors leading to the improved relations between the Severan emperors and the Jews was presumably a result of the stance of the Jews in the struggle for the imperial throne which took place in the years 193–4, mainly in the east of the empire, between Septimius Severus and Pescennius Niger, the governor of Syria. In this struggle the Samaritans supported Niger. The two Roman legions stationed in Palestine at the time, the Tenth Fretensis and the Sixth Ferrata, also took an active part in the struggle between Severus and Niger. The Tenth Legion supported Niger, while the Sixth supported Severus. It was apparently as a result of this that Septimius Severus gave the Sixth Legion Ferrata the title of fidelis constans, true and firm. Similarly he took the status of polis away from Neapolis [Shechem], the city of the Samaritans.¹

One of the results of the change of dynasty was mutual recognition between Jews and Romans. An example of this sort of recognition was the de facto permission for Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi to judge capital cases, even though this was not usually left in the hands of local leaders in the provinces. Roman recognition of the right to judge capital cases can be seen from the evidence of the Church Father Origen, in his letter to Julius Africanus, a Christian writer at the turn of the second and third centuries CE. Julius Africanus claimed that the story of Susannah and the Elders, an addition to the Book of Daniel in the Apocrypha, was a forgery. One of the reasons why Julius Africanus contends that it is a forgery is the fact that it tells of a death sentence under foreign domination. Origen rejects this claim in his reply:

And even now, under Roman rule, when the Jews pay the two dinars in tax, the ethnarch acts as the authority for the Jews, and, as it were with the connivance of the emperor, he is in no way different from a king over his people. For cases are tried surreptitiously according to the [Jewish] law, and people are even condemned to death, albeit not entirely openly, but certainly not without the knowledge of the emperor. Indeed we learned this and ascertained it when we lived in their land for many days.²

Origen, who came from Alexandria, stresses in his letter that he is relying on direct evidence obtained as a result of living in Palestine, and indeed we know that he was in the country during Rabbi’s patriarchate, in the years 215–19. He gives evidence that in spite of the fact that the Jews were subject to the tax of two denarii after the destruction of the Temple,³ the power of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi was so great de facto that he could even enforce the death sentence. In spite of the many scholars who have doubted this testimony and proposed alternative explanations,⁴ there is no real reason to doubt its reliability. This is contemporary evidence; and Rabbi’s special status in relation to the Roman authorities and in relation to the Jews certainly fits the possibility that the authority given to the patriarch to judge capital cases was a sort of silent connivance,⁵ especially since it was at this very time that the Romans granted permission to the free poleis to exact punishment. It is reasonable to suppose that this was a sort of kangaroo court, whose judges were perhaps aided by the sort of police force which was kept by the patriarch to carry out his death sentences.⁶

There is evidence of Jewish gratitude to Septimius Severus and his family from a Greek inscription found in Katziun in Eastern Upper Galilee (near present-day Rosh Pina) and dated to the end of the second century CE, which probably came from a synagogue:

For the salvation of our lords, the rulers and emperors: Lucius Septimius Severus the pious, the strong, the august, and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus [known as Caracalla] and Lucius Septimius Geta his sons, for a vow, the Jews [dedicated this inscription].

On the left, there is a further part of the inscription, inside a wreath:

And Iulia Domna, Augusta.⁷

This inscription is the only one of its kind from this time.⁸ There can be no doubt that it was set up to show what was, from the Jewish point of view, the special network of relationships which developed between the Jews and their Roman rulers in the Severan period (i.e. in the days of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi). It mentions three emperors, for the two sons of Septimius Severus, Caracalla and Geta, were co-emperors with their father during the years 198–211.

General imperial policy in the time of the Severans was to encourage leaders and institutions, especially in the east of the empire, which was the cradle of the Severan dynasty. Eastern religions, and sages and philosophers from the east enjoyed wide popularity in Rome. The cultural syncretism which was part of this all-embracing policy set as its goal the merging of the Greek east and the Roman west of the emperors. The peak of this policy came in 212, in a law which gave Roman citizenship to almost all the inhabitants of the empire. This was one of the legal initiatives of the emperor Caracalla. According to this law, known as the constitutio Antoniniana, Roman citizenship was granted to all the free inhabitants of the Roman Empire.⁹ This can be seen as an important stage in the development of the legal status of the inhabitants of the empire, and a basis for unifying the Roman world.

In the Talmudic literature there are around a hundred traditions which tell of the close relations between Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi and the ‘Emperor Antoninus’. It is true that there are also traditions about meetings of other rabbis with a Roman emperor or with the ‘great men of Rome’, such as, for example, the conversations between Joshua b. Ḥananiah and the Emperor Hadrian; or Rabbi Akiva and Tineius Rufus, the Roman governor of Palestine; or Rabban Gamaliel and his colleagues who held talks during their visit to Rome with senators and people in power, but the accounts of these meetings can be summed up as vague expressions relating to the Torah, halakhah (religious law) and aggadah (narrative traditions). In contrast, in the traditions dealing with meetings between Rabbi and ‘Antoninus’, there are conversations on subjects where ‘Antoninus’ takes Rabbi’s advice on business affairs, foreign and internal policy, and entertainment. These traditions are found in both the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. No few scholars have spent much time and effort in debating the identity of ‘Antoninus’. The general consensus is that this title refers to Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, known as Caracalla. The friendly relations between Caracalla and the Jews is clear from the commentary of the Church Father Jerome on a verse from the book of Daniel (11.34), Now when they shall fall they shall receive a little help. Jerome writes: ‘There are Jews who relate this to Severus and his son Antoninus.’¹⁰ It should be remembered that at this time Septimius Severus and Caracalla gave Jews the right to take significant positions on city councils. It is possible that Caracalla came to the East and even visited Palestine at least once. There is a tradition that ‘Antoninus’ converted to Judaism, and in the Jerusalem Talmud there is a tradition that he was circumcised.¹¹ In the eyes of the rabbis, the pagan ‘Antoninus’ is worthy of a place in the World to Come.¹² Another fantastic tradition mentions a tunnel which led from the house of ‘Antoninus’ in Rome to Rabbi’s house. Every day, we are told, ‘Antoninus’ would come through it, to consult with Rabbi. ‘Antoninus’ set a slave at each opening to this tunnel, and each of them was killed after each visit so they could not reveal what had happened.¹³

A considerable part of the wealth of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, which enabled him to attain his special status among the Romans and also among the elite of Jewish society, came to him from the Romans themselves, and in particular from ‘Antoninus’. There is no reason to cast doubt on the Talmudic sources which give evidence about the lands which Rabbi received from ‘Antoninus’ as a gift, or on lease (although it is possible, of course, that in some of the places where the Emperor is mentioned as bestowing the gift, in fact it was given by the governor or another high Roman official). Thus Rabbi owned the lands of Bet She‘arim, and the lands of Mahlul (biblical Naḥalal). A tradition in the Jerusalem Talmud notes that ‘Antoninus gave Rabbi two pieces of fertile [lands] in Arisut’.¹⁴

From the context it appears that these lands were in the Golan. Rabbi also owned lands in the territory of Tiberias and in the Bashan, and in the area of Lod as well. Other texts give evidence that Rabbi had the right to grow apharsimon, balsam – a plant which produced an aromatic oil, called opobalsamum, when gashes were made in its bark. This was widely regarded as the best perfume. Growing balsam was generally an imperial monopoly, but it is clear that Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi had lands in the area of the Jordan valley or the Dead Sea which included balsam plantations. Another tradition tells us of Antoninus’ thoroughbred cattle, which were brought in to fertilise Rabbi’s herds.¹⁵

In contrast to these, there are other sources on the relations between Rabbi and ‘Antoninus’ which are clearly no more than legends and folk tales and do not belong to historical fact.¹⁶

Ulpian, one of the most outstanding Roman jurists, who originated in Tyre and was mostly active in the first quarter of the third century CE (i.e. in the time of Rabbi), notes legislation by Septimius Severus and Caracalla on the subject of the status of Jews in the cities, which has been preserved in the Digesta:

The divine Severus and Antoninus allowed those who follow the customs of the Jewish religion to take offices, but they also subjected them to obligations, albeit ones that did not interfere with their religion.¹⁷

From this it is clear that until the permission given by Septimius Severus and Caracalla, official positions were closed to the Jews, and from the context it is clear that this referred to the city councils. In his time, Hadrian had organised the cities of Roman Palestine in order to keep Jews out of positions in the city leadership. By contrast, Septimius Severus and Caracalla ruled that Jews were allowed to serve in these positions, for example, to be a member of the city boule. In parallel, Jews had to take upon themselves the liturgies (i.e. to fulfil certain civic demands), as long as it did not interfere with their religious practice.

According to the legislation of Septimius Severus and Caracalla, Jews could be members of the institutions of city leadership. As a result, in the cities where the majority of inhabitants were Jews, the leadership institutions were also manned by Jews. Both the Talmuds discuss a case where aurum coronarium was imposed on the institutions of the city leadership, apparently in Tiberias. This tax had originally been imposed when a new emperor succeeded to the throne, but over time it developed into a tax which was also imposed on other occasions. At first this tax was paid in the form of a golden crown given to the emperor, as its name implies, but over time it was changed to a sum of money like any other tax.¹⁸ The boule and the strategoi were divided over whether each side had to pay half the sum, or the strategoi, who were also members of the boule, should pay half the tax, while the members of the boule should pay only one half of the sum. The case was brought before Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, and he ruled that the members of the boule should pay half the sum required, while the strategoi should pay the other half.¹⁹

Many scholars have debated the question of what exactly the institution of the strategoi was. The word is not common in the Talmudic literature, so that it is necessary to examine the contexts in which it appears in the city administrations in other Roman provinces. This investigation reveals that strategoi was a Greek term parallel to the Latin duoviri, a term used for the two highest offices in the administration of a city which had acquired the status of a colonia. They were parallel to the two consuls who held the highest office in the city of Rome during the republic.²⁰ It is known that this governing body, the duovirate, existed in various different cities in the Roman provinces of Asia Minor. The term strategos is mentioned, for example, in an inscription from Gerasa across the Jordan, as well as in a basilica from the Severan period which was discovered in Sebaste, the central city in the Samarian hills, to which Septimius Severus granted the status of a colonia. Strategoi are also mentioned in connection with the cities of Gaza and Petra. When Tadmor/Palmyra became a colonia, they followed the accepted custom of appointing duoviri, and during the years 224–62 these two top city officials were called strategoi. The institution of strategoi is also mentioned in a document recording a sale written in Edessa in north Mesopotamia, which was discovered in the excavations at Dura Europos.²¹

Given this peaceful atmosphere, the good economic situation and the autonomy given to the Jews in general and to their leadership institutions in particular under Severan rule, Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi felt that there was no longer any need to fast on the fast days commemorating the destruction of the Temple, even though the Temple had not been rebuilt, and the Jews did not have complete autonomy. His attempt to cancel the fasts of 17 Tammuz and 9 Av, which are an expression of mourning for the destruction of the Temple and the loss of Jerusalem, can be seen as a definitive expression of this political concept and the way in which he saw his own time as the ‘beginning of the redemption’, a vision which he wished to communicate to the people. Thus Rabbi gave a personal example, by going to bathe in the springs of Sepphoris on 17 Tammuz. Bathing is one of the enjoyments prohibited on a fast day, but in spite of this, Rabbi bathed in public on 17 Tammuz, the fast day which commemorates the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem by Titus.²² Rabbi’s attempt to cancel the fast of 9 Av as well was a reformatory move that was even more significant, for 9 Av is the day when, according the rabbis, Jewish suffering was redoubled: the fast commemorates the destruction of both the First Temple and the Second Temple as well. Rabban Shimon ben Gamaliel, Rabbi’s own father, had said:

[A]nyone who eats and drinks on 9th of Av, it is as if he had eaten and drunk on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.²³

The rabbis of the generation of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi were not prepared to accept this ruling, and when he saw that he could not persuade them, he cancelled his own ruling. There is confirmation for the suggestion that the clement political climate of his time was one of the reasons behind Rabbi’s attempted reformatory rulings. The Babylonian Talmud preserves a tradition that distinguishes between the days of shemad (repressive legislation) and the days of peace (political independence), and between the days when there is neither repression nor peace (i.e. foreign domination without repression). From this tradition – although it is cited in the name of Rav Papa, a Babylonian amora who lived in the mid fourth century – it is clear that the criterion for fasting or not fasting in memory of the destruction of the Temple was, in fact, the political situation.²⁴

The Roman recognition of the Jewish courts in Palestine was expressed in the fact that the Roman authorities themselves were apparently also involved in the violent enforcement of legal sentences regarding personal status ruled by the Jewish courts, as is stated expressly in the Mishnah:

A divorce given under duress – If it is a Jewish [court] it is valid, but if it is a non-Jewish court it is not valid. If the non-Jews beat him and say to him: Do what the Jews tell you, it is valid.²⁵

From this we learn that there were cases where the Romans forced a husband to give his wife a divorce, according to the instructions of a Jewish court, and they were simply helping to carry out the sentence of the Jewish court.

The date of this law has not been ascertained, but a similar pattern of behaviour is seen also in a baraita which is clearly from Severan times – to be more exact, from the time of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, for it is stated by Rabbi Ḥiyya, a contemporary of Rabbi’s:

There is a baraita about Rabbi Hiyya: If non-Jews enforced the ruling of a Jewish law court – it is valid.²⁶

The involvement of the Roman authorities in enforcing sentences dealing with personal status in Jewish courts is also seen in the following source:

Ḥalitzah (release of a woman from marriage to her dead husband’s brother) enforced in a Jewish court is valid. Among the non-Jews they beat him (the brother-in-law who refuses to release the widow) and say to him: Do what Rabbi So-and-So says to you.²⁷

In his Tosefta Kifshuta, ad loc., Lieberman discusses this passage, and distinguishes between ḥalitzah imposed by a Roman court, which is not allowed, and a case where the non-Jews violently force a Jew to release his brother’s widow following a decision by the rabbis: in this case the ḥalitzah is permitted.

The emperors of the Severan dynasty were very active in raising the status of towns in the Eastern provinces (Asia Minor) and the North African provinces to the level of a polis or colonia. The founder of the dynasty, Septimius Severus, gave Lod [Lydda] the status of a polis in the year 199/200,²⁸ and the city received the name Diospolis; Bet Guvrin received the name Eleutheropolis;²⁹ and apparently even before this the emperor gave Sebaste, which was already a polis, the status of a colonia. I have already noted how he temporarily lowered the status of Neapolis [Shechem] which lost its status as a polis because of its support for Pescennius Niger in 194, his rival in the struggle for the imperial throne. Elagabalus gave the status of polis to Emmaus, which received the name Nicopolis,³⁰ and the same status was granted to Antipatris.³¹ Both of them raised the status of these cities in the time of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, but also acted similarly in other provinces.

It is possible that Tiberias was also granted the status of a colonia. There are a number of reasons for thinking so: the institution of the two strategoi which we have identified with the duoviri in Tiberias, and this was an institution which was found only in coloniae. One of the traditions in the Babylonian Talmud on the relations between Rabbi and ‘Antoninus’ appears in a legendary context which deals with making Tiberias a colonia.³²

And if it is a problem for you that one does not appoint a king’s son as king, [such an appointment] would be made at [the king’s] request, as was the case with Aseverus son of Antoninus who became the ruler. Antoninus said to Rabbi: I want my son Aseverus to reign after me, and Tiberias to be made a colonia, and if I ask them [the Senate] one of these, they will do it for me; if I ask them both things, they will not do it. [Rabbi] brought in a man riding on another man, and put a dove in the hand of the man on top, and said to the man below: Tell the man above to release the dove from his hand. [Antoninus] said, Understand from this, that he hinted to me as follows: You ask them for Aseverus my son to succeed me, and tell Aseverus that he should make Tiberias a colonia.³³

Yaakov Meshorer, indeed, claimed that an inscription on one of the coins of Tiberias from the time of Elagabalus includes the letters COL, for colonia.³⁴ This would indeed have been enough to demonstrate that Tiberias did in fact become a colonia, and would have given it a date for when it occurred. Meshorer based himself on the Latin letters COL which he tried to identify on the coins, but these coins clearly have Greek letters on them. Thus this coin cannot be relied on for evidence that Tiberias was a colonia at the time it was minted, for in that case the whole inscription would have had to have been in Latin. The only place in which Tiberias is mentioned as a colony is a marriage contract from the year 1035, which was found in the Cairo Genizah, where there is a record which reads: Medinta Tiberia Colon[ia].³⁵ This terminology would appear to show that there was a tradition that Tiberias had indeed been a colonia in earlier times.

The possibility that Tiberias did indeed receive colonial status in Severan times in the days of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi goes some way to explain the reasons for, and the significance of the move of the Jewish leadership institutions from Diocaesaria (Sepphoris) to Tiberias in the first half of the third century. The leadership institutions – the patriarch and the Bet Va’ad (the rabbinical leadership) – grew in power, from their first rehabilitation in the little towns of Ushah and Shefar‘am following the repressive legislation after the Bar Kokhba revolt, through their move to Bet She‘arim and Sepphoris/Zippori in the days of Rabbi. The move to Bet She‘arim, which was imperial land given to Rabbi, demonstrates the way he was recognised by the Roman authorities, while the move to Sepphoris, which was a polis, is evidence for the submission of the urban elite to his authority. This was the beginning of the settlement of the Jewish leadership in the cities. The final station of the Jewish leadership institutions was Tiberias, and after the city apparently received colonial status, it became the central and most important city in Galilee. The move to Tiberias happened after the process of separation between the patriarchate and the Bet Va’ad, which followed the death of Rabbi and took place in stages: first the Bet Va’ad moved to Tiberias in the middle of the third century, when it was headed by Rabbi Yoḥanan bar Napha. After this, the patriarchate moved as well, at the latest in the time of Rabbi Judah Nesia the second –the great-great-grandson of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi. At any rate, in the time of Diocletian, who succeeded to the imperial throne in 284 CE, the patriarchate was already sited in Tiberias. Thus this gradual process, which had taken about a hundred years, came to an end, having begun in the little town of Usha and ending in Tiberias, the chief city of Galilee.

The increased number of cities appears to have changed the Roman administrative division of Palaestina. In the time of the Second Temple, there was only one city in the territory of Judaea, Jerusalem, and even this status is not agreed on by scholars. In Galilee too there were few cities. A further city was Jaffa, which Vespasian made into an autonomous city called Flavia Ioppe. The province was divided into 24 toparchies, each centred on a settlement which did not necessarily have the status of a city. We know about these toparchies from Josephus, Pliny the Elder and the documents from the Judaean desert from the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Hadrian made Jerusalem into a colonia, and as a result, the city received the name of Aelia Capitolina. Hadrian also actively promoted the Hellenisation of the Galilean cities Tiberias and Sepphoris – which with its rise to city status appears to have received the name of Diocaesarea. In other words, he gave them a pagan character and transferred the city government from Jewish to pagan hands.

We have seen that the impetus for the process of urbanisation took place in the time of the Severans and that of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi. We can understand the Roman administrative organisation of Palestine in their time from the Onomasticon of Eusebius, whose lists do not mention any villages belonging to the territories of other villages, but only villages in the territory of cities. The root of this administrative development in the context of which a city was the centre of each toparchy is based on the urban initiative of the time of the Severan emperors. In other words, at the time of this dynasty the process by which toparchies were set up centred on a village came to an end, and from now on territories were centred on cities only.

There is a considerable amount of overlap between the urbanisation policies of the Severans, and Rabbi’s policies and halakhic rulings in relation to the cities. Thus he exempted cities with a Jewish minority of inhabitants from the religious obligations of tithes and the sabbatical year:

Rabbi exempted Bet Shean, Rabbi exempted Caesarea, Rabbi exempted Bet Guvrin, Rabbi exempted Kfar Tzemah.³⁶

Rabbi stressed that it was not his intention to remove these cities from the halakhic borders of the Land of Israel, and they were still subject to the purity laws of the halakhic Land of Israel. This step, therefore, was in order to encourage Jews from the countryside to settle in these cities, rather like the fact that in Israel today the inhabitants of Eilat are exempt from VAT, and people living in the countryside and the occupied territories have tax concessions. With these rulings Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi was cooperating with the urbanisation policies of the Severans, especially as one of the cities mentioned, Bet Guvrin, actually received the status of polis from Septimius Severus in the time of Rabbi himself. In his time the process began of granting Ascalon exemption from observing the religious obligations of tithes and the sabbatical year. It should be noted that Rabbi did not absolve his home city of Sepphoris from the observance of the commandments relating to the produce of the Land of Israel, nor Tiberias or Lod, because the majority of their inhabitants were Jews.

To conclude: In the time of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, there was a revolution in the relationship between the authorities and the Jews in Palestine. There can be no doubt that this revolution was linked with the special personality of Rabbi, and his way of leadership, as well as the succession of the Severan dynasty to the imperial throne, and Roman policy in the provinces in general in the time of the Severans. After the Severans came the imperial crisis, which left its mark especially on the eastern provinces, which were subjected to such a heavy economic burden that many Jews emigrated to Babylonia, the home of the largest Jewish diaspora community outside the borders of the Roman Empire.³⁷