Download Jews in the Antonine Age Martin Goodman The treatment of the

CRASIS Annual Lecture 2013 Please do not cite without permission from the author 21 January 2013 Jews in the Antonine Age Martin Goodman The treatment of the Jews of the Land of Israel by the Roman state after the Bar Kokhba war is a familiar story. The name of the country of the Jews was changed to Syria Palaestina and Jews were forbidden to live in the city of Jerusalem, which the Romans knew, all too well, was central to their religious identity. The reason for such draconian behaviour lay quite openly in mistrust of a people who had rebelled, with appalling consequences, three times over the previous seventy years, twice in the homeland and once, less than twenty years before the Bar Kokhba revolt, in the diaspora. The effect was to deny to Jews in their homeland the national identity they had so proudly proclaimed on their distinctive coinage both during the great revolt of 66-­‐
70 and under the regime of Bar Kokhba. The question to be tackled in this lecture is why, despite this treatment of their homeland, the Romans allowed diaspora Jews to continue to form distinctive national and religious communities in diaspora cities in cities all round the empire in the two centuries between the Bar Kokhba war and the introduction by Constantine into Roman imperial ideology of Christian notions about Jewish identity. Such liberal treatment of diaspora Jews is a bit of a puzzle and was the basis of an argument by Clifford Ando that my depiction, in Rome and Jerusalem, of Jews after Bar Kokhba as marginalised in the Roman world, was somewhat exaggerated. Ando’s critique seems to me overstated: his assertion that, compared to the persecution of Christians in the same period, Jews were protected and privileged, ignores the outrage to Jewish religions and national sensibilities caused by the refusal of the Roman State to permit Jews to worship with sacrifices and other offerings in their temple despite this form of worship being the most familiar to ordinary Greeks and Romans of all the Jews’ customs, and despite the clear stipulations for offerings ‘in a place which the Lord your God shall choose’ in the Jews’ sacred texts (about which, of course, Romans will have been less well informed). It is also not clear to what extent Christians (with whom Ando compares Jews) really did live under the threat of persecution throughout these centuries -­‐ if they had really felt themselves wholly marginalised, the apologists would not have addressed appeals for understanding to emperor and the opponents of Paul of Samosata would not have called in imperial aid for their side in the internal struggles of the church in Antioch in the second half of the third century, after the Decian persecutions. Christian texts of this period may reflect more a culture of martyrology, in which suffering for the sake of Christ was put to good use in exhortation of the faithful, than an environment in which persecution was really a constant fear. CRASIS Annual Lecture 2013 Please do not cite without permission from the author 21 January 2013 Nonetheless, Ando makes a significant point: in light of the tendency of other peoples, living as minorities in the cities of the Roman world to lose their distinctive identities over time, not least in the melange of populations in the city of Rome itself, it is curious that the Roman state permitted and indeed enabled, communities of Jews to maintain theirs. The reason cannot lie in ignorance of what had happened in the Jewish homeland, about which awareness seems to have been widespread across the Roman world, despite the paucity of imperial propaganda about the defeat of Bar Kokhba in 135 compared to the extraordinary state publicity which had accompanied the Flavian victory in 70 CE . Towards the end of the second century, the medical writer Galen wrote of a ‘Judaean stone’ used for dealing with bladder and kidney stones that is called ‘the Judaean’ after the land in which it is produced, while also noting that this land was ‘Palestinian Syria’. This new name of the province had rapidly become standard. Around the same time as Galen, the poet Oppian wrote about balsam as the ‘perfume of Palestine’, and Alexander of Aphrodisias, in his commentary on meteorological phenomena, described the Dead Sea as ‘situated among the Palestinians’. Earlier in the second century, Pausanias tended to substitute the term ‘Hebrew’ for ‘Jew’, referring to the ‘Hebrews beyond Syria’ who rebelled against Hadrian and the ‘Hebrews’ said to have in Jerusalem the remarkable grave of Helena (the queen of Adiabene, described inaccurately by Pausanias as having been a native woman). In referring to Helena’s tomb, Pausanias noted that Jerusalem had been ‘razed to the ground’ by the Roman emperor, and the total destruction of the city was a commonplace also to be found in many other writers. In the third century Philostratus imagined a speech in which the sage Apollonius of Tyana berated Vespasian for wasting his energy on attacking the city of a people so intrinsically in rebellion against all humanity because of their ‘unmixed life’ that it would have been better not to have got involved with them in the first place. Such a connection between the city which had been destroyed and the religious lives of Jews in his own day was explicit in the account of the destruction by Philostratus’s contemporary, the historian Cassius Dio, who noted that it had occurred ‘on the very day of Saturn, the day which even now the Jews reverence most’. According to Dio, diaspora Jews had been much implicated in the Judean uprising against Rome in 66-­‐70 since he stated explicitly that the local Jews ‘were assisted……. by many who professed the same customs not only from the Roman empire but from beyond the Euphrates’ ; this picture may have been incorrect, since it is contradicted by the assertion, attributed by Josephus soon after the war to the Herodian king Agrippa, that Judean rebels in 66 would hope in vain for such help from their diaspora compatriots, but evidently at least one intelligent Roman, Cassius Dio, believed in the early third century that diaspora Jews had been involved in this way. Dio was also well aware of the potential dangers of a mass diaspora CRASIS Annual Lecture 2013 Please do not cite without permission from the author 21 January 2013 uprising, since he is one of the few historians known to have described in any detail the terrible consequences of the tumultus in Cyrene, Egypt and Cyprus in the last years of Trajan, which, according to his account, involved horrific savagery and resulted in the deaths of nearly half a million people . And Dio believed that the diaspora Jews had been caught up in the start of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132 CE, when ‘the Jews everywhere were showing signs of disturbance, were gathering together, and giving evidence of great hostility to the Romans’. If other Romans shared this belief, why did the diaspora Jews apparently retain their privileges as protected communities unscathed in the years that followed Bar Kokhba’s defeat? Dio himself may indicate some awareness of the anomaly in the account of the Jews which accompanies his narrative of the capture of Jerusalem by Pompey in 63 BCE, when he remarks that ‘the genos (of the Jews), despite frequent repression, has nonetheless greatly increased to the extent that it has won its way to the right of freedom in its observances’. The same passage reveals an assumption that the Jews are a nation, stating that the whole people (ethnos) from Phoenicia to Egypt have been called from old ‘Palestine’ but that they have also acquired another name: ‘the country has been called ‘Judaea’ and they themselves ‘Jews’ ’. Dio professed ignorance as to where the name originated, but noted that ‘it applies also to other men who are enthusiastic for their customs despite being of a different people’. That Jews could be described as an ethnos was implicit also in the description of the unofficial power wielded by the ethnarch in Galilee according to the Christian Origen in his letter to Julius Africanus in 248CE in reference to the plausibility of the story of Susanna in the Greek text of the book of Daniel: ‘We who have experienced it know that he (the ethnarch) differs in no way from a king of a nation (ethnos)…. And this we learned in the land of this nation (ethnos) where we spent much time and were fully convinced’. A pagan contemporary of Origen who composed the Sententiae attributed wrongly to the earlier third century jurist Julius Paulus Prudentissimus evidently also thought of the Jews as a people, since he recorded a prohibition on Jews circumcising male slaves ‘of another nation’ (alienae nationis). At the same time, other Romans defined Jews by their religion. According to the Digest, the jurist Modestinus recorded a transcript of Antoninus Pius that if anyone circumcises someone ‘not of the same religion (religio)’, he shall suffer the punishment of a castrator’. In the eyes of outsiders, it was their religious fanaticism which marked out Jews. In Numidia the writer Apuleius, pithily characterising the people to the east of the Mediterranean, singles out the Jews as superstitiosos. If the Digest preserves the original wording in the version recorded in the name of the third-­‐century jurist Ulpian, superstitio was the term used by the emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla to refer to Judaism when taking up offices and liturgies, but use of threskeia in the Greek version of the same ruling cited by his contemporary Modestinus suggests that Ulpian’s wording may have been adapted by a Byzantine editor. But in any case derogatory remarks about Jewish belief as impious were a commonplace: the orator Aelius Aristides, himself an intense devotee of the healing god Asclepius, clarified for his readers the characteristic of CRASIS Annual Lecture 2013 Please do not cite without permission from the author 21 January 2013 self-­‐achievement and stubbornness he wished to describe by saying that it was similar to the nature of ‘the impious who live in Palestine’, for whom ‘the mark of impiety is that they do not recognise their betters’ (that is, believe in the gods). It is hard to know how much any of these authors knew about Jewish religious practice beyond circumcision, the sabbath, and food taboos. A certain Cleomedes, who composed a Stoic work on astronomy, referred to the prayer-­‐house (proseuche) of the Jews and the beggars in its courtyard as the venue from which the vulgar language used by Epicurus emanated, but one cannot tell from this how much he really knew about the nature of Jewish prayers. In general, the lack of references in pagan authors of the high Roman empire to synagogues, which in retrospect appear as one of the most distinctive Jewish innovations in the history of religious practice, is remarkable. Even more remarkable is the reference in the late third century by the orator Menander from Laodicea (probably in Asia Minor), to the pilgrim festivals in Jerusalem, still in his day the most impressive example of mass pilgrimage: The glory of the festival is enhanced when those who proclaim the gathering are themselves of high repute, as well as when those who assemble are either very great in number or of the highest repute. An example of the last kind are those who go to Olympia, for the more renowned meet there; while the largest multitudes are to be found at the festival of the Hebrews living in Syria Palaestina, as they are gathered in very large numbers from most nations. It is astonishing that this comment was apparently written down some two centuries after the Jerusalem Temple has ceased to exist. Herod’s superb building evidently remained a powerful memory, and it should not surprise that it dominated Cassius Dio’s description of the religious customs of the Jews: They are distinguished from the rest of mankind in practically every detail of life, and especially by the fact that they do not honour any of the usual gods, but show extreme reverence for one particular divinity. They never had any statue of him even in Jerusalem itself, but believing him to be unnameable and invisible, they worship him in the most extravagant fashion on earth. They built to him a temple that was extremely large and beautiful, except in so far as it was open and roofless, and likewise dedicated to him the day called the day of Saturn, on which, among many other most peculiar observances, they undertake no serious occupation. All of which deepens the puzzle. If Romans believed that Jews were a people fanatically dedicated to their religious practices, and that the central focus of their practice lay in the Jerusalem Temple, and that Rome was deliberately preventing Jews from worshipping in the temple by frustrating any possibility it could be rebuilt, why did they court disaster by continuing to recognise Jewish communities CRASIS Annual Lecture 2013 Please do not cite without permission from the author 21 January 2013 in the diaspora as distinctive ethnic and religious groups? To expect a single answer would be unreasonably optimistic, but a number of possibilities may be worth suggesting. All are predicated, in different ways, on the power of inertia. Perhaps the Roman state simply hoped that by doing nothing it would avoid stirring up trouble. If Jews had for centuries been seen as separate communities in diaspora cities (and their separation was a common theme in non-­‐Jewish comments about them), it may have seemed imprudent to upset the status quo. That Jews themselves wished to organise themselves into separate communities seems clear from the inscriptions which recorded both their burial sites and their institutions, with their references to the ‘people’ (laos) and the synagogue. It would be naïve to imagine that such small groups could by themselves be a real threat to the state (although the combined mass uprising in the last years of Trajans’ rule had inflicted real damage), but the Romans in this period set the bar high in their expectations for peace and security in the province, at least within cities. At the same time the state may have felt more formally bound by its own procedures to continue recognition of Jewish communities. Much has been written about the series of decrees relating to diaspora Jews (mostly in Asia Minor) listed by Josephus in his Antiquities, but the discussion has rarely focussed on the purpose of his citation of these rulings in the eighties and nineties CE, when they seem to receive disproportionate attention if they are simply seen as part of Josephus’ historical narrative. It seems likely that Josephus was making an implicit plea for diaspora Jews in his own time when he quoted at length from such documents as the edict sent to ‘the rest of the world’ by Claudius as the conclusion of a dispute about the rights of the Jews of Alexandria in the forties CE, in which the emperor is recorded as affirming that ‘the Jews through the whole world under our sway should also observe the customs of their fathers without let or hindrance’. Since Josephus himself had told his readers in the last book of the Jewish War about an attempt by the leaders of Antioch, another great city of the eastern part of the empire with a large Jewish presence, to do away altogether with such privileges immediately after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE, and the protection of the Antiochene Jews by the Roman state, such reassertion of the legal basis of Jewish communal rights was evidently not at all redundant in the eighties and nineties CE when the Antiquities were composed. Privileges could of course be withdrawn, but if such appeals were considered worthwhile by Josephus in his time, they were presumably also of potential value for Jews after 135CE. But from the standpoint of the state perhaps the strongest reason to allow diaspora Jews to reinstate their distinctive communal identities was the inertia of the tax system and the collection of the special Jewish tax. It is a commonplace that once a tax has been imposed, it is hard to abolish, even if it was originally intended only as a temporary levy for a specific purpose. The special tax on Jews which was levied after 70CE was originally intended, it seems, to pay for the rebuilding of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome which had been destroyed in the civil strife of CRASIS Annual Lecture 2013 Please do not cite without permission from the author 21 January 2013 69CE, but the tax continued once the temple of Jupiter had been rebuilt, operating as, in effect, war reparations for the damage inflicted on Roman forces in Judaea from 66 to 70. It was anomalous that the impost fell not just on those who had participated in the war but also on the Jews of the diaspora, and references to the tax in Suetonius’ biography of Domitian, and on the coins of Nerva, suggest that the collection of the tax was widely resented, at least among the plebs in the city of Rome in the last quarter of the first century. Such resentment did not prevent the continued collection of the tax down to at least the first half of the third century, when Cassius Dio recorded that it was decreed that ‘from that time forth (i.e. 70CE) the Jews who continued to observe their ancestral customs should pay an annual tribute to Jupiter Capitolinus’. For Tertullian, a Christian contemporary of Cassius Dio, the tax was the price that Jews paid for freedom not to take part in pagan worship, a privilege he explicitly contrasted to the potentially dangerous consequences to Christians of opting out of civil religion. Quite how much money the tax brought in to the Roman state, and quite how, and by whom, Jews were defined by the state and marked down as required to pay the tax, is not known, but the fiscus which operated it was a separate division within the tax-­‐collecting bureaucracy of the Roman state already in the time of Nerva. For Origen in the mid third century, the payment of ‘the half-­‐
shekel’ to Rome by the Jews was one of the things he could assume that Africanus, the recipient of his letter, would naturally know. It would be unsurprising if such bureaucrats were reluctant to give up a source of revenue so easily collected, and if the process required the taxpayers to be identified as members of separate groups in the cities of the empire, that might seem a price well worth paying.