The Oxford History of the Biblical World (102 page)

The legislation of Constantine II (337–40) and Constantius (337–61), sons of Constantine, reiterated and developed that of their father. In a law issued in 339, Jews were again prohibited from purchasing non-Jewish slaves. Such slaves would be immediately forfeited. If a Jew circumcised a slave, he would both forfeit him and be subject to capital punishment. Although this edict was similar to the law issued by Constantine only four years earlier, now the punishment for circumcising a non-Jewish slave was death. Also, a non-Jewish slave was to be forfeited, even if he were uncircumcised.

Another decree commanded that women converts to Judaism who had formerly
been bound to the imperial weaving factory be returned to the factory. Jews who converted Christian women to Judaism were subject to capital punishment. Finally, in 353, Constantius issued legislation ordering that the property of Christian converts to Judaism be confiscated. The language of the latter two decrees was again harsh in its identification of Judaism with turpitude, villainy, and sacrilege.

By the close of the fourth century, marriages between Jews and Christians had been prohibited; such marriages were to be treated as adultery. During the fifth and sixth centuries, legislation designed to limit the spread of Judaism continued to be promulgated. As in the earlier fourth-century legislation, decrees were issued to eliminate both Jewish proselytism and the Jewish ownership of non-Jewish slaves. Also, the building of new synagogues was repeatedly prohibited. To be sure, the degree to which such legislation was enforced is unclear. In fifth- and sixth-century Palestine, for example, despite the prohibitions, new synagogues were built, and in fifth-century Capernaum, a grand synagogue and church stood in close proximity. Jews were also excluded from most imperial offices, with a few lowly and burdensome exceptions, including service in the financially oppressive municipal councils. Increasingly, much of the legislation concerning Jews and Judaism was embodied in laws that also addressed pagans and heretics, and that limited the rights of individuals in these groups in a number of venues, including the courts.

In contrast to pagan worship, however, the practice of Judaism was never banned. A decree issued by Theodosius in 393 and addressed to the supreme military command in the east stated: “It is sufficiently established that the sect of the Jews is prohibited by no law. We are therefore gravely disturbed by the interdiction imposed in some places on their assemblies. Your Sublime Magnitude shall, upon reception of this order, repress with due severity the excess of those who presume to commit illegal deeds under the name of the Christian religion and attempt to destroy and despoil synagogues” (
Codex Theodosianus
16.8.9, trans. A. Linder,
The Jews in Imperial Roman Legislation,
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987, p. 190). Similar protective legislation would also be issued in the early fifth century, reflecting not only the state’s concern with law and order and its desire to assert its power in relationship to the church, but also, even if in weakened form, the acceptance of Judaism as a “licit religion.”

The legislation of the fourth through the sixth centuries thus represented a marked deterioration in the status of Jews and Judaism, especially in their relationship to the Roman state. The laws echoed the sentiments and concerns expressed at the roughly contemporary church councils, whose canons included prohibitions against marriage with Jews, adultery with Jewish women, the blessing of fields by Jews, the participation in feasts with Jews, and the observance of the Jewish Sabbath and Passover. Yet both the church canons and the imperial legislation assumed that Jews and Christians were interacting, and that Judaism remained a powerful attraction to Christians and to potential pagan converts to Christianity.

Although anti-Jewish sentiments in the writings of the church fathers antedate the fourth century, they assumed greater significance in the emerging Christian state. Like the ecclesiastical canons, many of the patristic texts were a response to the
presence of thriving and vibrant Jewish communities and to the perceived threat Judaism posed as an alternative to Christianity. We should recall that during the early centuries of Christianity, most Christians were new Christians for whom the evolving boundaries between Judaism and Christianity were likely to have been blurred. The church remained concerned about “Judaizing” tendencies among its adherents, as it continued to erect boundaries and to define itself, in large part, in contrast to the Judaism out of which it had emerged—a Judaism that continued to thrive and that not only competed with the church for members but whose very existence challenged the church’s self-understanding as the “true Israel” and, as such, the sole legitimate interpreter and possessor, in a sense, of the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament.

As early as the second century, a genre of Christian apologetic literature emerged, aptly described as “Against the Jews,” titles first used by Pseudo-Cyprian and Tertullian during the last quarter of the century. This literature, contributions to which were also made by such prominent figures as Justin Martyr in the second and Augustine in the fifth century, sought to demonstrate that in the aftermath of the coming of Christ and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, Jewish religious practice was obsolete and that the “old Israel” had been superseded by the “new.” The Old Testament itself, when properly understood, bore witness both to the life of Christ and to the emergence of the church and the displacement of the Jews.

Similar anti-Jewish teachings were also expressed in a broad range of patristic writings, including sermons, biblical commentaries, and works that sought primarily to refute paganism or Marcionism. Augustine’s position concerning the Jews would become the dominant view of the medieval church. Like biblical Cain, the Jew was to be both protected and condemned to the life of a pariah. Jewish misery would testify, in turn, to the victory and truth of Christianity. The language of the patristic anti-Jewish writings was often harsh. Jews were accused, in some texts, of the paramount religious and moral crime of deicide; they were also charged with activities that society in general condemned—sacrilege, impiousness, drunkenness, lasciviousness, thievery, and disease.

All of these sentiments are present in John Chrysostom’s eight forceful homilies to the Judaizing Christians of Antioch, delivered in 386 and 387, which drew on stock rhetorical images and on what by the fourth century had become stereotyped Christian invective. John’s sermons must be understood, as Robert Wilken has observed, both in the context of the vibrance and attractiveness of the Antiochene Jewish community to which many local Christians were drawn and in the context of his ongoing struggles against Arian Christians as well as against those pagans who saw in the continuation of Jewish ritual practice a challenge to the claims of Christianity. For John, Jewish ritual practice had been permanently invalidated by the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple within a generation of the death of Jesus and in fulfillment of his prophecy in Matthew 24.2. Julian’s failed attempt to rebuild the Temple confirmed this view. Thus John declared, “If the Jewish rules are holy and venerable, our way of life must be false” (
Adversus Iudaeos
1.6).

Of course, early rabbinic Judaism, like early Christianity, evolved in the aftermath and responded to the destruction of the Temple and the cessation of ancient Israel’s sacrificial system. Each, in its way, developed its own identity and forms of self-legitimization independent of the Temple and its rituals. The church maintained not
only that Jesus had prophesied the destruction of the Temple but also that Jesus was the final and perfect atoning sacrifice, after whom no more sacrifices were necessary. Although rabbinic Judaism would develop liturgical and other expressions of remembering the Temple, and even hoped for its rebuilding, at the same time it maintained that in the absence of the Temple equally effective means of attaining a right relationship with God were present. In a statement attributed to Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, depicted as comforting a colleague who was mourning the destruction of the Temple, the place of Jewish atonement, he uttered that another atonement, equally effective, was “deeds of lovingkindness.” Whereas the early church would understand itself as the sole and universal vehicle for salvation, early rabbinic Judaism envisioned salvation as open not only to Jews, who were mandated to adhere to God’s commandments as interpreted by the rabbis, but also to righteous non-Jews who were required to follow the laws of Noah. The rabbis debated the number and content of these laws, generally numbered as seven. To be sure, one of the laws was a prohibition of idolatry, which would have excluded those who engaged in pagan religious practices.

Today, when Christians number close to two billion and Jews are fewer than 1 percent of that total, it is easy to forget that Christian anti-Jewish polemics evolved during the period when Christianity was a small, powerless, illegal, and at times persecuted minority, seeking to develop its own identity apart from and often in contrast to the Judaism that had given birth to it. In vastly different times, patristic anti-Jewish teachings, loosed from their historical moorings, would contribute to the demonization of the Jew in medieval and modern Europe, with terrible and tragic consequences.

The surviving sources yield little information concerning Jewish responses to evolving Christianity and to the Christianization of the empire with the concomitant deterioration in the legal status of Jews and Judaism. Some Jews and Christians probably engaged in debates, and both Origen and Jerome, roughly a century apart, apparently studied with Jewish sages, a reminder that Jewish-Christian relations could be positive as well as negative. Perhaps the standardization of the Jewish calendar, which probably occurred in the midfourth century, and the completion of the Palestinian Talmud and such midrashic works as Genesis Rabbah and Leviticus Rabbah in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, were responses to the challenges posed by now Christian Rome, as the eminent scholar of rabbinic Judaism Jacob Neusner has suggested. Both in their doctrines of history, Messiah, and Torah and in their depictions of Rome, these works appear to respond implicitly to Christian dominance, notwithstanding the absence of explicit reference to Christianity in them.

The same period was also formative in the evolution of such institutions as the synagogue, the patriarchate, and the office of rabbi. Today the intimate association between the rabbi and the synagogue is taken for granted; but in the earliest centuries of the rabbinate and the synagogue, they functioned largely independently of each other. The origins of the synagogue are unclear. It is apparent from archaeological data and from Jewish and non-Jewish literary sources, including the writings of Josephus and the New Testament, that the synagogue, as a Jewish communal association
and as an actual building or place, existed in Palestine and in the Diaspora before 70
CE
, when the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed. In the aftermath, the roles and importance of the synagogue would increase in Jewish communal and religious life. These roles were neither static nor uniform, varying regionally and over time. The evolving synagogue appears to have assimilated what, at least in some places, were originally separate institutions, to become a multipurpose institution whose activities included the reading of the Torah, organized prayer, study, and, most likely, a variety of communal endeavors such as education and charitable work.

The earliest archaeological evidence for the synagogue dates from third- and second-century
BCE
Egypt, where inscriptions for “prayer houses” have been found. At Delos the remains of a first-century
BCE
synagogue have been excavated. Diaspora synagogues have also been identified in such places as Ostia, Sardis, Stobi, Priene, and Dura-Europos on the Euphrates, where a third-century
CE
synagogue contained wall frescoes depicting biblical scenes, some of which have parallels in rabbinic midrashic texts.

Although there is evidence for first-century
CE
synagogues at Gamla and Migdal and at the fortresses of Masada and Herodium, the florescence of Palestinian synagogal architecture dates from the third century
CE
. Most of the more than one hundred remains of synagogues that have been identified are located in Galilee and in the Golan. Typically oriented toward Jerusalem, synagogue buildings consisted of apsidal and nonapsidal variations of the Roman basilical structure, as did Christian churches. The art of the synagogue was diverse, and included both relief sculpture and mosaics, and secular and distinctly Jewish symbols, the most common of which was the menorah. Several of the mosaics include depictions of the pagan sungod Helios surrounded by the signs of the zodiac. Although the significance of these mosaics is unclear, they are testimony to the participation by local Jewish communities in facets of the larger Greco-Roman culture. Similarly, synagogal donor inscriptions provide evidence of Jewish participation in the Greco-Roman practices of communal benefactions. Inscriptions and imperial legislation both provide some information on synagogue offices, especially that of the
archisynagoge,
or “head of the synagogue.” The rabbi seems to have had no authority over the synagogue; his domain was the academy or disciple circle, and the rabbinic court.

The synagogues of the fourth to sixth centuries are also indicative of the vitality of the Palestinian Jewish community, despite the changing legal status of Jews and Judaism. The fourth and fifth centuries were overall a period of growth and prosperity for all of the communities of Palestine, not only because of that region’s special status as Holy Land but also because it shared in an overall economic recovery in the east, facilitated by the radical administrative, economic, and financial reforms of Diocletian, which were continued by Constantine and Constantius. Although the economic situation was far from optimal, it was better than it had been during the political and economic anarchy of much of the third century.