Jewish Daily Life in Roman-Era Palestine

Jewish life grew and changed in remarkable ways during the period of Roman rule. The familiar structures of modern Jewish life—such as community synagogues led by rabbis—were emerging and assuming recognizable form. The Talmuds, both Babylonian and Palestinian, were growing in influence, as was the political importance of the Babylonian yeshivot, where the Babylonian Talmud was being edited and aggressively promoted.

For the ancient Jews, much of the information anthropologists, sociologists, and social historians are typically concerned with is either completely unknown or can be reconstructed only in very speculative ways. Much of our evidence for topics like education, labor, health, and even specific beliefs and practices is indirect. We can, however, draw some important negative conclusions.

Despite biblical prohibitions, priests owned land in Palestine and may well have been among the most important landowners there. The biblical law of the jubilee year requires all land to revert to its original “tribal” owners every fifty years. This has long been recognized as impracticable, and there is no evidence that ancient Jews ever followed the rule. The priests, it would seem, either simply ignored some biblical laws or found ways to evade them.

The coastal plain is flat but not terribly fertile. The best land in the country, the Jezreel Valley grain belt and the great balsam and date plantations near Jericho, were owned by whoever ruled the country. The hilly topography of the remaining land guaranteed that plots of farmland were small; one became rich by accumulating plots, not by buying contiguous properties. This had important implications for social structure: the Italian-style latifundium (comparable to the plantations of the pre–Civil War American South), farmed by huge teams of agricultural slaves, was largely impossible. The small free farmer would have been a more common figure.

As Judean landholding became concentrated in fewer hands during the latter part of the period, free farmers were replaced by or transformed into tenants or sharecroppers. Such small landholders as remained were, as always, highly vulnerable to crop failure and drought, both of which were very common occurrences in the southeastern Mediterranean basin. Farmers would necessarily have sought protection from neighbors, relatives, and friends. It is often asserted that in the Second Temple period clan structures first declined in importance and then broke down completely, being replaced by the nuclear family. But it seems likely that extended family still had an important role to play.

As far as we know, Jews ate, dressed, and conducted themselves the same way as most other people in their environments. There is no evidence yet for the fully elaborated rabbinic laws of kashrut, but Jews were known for not eating pigs. Few people in the pre-Hellenistic Near East did. Like most people in the area, most Palestinian Jews combined farming with small-scale herding. Domestic livestock might have been fit for consumption but—alive—represented a significant economic asset. Most people were therefore nearly vegetarian, subsisting on grain, olive oil, and legumes. Pigeons were raised extensively in Judea, perhaps for sacrifice but also for the occasional jolt of animal protein for those who could afford it. There is also archaeological evidence for the widespread consumption of (probably pickled or dried and salted) freshwater fish. The most common of these, to extrapolate from archaeological finds, was, somewhat surprisingly, catfish, regarded by later Jewish tradition as not kosher.

We await systematic pathological analysis of human remains from Jewish sites in Palestine, but that from other sites in the Roman Empire tells a rather grim story: many people—by no means everyone and everywhere—were chronically malnourished and suffered diseases caused by malnutrition. In addition, by the first century, malaria had spread around the Mediterranean basin, with devastating impact, although it was presumably less prevalent in the Jewish highlands of Palestine than along the Greek coast. In the crowded conditions of the first century, all these factors, and more, eventually produced very high mortality rates, especially for infants and women. In the Roman Empire, life expectancy at birth is estimated to have been merely twenty to twenty-five years; there is no reason to think the Jews in Palestine were much better off.

Indeed, some ancient writers thought that the Jews were, in fact, worse off. They were said to refrain from exposing their unwanted children, as a means to increase their numbers—although how widespread the practice of exposure really was among other groups in the Roman Empire is a matter of intense modern debate. They also allowed one day in seven to pass in idleness, thus—it was thought—decreasing their ability to be productive.

The little we know about high and late Roman imperial Jews from outside rabbinic literature tells a story of successful integration into the Roman system, at long last. The Jewish cities of Galilee, while remaining demographically Jewish, now became standard Roman cities, complete not only with bathhouses, theaters, and marketplaces but even with temples and gods. We are hardly in a position to know, however, whether this was merely a thin veneer of sensible Romanization protecting a still thoroughly Jewish private sphere or whether the leading Jewish landowners of northern Palestine had concluded that the time had come to become Romans in a deep and serious way.