Legal Status of Jews in the Third Century

In the first century BCE, through decrees and rescripts, Julius Caesar (r. 49–44 BCE) and the first Roman emperor, Augustus (r. 27 BCE–14 CE), granted Jews various privileges in the cities of the East, establishing that, at least in principle, the Jews were a nation in alliance with the Romans. The First and Second Jewish Revolts (66–73 CE and 132–135 CE, respectively) transformed that alliance into an adversarial relationship. After the Jews were defeated, the Romans subjugated them.

Matters of legal status and civil rights were neither simple nor stable, and given the paucity of source material, the legal condition of Jews in the Roman Empire by the third century remains difficult to assess. In his famous edict, the Constitutio Antoniniana of 212 CE, the emperor Caracalla (r. 211–217 CE) granted citizenship to all freedmen—that is, emancipated slaves—living in the Roman Empire. The exception were men of dediticius status, that is, freedmen who were not entitled to Roman citizenship because they had once been hostile combatants. It seems likely, then, that some diaspora Jews benefited from this grant of citizenship but that the Jews of Palestine, who had revolted twice, were among the dediticii. The clearest evidence for general Jewish possession of citizenship in the empire is from 398 CE.

Caracalla had followed the precedent of his father, Septimus Severus (r. 193–211 CE), in fostering better relations between the empire and the Jews. Despite Caracalla’s reputation as a tyrant and cruel ruler, some measure of autonomy was granted to Jewish communities under his and his family’s rule. Caracalla’s action likely was also a means of increasing the Roman tax base and burnishing his image after he murdered his brother Geta. The first excerpt here from the Historia Augusta deals directly with the edict and asserts that citizenship status was granted to virtually all freedmen. The second presents Caracalla as sympathetic toward Jews even at the young age of seven.