The End of Antiquity

The Edict of Toleration, issued by Emperor Constantine at Milan in 312 CE, brought to an end almost three centuries of official persecution of Christianity. It signaled the beginning of the gradual conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, a momentous development for Jews. On the one hand, the Christianizing Roman state of late antiquity once again recognized the corporate existence of the Jews, something the pagan Roman state had not done since 70 CE, and granted official recognition to Jewish communal and religious institutions and leadership. On the other hand, from the end of the fourth century on, there was an attempt, both in the Roman government in general and on the local level, to comb the Jews out of their previous condition of integration into local social and political structures.

Jewish laws and institutions were authorized or even supported by the state, but Jews were expected to maintain their separation and to avoid exercising power or influence over non-Jews. They were to enjoy a sort of citizenship, but of decidedly second rank. At the same time, bishops and monks occasionally conducted campaigns of intimidation against local Jews, to the point, occasionally but rarely, of forcing them to convert to Christianity; powerful churchmen did not always see eye to eye with the emperors on how the Jews should be treated. The state’s position, interestingly, received important theological support from the greatest western church father of all, Augustine (354–430 CE), bishop of Hippo, who argued that Jews should be sustained and supported, though in a degraded position, because they alone testified to the antiquity and veracity of the Gospel, as foreshadowed in the Hebrew Bible.

Jews in the Roman Empire responded with a kind of organizational standardization. The synagogue-centered community gradually became the norm everywhere in the Roman Jewish world. In both Palestine and the diaspora, Jewish communities were routinely prepared to expend considerable resources on this type of reorganization. Inscriptions found in such structures inform us that a new language of communal identity was emerging, which eventually became standard throughout the Jewish world and has endured to the present. The local organization called itself kehala kadisha (“holy assembly”) in Aramaic or in Hebrew kehilah kedoshah and was dedicated to the performance of mitzvot, at this point meaning primarily donations to charity and to the community. We cannot be certain, but it is possible that some such communities were beginning to function as organizations that sought to provide for the social welfare of local Jews, enabling help with marriage, burial, redemption of captives, and so on.

What the late antique communities lacked, though, were communal rabbis, until the sixth century, when they appear sporadically in a few texts. Instead, wealthy members seem to have made the religious decisions and may have played some judicial role, for which they may have had some sort of Jewish education.

Extrarabbinic texts such as the Theodosian Code and other Latin and Greek texts, especially the writings of Libanius, St. Jerome, and Epiphanius of Salamis, affirm the emergence and brief florescence of the patriarchate, a trans-local Jewish institutional structure with earlier origins. The “patriarchs” of Tiberias (in Hebrew, nasi; pl., nesi’im) appear in the Palestinian Talmud as leaders of the rabbinic organization and as increasingly influential among Jews in Palestine and even beyond. The patriarchs claimed descent from King David and from Rabbi Judah the Prince, purportedly the redactor of the Mishnah, who flourished around the year 200 CE. In addition to bearing responsibility for setting the liturgical calendar, they were rich and could easily place their clients in communal positions.

Rabbinic texts say very little about the existence of an actual patriarchal office before Judah’s time but have much to say about Judah and his immediate successors. Curiously, they do not mention the later patriarchs, surely a sign of the rabbis’ growing alienation from their patrons. Only in the fourth century, however, did the position of the patriarchs become fully institutionalized. They rose into the high ranks of the eastern Roman aristocracy and were recognized by the state as leaders of the Jews, with the right to collect taxes from Jews throughout the empire. Of course, they lacked a coercive apparatus—this the emperors never granted—so their taxation was closer to what we would call fundraising, but this does not diminish the significance of the concession. The patriarchs’ fortunes, it would seem, depended on their friendships in the imperial court, and these began to falter under the increasingly pious Theodosius II. In 415, the patriarchs’ privileges were drastically reduced, and by 429, the institution was gone.

In the Persian Empire 

Let us turn to the Persian Empire. The Babylonian exile ended when the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great defeated the Babylonians in 539 BCE and permitted the Jews to return to Judea. Even after that, however, a small group of Jews (it is unknown how many) remained in Babylonia (Iraq). Between the sixth century BCE and the third century CE, little is known about the Jewish community living there, but during the Sasanian period (224–651 CE), the Jewish community in Babylonia gained prominence and influence. The Sasanians, named after an Iranian dynasty that had defeated the Parthians in 224 CE, made Zoroastrianism (more precisely, Mazdaism) the official religion of the empire, but the Sasanian state was nonetheless a multiconfessional polity. Over the centuries, several religions flourished to varying degrees throughout the empire. Early on, Christians faced difficulties, but by the fifth century they had established themselves as a strong presence, growing in number and influence; the king even established a Persian church that attracted members of the nobility. Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian names are found on magic bowls from the western region of the empire. And it was Jews living within the orbit of the Sasanians who produced the Talmud, in which one finds encounters—real or imagined—between rabbis on the one hand and Persian kings and Zoroastrian religious functionaries on the other.

Jews were presented with the opportunity to integrate into Persian life. Some took Persian names, dressed in Persian garb, embraced elitist Persian mores, and acted like citizens of the empire. Others did not. In general, it would appear that the multiconfessional, accommodating dimension of the Sasanian Empire was beneficial for the Jews.

The affairs of the Jewish community in Babylon were administered by the exilarch (Aramaic resh galuta; lit., “head of the exile”). Very little, unfortunately, can be said about this office. Rabbinic sources—tendentious and uneven—affirm that it was associated with Davidic lineage and that the exilarch held some juridical authority. The Christian catholicos, about which there is greater information, provides a point of comparison. Still, all we can safely say is that the exilarch was an affluent official recognized by the Sasanian government as a leader of the Jewish community.

By the fifth and sixth centuries, Jewish life began generally to acquire a more familiar feel. Hebrew gradually reemerged as a language of piety, and in more and more places, Jews apparently read and studied the Torah in that language, and not in Greek. Eventually Hebrew entirely replaced Greek as the Jews’ liturgical language, and the end of antiquity witnessed an unprecedented burst of liturgical creativity in Hebrew. The resulting Hebrew poetry, called piyyut, is simultaneously completely Byzantine in form and mood and utterly reliant on the language of the Hebrew Bible and the content of rabbinic midrash.