Jewish Persecution of Christians
The great conflict between the Church and the Synagogue and the gradual breakdown of the immense bureaucracy of the Roman imperial government both occurred during the fourth Christian century. This breakdown and the ever-growing influence of the ecclesiastical authority on the central government is visible in the Roman legislation of the century which dealt with the actual rights and privileges of the Jewish community. The Theodosian Code, a compilation of the mid-fifth century, does not contain all the legislation previously passed, but it probably contains all that was ever enforced or not withdrawn before 438. The Theodosian Code gives accurate dates and place locations from which laws and rescripts were promulgated; from these it is possible to reconstruct the progressive decline in privileges and security suffered by the Jews in the Roman Empire from 321 to 438.
The Theodosian Code shows us that those immunities which had been granted to the Jews by the pagan emperors, and which had made them a privileged class dwelling within the Roman world, were continued by the Christian emperors. At the opening of the fourth century Jews were classed as Roman citizens and enjoyed all the advantages of civic status. They were in every economic stratum of the empire; many were rich, many were poor. Some were merchants, others artisans, and still others farmers. They had their own cult organizations called synagogues. If any Jew did not belong to such an organization he had to pay the Roman government poll tax and sacrifice to the Roman gods. Only a Jew within the synagogal organizations could escape these munera (civic duties). The synagogues were the Jewish collegia, which themselves had to pay collegiate munera, the Fiscus Judaicus, a didrachm levied by Rome after A.D. 70 on the head of every Jew. This Fiscus was collected indirectly by the synagogues and sent to Rome. It originally had been gathered to support the Capitoline temple, but later was paid directly into the emperor s treasury. The main Jewish privilege was that Jews could not be forced to perform any task which violated their religious convictions. This meant that they were exempt from the crushing burden of the decurionate, that responsibility for the collection of imperial taxes which was gradually impoverishing the middle class of the Roman world. And Jews were neither compelled to celebrate state worship nor forced to attend pagan temples. The Jews had to perform all other liturgies and tutelae (forced donations) common to all Roman citizens.
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At the opening of the fourth century the central Jewish administrative council, called the Sanhedrin, was very active in Palestine, and several schools were in operation there under the guidance of the Jewish nasi or patriarch. The maintenance of these institutions was a religious duty for the Jews. The money for their support, called the aurum coronarium, was collected by men called apostoli, agents of the patriarch, and deposited in the Jewish synagogues. Some Jews, such as slaves, did not support the state at all, but a Jew could be slave to another for only seven years, and it was a religious duty for Jews to free brothers enslaved by the Gentiles. Therefore it seems probable that there were very few Jewish slaves, and most Jews contributed at least something to the public welfare. As Juster shows, the economic and political position of the Jews in the Roman Empire was unique. No other group had exactly the same rights or obligations. Nevertheless, at the opening of the fourth century nothing marked the Jew off conspicuously from his neighbor. From the end of the second great revolt in Palestine, 135, to the time of Constantine, 313, most emperors and the Roman governments they represented were indifferent to the nature of Judaism.
When Christianity was legalized in 313 and became the close ally of the Roman emperors, this indifference quickly became a thing of the past.Thus in 321 Constantine promulgated the earliest law recorded in the Theodosian Code dealing with the Jews; it begins the process of reducing their privileges and immunities. Already in this first law there is evidence of that hatred which would change the role of the Jew in a little over 100 years, from one of privileged citizenship in the Roman Empire to that of outcast.
Much of Christian hatred toward the Jews was based on the popular misconception, amazingly enough still prevalent, that the Jews had been the active persecutors of Christians for many centuries. Juster, Parkes, and 'Williams have ably shown the fallacy of this idea concerning Jewish persecution of Christians during the first three centuries. It remains to discover whether there is any basis for the claim, often voiced in the writings of the church fathers, that the Jews were actively persecuting Christians during the crucial fourth century, thus inviting Christian hatred and retaliation.
The following examination of the sources for fourth century Jewish history will show that the universal, tenacious, and malicious Jewish hatred of Christianity referred to by the church fathers and countless others has no existence in historical fact. The generalizations of patristic writers in support of the accusation have been wrongly interpreted from the fourth century to the present day.That individual Jews hated and reviled the Christians there can be no doubt, but there is no evidence that the Jews as a class hated and persecuted the Christians as a class during the early years of the fourth century. Jewish hatred was rather directed toward the Gentile Romans who had despoiled the Temple and kept the Jews from Jerusalem. Evidence that the Jews took no part in the great persecutions of the second, third, and fourth centuries comes not from Jewish sources nor from inference, nor from later generalization, but from the Acta Sanctorum, which records the lives of the very martyrs whose deaths are in question. The responsibility for the persecution of Christians lay completely with the Romans and not with the Jews after the first century of our era. Scattered throughout the Acta Sanctorum, however, are many references to Jewish hostility and often violence towards the Christians. An examination of those Acta involving the Jews may help to show first: how small a part of the vast number of fourth century martyrs were molested by the Jews; and second: how dangerous these documents are for use as historical evidence, since the fanciful and imaginative are inextricably entwined with the kernel of fact.
