“Here rests Faustina, aged fourteen years, five months. . . . Two apostoli and two rebbites sang lamentations”

In response to pressures detailed here, some Jews converted, disrupting familial relations. Many did not. Others immigrated to less inhospitable regions. Some accounts of their active resistance may have merit: mocking Christians at Ravenna; fighting with Arian Ostrogoths against Justinian at Naples (Prokopios). They entertained hopes of divine intervention, following a Moses-type messianic pretender on Crete, and assembling for the restoration of Jerusalem (Life of Barsauma). They adapted. Whatever the impact of the cessation of the Jewish patriarchate, Jewish leaders in Ravenna were advocating for local Jewish rights only weeks after Gamaliel’s demotion. Intriguingly, inscriptions for Jewish women synagogue officers increase in the fifth century. More inscriptions utilize Hebrew. Men called “rabbi” now appear in a few diaspora epitaphs. Emergent rabbinic programs may have offered ways to tighten social boundaries, countering the consequences of imperial restrictions and Christian pressures to convert. The evidence, however, remains merely suggestive.

“In what has been allowed to them, [the Jews] should not sustain any prejudice.”

In the West, Arian Gothic administrations seem less interested in the active anti-Jewish programs of their Nicene counterparts and less susceptible to the pressures of Nicene bishops. Jewish advisors, such as one Symmachus, served in the court of Theoderic. Gregory of Tours recounts how his catholic colleague, Avitus of Clermont, forced Jews in sixth-century Clermont to convert—strikingly reminiscent of the account about events on Minorca. In Gregory’s writings, synagogues are sometimes attacked, yet Jews participate in public life in major towns like Orleans. The late sixth-century letters of Gregory the Great depict a landscape still populated by unconverted Jews, dissident Christians, and recalcitrant practitioners of ancestral religions. They provide glimpses of Christian attacks on synagogues and Jewish rights, complexities of life for often impoverished newly converted Jews, and strategies to evade restrictions on Jewish slaveholding. Gregory advocated kindness and persuasion, rather than violence and coercion, but his relatively irenic stance toward Jews would not prevail.

“We do not grant that their synagogues shall stand, but want them to be converted in form to churches”

Evidence for Jews in the Mediterranean diaspora wanes by the fifth century. Few laws pertain to Jews between Theodosios II’s death and the ascension of Justinian seventy-five years later. Material evidence for Jews is sparse. Only non-Jewish writers offer possible evidence. John Malalas recounts synagogue attacks by the “Greens” charioteers’ association. Justinian’s harsh critic, Prokopios of Caesarea, notes Justinian’s various anti-Jewish acts. Justinian’s famed legal Code confirms his intensification of his predecessors’ programs against all non-Nicene persons, including Jews and Samaritans. His famous Novella 146 authorized use of the Septuagint, but banned the Deuterosis—sometimes thought, perhaps wrongly, to be the Mishnah. John of Ephesos claims that (after a devastating outbreak of plague) Justinian sent him to convert the remaining dissidents and traditionalists of Asia Minor, where he also transformed a few synagogues into churches. John Malalas chronicles Samaritan revolts also recounted by Prokopios, as well as Jewish victims of earthquakes.

“No synagogue shall be constructed from now on”

In the early fifth century, anti-Jewish legislation and other pressures on Jews increased. Stories of attacks on Jewish synagogues—and other interreligious violence—proliferated in the suspect Lives of Christian saints, like Salsa, Marciana, Sergius, and especially Barsauma. In Alexandria, a Christian mob murdered the philosopher Hypatia. The city’s Nicene bishop, Cyril, expelled Jews after an alleged attack on Christians. A few inscriptions and a Jewish marriage contract from Antinoopolis may allude to these events. Theodosios’s wife, Eudokia, a convert to Nicene Christianity, seems to have been sympathetic to Jews. His sister, Pulcheria, may have orchestrated a law banning construction of new synagogues and helped demote the Jewish patriarch, Gamaliel VI. Accused of illicit synagogue construction, owning Christian slaves, and other crimes, his downfall may relate to events on Minorca only two years later. Not long after, Honorius expelled Jewish men from all branches of the state service. An ominous new law protected “innocent” Jews from arson and vandalism, but cautioned them against anti-Christian acts.

“Five hundred and forty souls were added to the church”

In the Letter of Severus of Minorca on the Conversion of the Jews, it is said that 540 Jews became Christians during one week in February 418. The Letter cunningly positions Christians as actors motivated by pious zeal and love for the Jews, refraining from violence and violating no laws regarding Jews and their synagogues. The underlying reality, if any, was likely quite different. Regardless, the Letter exemplifies and encapsulates many of the issues presented in this book: the reliability and rhetorical purposes of Christian accounts of Jewish conversions; social relations between Jews and Christians in late antique towns; the diverse tactics Christian bishops employed (scriptural debates, threats of violence and social misfortune, and actual mob violence, including burning synagogues and confiscating Jewish books); Roman laws pertaining to attacks on Jews and their synagogues; and the numerous consequences for Jews who became Christians.

The Absence of Evidence as the Evidence of Absence

Evidence for Jews in the late antique Mediterranean diaspora declines precipitously from the fourth to the seventh centuries CE. No identifiable writings in Greek or Latin survive from late antique Jews, forcing reliance on late Roman laws, accounts in non-Jewish authors, and limited archaeological remains. This increasing absence of evidence ultimately seems to be actual evidence of increasing absence. The category “diaspora”—in opposition to the homeland of Israel—has practical and theoretical limitations and is implicated in debates about contemporary Jewish identifications. Still, a study devoted almost exclusively to Jews of the late ancient Mediterranean is warranted by virtue of prior neglect, a history of privileging rabbinic sources, and a related tendency to assimilate the history of all Jews in late antiquity into that of the rabbis. The study tries to avoid the derogatory terms “pagan” and “heretics,” preferring the admittedly more cumbersome “dissident Christians” and “practitioners of (other) traditional Mediterranean religions.”

“The sect of the Jews is prohibited by no law”

After the death of Julian, bans on traditionalist practices resumed and conflicts between Nicene and Arian Christians continued, while pressures on Jews gradually increased. The fervently Nicene bishop of Milan, Ambrose, seems to have played an outsized role in the policies of Gratian’s administration and then in those of Theodosios I, who assumed de facto control of the entire empire in 389. He suppressed non-Nicene Christian churches, criminalized traditional worship, and incentivized conversion. Some of his laws protected Jews against violence and imperial interference in internal Jewish affairs, and he resisted Ambrose’s pleas for leniency for Christians who attacked a synagogue in Callinicum (modern Raqqa). It is difficult to assess the frequency of such attacks, or of Jewish conversions to Christianity, such as that of Joseph of Tiberias, as told by Epiphanios. It’s unlikely but not impossible that the Jewish patriarch in Palestine influenced some of Theodosios’s actions.

“You shall have freedom from care . . . during my reign.”

From the reign of Constantine through the death of the emperor Julian in 363 CE, relatively little imperial attention was focused on Jews (or Samaritans). No early laws targeted Jews merely for practicing their ancestral religion. Instead, Constantine and subsequent emperors sought the conversion or even eradication both of practitioners of traditional Roman religions and of Christians who held opposing theological views. The chapter summarizes how late Roman laws were produced and transmitted, then reviews and analyzes the legislation pertaining to Jews issued in the name of Constantine and his various successors, through Julian. Some regulated Jewish ownership of Christian slaves; others prohibited Jews from abusing co-religionists who became Christians. CTh. 16.8.1, often thought to prohibit conversion to Judaism, probably extends those prohibitions to non-Jews. Julian authorized the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple (along with other traditionalist temples). Christian authors claim divine intervention aborted the project.

Epilogue

THE CHRISTIANIZING OF the ancient Mediterranean came at a tremendous cost to many persons. It entailed the suppression and eradication of all traditional Mediterranean religious practice except that of Jews, Samaritans, and of course, Christians themselves. Temples and other cult sites were closed. Entering them for religious purposes was criminalized, and the penalties (threatened) for such acts were dire: banishment, deprivation of the right to bequeath property to one’s heirs, confiscation of property to state coffers, and even death. That such strategies may not have been entirely effective is immaterial; traditional Mediterranean religions were sufficiently decimated by the alliance of Christian bishops and Roman emperors that they would never recover. Theodosios I may have been optimistically premature in his perception that there were no more “pagani” in the late fourth century, but this would ultimately prove true enough. According to the Pew Research Center, in the twenty-first century, there are over 2 billion Christians, if of varying persuasions; there are no functioning temples to the ancient Mediterranean gods....

“We deny to the Jews and to the pagani, the right to practice legal advocacy and to serve in the state service.”

Competition between the empresses intensified. Eudokia’s uncle Asklepiodotos implemented a law protecting Jewish synagogues. Simeon the Stylite allegedly objected, Theodosios relented, and Jews protested, replaying Ambrose’s contestation with Theodosios I over the Callinicum synagogue. Theodosios II expropriated funds collected after the cessation of the patriarchate. Theodosios’s later laws dismissed Jews (and Samaritans) from most public offices and stripped them of prestigious ranks, perhaps related to a conflict between Eudokia and Barsauma. After the empress permitted Jews to pray on the Temple Mount, Barsauma may have orchestrated their massacre. Jewish efforts at redress ultimately failed. Western laws from Galla Placidia, mother of another child emperor, Valentinian III, prohibited Jews from state service and from serving as legal advocates. Jews and Samaritans could not disinherit family who converted. Jews on Crete are said to have been misled by a messianic pretender around the same time. A rare inscription from Grado, Italy, memorializes a sole fifth-century Jewish convert to Christianity.