The legal status of the Jews in the Roman Empire

HISTORICAL AND LEGAL CONTEXT Given that legal status is determined by law – the social rules that prescribe conduct and are justiciable – the legal status of Jews in the Roman Empire was determined by more than one law. This situation resulted from their ambiguous existence within a non-Jewish society; while they participated in many activities of the general society, they endeavored to keep a significant portion of their life isolated from certain layers of the social order and to preserve a distinct Jewish sphere. Mutual compromise was necessary for such a situation to come into being and to endure. Both sides needed to strike a balance between integration and isolation, demarcating “Jewishness” and “non-Jewishness” in such a way that the spheres could interact without negating either what Jews considered the essentials of their Jewishness or the values non-Jews regarded as fundamental. In this negotiation the role of the non-Jewish society was the more important because of the inherent imbalance of power. The active good will, or at least the acquiescence, of the non-Jewish society was necessary to sanction such an arrangement and to make a functional compromise feasible. Such a compromise usually represented a shifting balance, uneasy and temporary. It depended on fundamental social attitudes toward the “other,” sometimes incarnated in their pure forms of either total exclusion or complete acceptance but more often in intermediate forms between these extremes. and it was constantly evaluated in the light of categorical values such as citizen/alien, civilized/barbarian, and religious/superstitious. The absolute identification of Jews and non-Jews with any of these dichotomies negated all compromise, by definition, while the existing equilibrium could be challenged from either side with disastrous results for the Jews. The great revolts in the Land of Israel (the 66–70 ce revolt and the Bar-Kochba War 132–5 ce) as well as the minor but no less calamitous revolts in the Diaspora during the second century originated in Jewish rejection of equilibriums they considered unacceptable and in their commitment to goals rejected by the non-Jewish society.