Jews and Others
part of Christians, and the legal status and the rights of Jews were substan-
tially reduced. But the right to practise their religion remained in principle
and, often precariously, in fact. It is something of a paradox that along with
the archaeological and documentary evidence, it is precisely the increasingly
repressive legislative pronouncements of the emperors on the one hand and
Christian records of their own hostile measures on the other which give us
the best hope of recapturing the reality of a distinctive phase in Jewish his-
tory. Its beginnings are obscure, but we might see it as going back to the
second century, and as coming to a sort of fruition in the fourth. That is to
say that the evidence, scattered and disparate as it is, suggests that the period
of unresolved tensions between pagans and Christians may have been a rela-
tively favourable and prosperous one for the settled Jewish communities of
the Graeco-Roman diaspora. If so, then what we can dimly perceive is quite
a significant chapter in the communal and religious history of the Jewish
people. That it has been on the whole a neglected chapter makes the many
remaining questions about the nature of Judaism in the late Roman diaspora
all the more important.