504 Cohen
Goths formed relationships with one another and often transgressed social
and religious restrictions imposed upon them. This chapter will then consider
the vestiges of pre-Christian religious traditions and Christian heretics who
were also part of the religious landscape in this period. Much of our evidence
for these communities comes from Catholic sources, and the organized church
will therefore by necessity make an appearance in what follows. However,
a systematic description of the church’s development and operations has been
left to other chapters of this book.3
Jews
There had been Jewish communities in Italy for centuries before the advent
of the Ostrogothic kingdom; however it was in Late Antiquity that Italian
Jewry became, in the words of Leonard Rutgers, “the single most visible and
tangible Jewish community of the entire western Diaspora”.4 The largest and
oldest Jewish centre was in Rome.5 But other important Jewish communi-
ties included Palermo and Catania in Sicily, Venosa and Naples in the south,
and Milan and Ravenna in the north.6 The size of these communities is dif-
ficult to estimate given the limitations of ancient demography.7 However, it
does appear that the urban population, especially in Rome itself, expanded
throughout the late antique period as Jews increasingly moved to cities from
smaller rural areas of Italy.8
Until recently it had been commonly thought that these Jewish communi-
ties were relatively isolated from their non-Jewish neighbours. It is certainly
true that as Christianity emerged as a sine qua non of social relations in the
4th and especially the 5th centuries, Jews were increasingly excluded from
the networks of patronage and power that dominated the politics of the late
empire.9 Laws preserved in the Theodosian Code, for example, banned Jews
3 See Sessa and Lizzi Testa in this volume.
4 Rutgers/Bradbury, “Diaspora”, p. 492.
5 See for example, Leon, The Jews of Ancient Rome; Solin, “Juden und Syrer”, pp. 587–789.
6 Sicily: Rutgers, “Interaction and Its Limits”. Southern Italy: Colafemmina, “Insediamenti e
condizione” and for a slightly later period, von Falkenhausen, “L’Ebraismo dell’Italia meridi-
onale”. Northern Italy: Ruggini, “Ebrei e Orientali nell’Italia”; Brown, “Ebrei e orientali a
Ravenna”; Somekh, “Teoderico e gli Ebrei”.
7 On the problems of Jewish demography in particular see McGing, “Population and
Proselytism”, p. 106.
8 Rutgers/Bradbury, “Diaspora”, p. 494.
9 Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, p. 179.