Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. - Seth Schwartz

186 CHAPTER SIX Laws^18 A discussion of late imperial legislation in regard to the Jews will introduce us to a crucial set of id ...

CHRISTIANIZATION 187 responses to legal questions sent by private citizens) on a certain issue around a certain date can inform ...

188 CHAPTER SIX tax collection) and thereby contributed significantly to an alleged centuries- long shift of Judaism from ethnic ...

CHRISTIANIZATION 189 by their ancestors, and clearly do not do so because of their horoscope. For it is not possible that Ares r ...

190 CHAPTER SIX Tertullian describes what is probably the Jewish tax as the fine Jews are com- pelled to pay for their observanc ...

CHRISTIANIZATION 191 liturgies even if they “harmed their religion,” and so on, much as many Pales- tinian Jews in the same peri ...

192 CHAPTER SIX All this changed in the later fourth century. The emperors now explicitly recognized the Jews as a legitimate re ...

CHRISTIANIZATION 193 maining Jewish officials, then inherited some of the patriarch’s privileges, most importantly, the right to ...

194 CHAPTER SIX liturgy was incumbent on the college of ship owners. The emperor prohibits the innovation on the grounds that it ...

CHRISTIANIZATION 195 state’s hostility, and the aforementioned insulting rhetoric (which is by the way not universally used in t ...

196 CHAPTER SIX recently revised his classic argument about the importance of “holy men” as patrons in the late empire, by admit ...

CHRISTIANIZATION 197 central government. One of the Jewish leaders was the son-in-law of Litorius, an important, rather surprisi ...

198 CHAPTER SIX But we should be careful. First of all, the story itself: while there now seem no grounds for suspecting the aut ...

CHRISTIANIZATION 199 reality, though even there, the insistence that Jews exercise their curial respon- sibilities kept the door ...

200 CHAPTER SIX and the local community which now became the chief organizing institutions of Jewish life and remained so until ...

CHRISTIANIZATION 201 (’amorlaos), and in some places possibly even Israel—terms that in their original scriptural context refer ...

202 CHAPTER SIX why did the community emerge only in the fourth century and following? In response, I would suggest that a purel ...

SEVEN A LANDSCAPE TRANSFORMED Cities T HE LANDSCAPE of high imperial Palestine was dominated b ythe pagan city. It was there tha ...

204 CHAPTER SEVEN than a village, of a caravansarai with ninety-six beds suggests something about the role of a possibl yexpandi ...

A LANDSCAPE TRANSFORMED 205 their Judaism—the yall eventuall ybecame Christian or, rather, Christians came to predominate and th ...