126 CHAPTER THREEof their prosperity and populousness in the later fourth century (which is to
say, they had more available surplus than they were used to, did more buying
and selling, and made more use of coins), the fact remains that they were still
peasants with a heavy tax burden and limited (though not nonexistent) access
to gold, the only stable currency in the later Roman Empire. Any attempt to
exact taxes is likely to have produced small returns and generated mainly
resentment. The cities of the Diaspora offered much richer pickings. The
Jews in these places were probably mostly artisans and merchants, not peas-
ants.^71 Since most personal taxes were land taxes, artisans and merchants had
a comparatively light tax burden and, given their complete dependence for
survival on urban markets, relatively easy access to cash.^72 The largest Jewish
communities tended to be in the largest cities—easily accessible and conve-
niently centered on their synagogues, and possessing in some cases by the
fourth century the rudiments of a loosely hierarchical organization, all of
which facilitated collection.^73
It is likely that the sources present a slightly distorted picture of the character
of patriarchal authority even in the Diaspora. The laws of the late fourth cen-
(^71) The evidence is almost all late antique. There were of course Jewish peasants in Egypt (CPJ
passim);how typical for northern Syria were Libanius’s Jewish tenant farmers? (seeGLAJJ, 2, no.
495a). Note also, around the year 400, the apparently prosperous Jewish landowner Licinius in
the region of Hippo Regius, whose legal entanglements with the local bishop, Victor, are the
subject of a recently (1974) discovered letter of Augustine (J. Divjak, ed.,Sancti Aureli Augustini
Opera, sec. 2 pars. 6,CSEL88 (Vienna, 1981) no. 8, wit ht he comments of Helmut Castritius,
“The Jews in North Africa at the Time of Augustine of Hippo: Their Social and Legal Position,”
Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies, B.I. (Jerusalem, 1986), 31–37); simi-
larly on Minorca in precisely the same period (see sec. 3 chap. 6). For Jewish glassmakers at
Constantinople and Emesa, see J.-P. Sodini, “L’artisanat urbain a`l’e ́poque pale ́ochre ́tienne (ive–
viies.),”Ktema4 (1979): 94; and H. J. Magoulias, “Trades and Crafts in the Sixth and Seventh
Centuries as Viewed in the Lives of the Saints,”Byzantinoslavica37 (1976): 23–24; for other
Jewis hartisans in late antique Asia Minor at Korykos, see J. Keil and A. Wil helm,Monumenta
Asiae Minoris Antiqua, vol. 3 III (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931), no. 237 (shoe-
maker), nos. 344, 448 (perfumers), no. 607 (head of goldsmiths’ guild); for Jewish merchants in
the late antique Adriatic area, L. Ruggini, “Ebrei e Orientali nell’Italia Settentrionale,”Studia et
documenta historiae et juris25 (1959): 231–41. The complex question of the Jews’ liability for
curial service is also relevant here because in most, though not all, places such liability depended
on ownership of land; see below and discussion in Linder,Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation,
pp. 75–77, with his comments on the particular laws cited there;LRE1.737ff.
(^72) The only personal tax assessed on urban merchants and artisans was the much-resented but
economically hardly onerouschrysargyron, instituted in the early fourth century and preceded
perhaps by some sort of head tax; for a general account, seeLRE1.431; R. P. Duncan-Jones,
Structure and Scale in the Roman Economy(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp.
187–98; Bagnall,Egypt in Late Antiquity, pp. 153–54.
(^73) That theapostolewas mediated through the communal leaders explains why CTh 16.8.14,
the western law of 399 forbidding collection of the tax, lists archisynagogues and elders together
withapostolias those on whom the prohibition falls. Rajak and Noy, “Archisynagogoi,” 80, how-
ever, regard the law’s list as blatantly erroneous.