184 CHAPTER SIXWe should also consider the likelihood that the failure of many Jewish con-
verts to Christianity to sever their family ties completely (as some laws and
many church canons imply, just as others suggest that Jews sometimes perse-
cuted their former coreligionists) may have created important groups of peo-
ple characterized by religious lability, a phenomenon well attested among
elements of the imperial aristocracy.^14 We will encounter an example of this
phenomenon below.
I would like to press the argument further. We should not be debating
whether some preexisting Jewish polity declined or prospered, or think only
about relatively superficial cultural borrowing conducted by two well-defined
groups. In my view, we should be looking forsystemic change: the Jewish
culture that emerged in late antiquity was radically distinctive and distinctively
late antique—a product of the same political, social, and economic forces that
produced the no less distinctive Christian culture of late antiquity. In this
chapter I will defend this position, and in the remainder of this book I will
provide a more detailed account of some aspects of the distinctive Jewish
culture of late antiquity.
The Third Century
There are scattered hints that some of the characteristics of late antique Juda-
ism were beginning to emerge in the later third and early fourth centuries,
before the conversion of Constantine to Christianity. We have already seen
that the Jewish cities may have begun to lose their pagan character then, and
that the patriarchs were beginning to grow in prominence. It is also thought
that several archaeologically attested synagogues in the Palestinian country-
side were constructed in the late third century, though this view is now under
attack.^15 Here I will attempt only a partial explanation; I would emphasize
that whatever the causes of these changes, they were still very small in scale
in the late third century.
It is generally supposed that one of the most important effects of the “crisis
of the third century” was the decline of the curial classes. Contrary to what was
(^14) See the material collected in the appendices of J. Parkes,The Conflict o fthe Church and
the Synagogue: A Study in the Origins o fAntisemitism(London: The Soncino Press, 1934, reprint
New York: Hermon, 1974), especially the church canons (pp. 381–88) and the mainly undatable
but suggestive professions of faith extracted from Jews on baptism, pp. 394–400. On the religious
lability of some elements of the aristocracy, in Peter Brown’s view especially characteristic of the
later fourth century, less so later, see Brown,Authority and the Sacred: Aspects o fthe Christianisa-
tion o fthe Roman World(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
(^15) Note also thesynagoge Ioudaionof Oxyrhynchus mentioned in a papyrus of 291:CPJ3,
no. 473.