CHRISTIANIZATION 187responses to legal questions sent by private citizens) on a certain issue around
a certain date can inform us about the emergence of certain social tensions,
and it can tell us how the emperor and his entourage tried to resolve such
tensions. Perhaps we can even speak in some cases of rather loose and evanes-
cent imperial policies, always modified by the need to pacify conflicting spe-
cial interests.^22 But we cannot write social history from prescription. So, for
example, it is important to note, as all scholars have done, the ever shriller
rhetoric of imperial legislation about the Jews, in part because deepening
imperial hostility, and the episcopal hostility that influenced it, are important
per se as expressions of official ideology. But it is not legitimate to infer from
either rhetoric or law alone that the conditions of Jews everywhere correspond-
ingly deteriorated.
Even when understood in these more modest terms—as oblique reflections
of social concerns and/or as expressions of imperial will—the laws about the
Jews in the Theodosian Code are not at all conservative. By their very exis-
tence they constitute a significant innovation because they imply that by the
late fourth century, the Roman state consistently regarded the Jews as a dis-
crete category of humanity. I am suggesting that the state had not done so, at
least not consistently, between the first and the fourth centuries. This sugges-
tion is related to but rather different from the argument of the previous section
of this book—that the Palestinian Jews did not enjoy autonomy in the high
empire—and requires some additional argumentation.
While it is true that Julius Caesar, Augustus, and their Julio-Claudian suc-
cessors recognized the right of the Jews to live according to their own laws,
emperors after 66, or 135C.E., seem rarely, if ever, to have passed laws con-
cerning the Jews or to have had anything like a Jewish policy. The Jews had
no legal “personality” or, at most, a rather thin and ephemeral one.^23 Martin
Goodman argued, by contrast, that changes in imperial policy regarding the
tax to the Jewish fisc in the first thirty years after its imposition in 70 consti-
tuted an attempt by the state to define the boundaries of the Jewish commu-
nity. Thus, by trying to collect the tax from nonprofessing Jews and from
gentiles (or, according to Goodman, Jews) who observed Jewish customs with-
out formally converting (or acknowledging a formal connection) to Judaism,
Domitian opted for a broad, “ethnic” definition, while Nerva made profession
of Judaism the essential characteristic of Jewish identity (for the purposes of
the Conflict Between Christianity and Paganism in Southern Palestine,” in A. Kofsky and G.
Stroumsa, eds.,Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land(Jerusalem:
Yad Ben Zvi, 1998), pp. 31–66, for an even more optimistic evaluation.
(^22) See J. Harries,Law and Empire in Late Antiquity(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), pp. 77–98.
(^23) Contrast K. L. Noethlichs,Das Judentum unter der ro ̈mischen Staat: Minderheitenpolitik im
antiken Rom(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996), pp. 76–90.