188 CHAPTER SIXtax collection) and thereby contributed significantly to an alleged centuries-
long shift of Judaism from ethnicity to religion.^24
But this thesis seems implausible.^25 One of the abuses Domitian’s “harsh-
ness” had made possible wascalumnia, or denunciation (Suetonius,Domitian
12.2). Since he tried to collect the tax from people who for various reasons
kept their Jewishness secret, it was now possible to inform on such “Jews” and
thereby make them liable to the tax. That Nerva abolished such delation, as
legends inscribed on some of his coins assert, does not automatically mean
that he changed the rules in other respects. Nonprofessing Jews may still have
been liable, though it would obviously have been harder to enforce such
liability in the absence of delation, and some writers of the later second cen-
tury do admittedly associate the tax with profession of Judaism. Even if Nerva
did restrict the tax to professing Jews, then, we may infer from Suetonius’s
account, he would have simply been restoring the practice that had existed
before Domitian’s reign. What this most likely meant was that Nerva, probably
like Vespasian and Titus before him, simply left determination of liability to
the Jews themselves. Or perhaps collection was sold to an agent who, once
again, was likely to be Jewish (and wealthy) or to have worked in close collabo-
ration with Jews, since Jews are likely to have known who was liable to pay.
In any case, sporadic imperial concern about liability for the Jewish tax hardly
amounted to an enduring effort by the state to determine the boundaries of
the Jewish community, the more so since there is no evidence for any further
imperial interest in the question of liability after Nerva’s death in 98. Indeed,
the history of the tax after the middle of the second century is obscure, to say
the least.
Similarly, sources of the second, third, and early fourth centuries, legal and
otherwise, preserve remarkably little information about relations between the
Roman state and the Jews.^26 The eccentric (so he later seemed) Christian
Syriac writer Bardesanes claimed in his treatiseOn Fate(or,On the Laws of
the Regions), composed in the later second or early third century, that (para.
43–44, my translation):
All the Jews who received the Law through the hand of Moses circumcise their
male children on the eighth day, and do not await the arrival of the stars, and do
not observe the law of the region (in which they live), and the star which rules
that region does not control them. But whether they are in Edom or Arabia or
Greece or Persia, in the north or the south, they observe that Law given to them(^24) Goodman, “Nerva, theFiscus Judaicus, and Jewish Identity,”JRS79 (1989): 40–44.
(^25) Even aside from the fact that I am not fully convinced that such a shift, which Goodman
takes for granted (following the arguments of S. Cohen: see the articles collected in hisBegin-
nings o fJewishness), ever really occurred—at least not in quite the way that Goodman assumes.
(^26) I am excluding the fictions of the Historia Augusta and the equally fictional stories of “Anton-
inus and Rabbi” in the Palestinian Talmud. Both reflect fourth-century conditions, if anything.