CHRISTIANIZATION 191liturgies even if they “harmed their religion,” and so on, much as many Pales-
tinian Jews in the same period conformed without noticeable hesitation to
the cultural and religious norms of city life.^33
In sum, for most purposes, the Jews were subjects and later citizens like all
others, not in any meaningful way a separate category of humanity. We may
in general compare them to such groups as the priests of the Egyptian temples
and Gallic religious experts, still in existence, still occasionally asserting tradi-
tional privileges, but much reduced, by a combination of official apathy and
official hostility. In this reduced state, such people were not thought immune
to the salvific power of Romancivitasandhumanitas.^34 Similarly, the state
tacitly allowed the Jews to do more or less as they pleased—a benefaction that
the Jews either often declined or their neighbors almost never bothered to
challenge. Perhaps the Roman state felt it could leave the Jews alone because
it had already stamped out their religion in 70C.E.; all that was left was a set
of largely inoffensive privatemores.^35 In any case, the state expressed little
interest in the inner constitution of Jewish corporations (e.g., in the rights and
privileges of their leaders) or in determining the legal and social boundaries
between Jews and others. Indeed, there is reason to believe that, at least after
the universal grant of Roman citizenship in 212, the state did not recognize
the legal existence of the Jewish corporations at all.^36
(^33) Apart from the evidence cited in the last section for Jews in municipal office, seeCPJ3, no.
474: Aurelius Ioannes, most likely Jewish, gymnasiarch at Karanis, in 304. Were the Jews ex-
empted from the imperial cult and/or the requirements to sacrifice imposed especially during
the sporadic persecutions of Christianity? Remarkably, there is almost no ancient information on
this question at all. A possible exception is Y. Avodah Zarah 5:4: “(Why is the wine of the Samari-
tans forbidden?.. .) Some would say that when King Diocletian came here [to Palestine], he
decreed that all the nations must offer libations, except the Jews; the Cutheans [Samaritans]
offered libations and so their wine was forbidden. Some would say, etc.” What should we make
of this? Probably it is one of several stories invented to explain the otherwise inexplicable prohibi-
tion of Samaritan wine. Even if it has a “historical kernel,” it may have nothing to do either with
the imperial cult or with the persecution of Christians (so Baer, “Israel, The Christian Church,
and the Roman Empire,” 119–28: Diocletian visited Palestine in 286 but did not persecute the
Christians until 303). Modern scholars are divided over whether the Jews were exempt or not—
see Juster, 1.339–54; Rabello, “Legal Condition,” pp. 703–4; Smallwood,Jews Under Roman Rule
pp. 539–44; Rives, “Decree of Decius,” 138. Perhaps some Jews were able to convince local
authorities that they did worship the emperor, in their own way, in the synagogues (why not? who
knew what went on in there anyway? and why doubt the Jews if they were upstanding citizens
otherwise?); other Jews may have participated.
(^34) See, in general, Frankfurter,Religion in Roman Egypt; Woolf,Becoming Roman, pp.
206–37.
(^35) See, pending publication of James Rives’s discussion of this issue, G. Bohak, “Theopolis: A
Single-Temple Policy and Its Singular Ramifications,”JJS50 (1999): 6–7; and note Cassius Dio’s
oddly periphrastic comment (37.17.1) that the Jews, though frequently persecuted in the past,
have now (early third century) so grown in number that they have achieved the right to express
their beliefs freely (es parrhesian tes nomiseos eknikesai).
(^36) See CJ 1.9.1, dated 213, which denies to theuniversitas Iudaeorumof (Syrian?) Antioch the
right to recover in court a legacy left them by one Cornelia Salvia; since the senate had not long