CHRISTIANIZATION 193maining Jewish officials, then inherited some of the patriarch’s privileges,
most importantly, the right to collect the so-calledaurum coronarium,orapos-
tole(CTh 16.8.29), there is no reason to think the Jewishprimateswere en-
tirely stripped of their recognized authority over the Jews. At any rate, most of
the laws granting them such authority were retained in the Codex Justinianus,
promulgated over a century after the end of the patriarchate.
Several laws of the 390s are of special interest because their backgrounds
are easy to reconstruct. They may thus enable us to learn something of the
social pressures that helped precipitate this change. For example, in the case
of CTh 16.8.8 (Theodosius I to Tatian, praetorian prefect of the East, Con-
stantinople, 17 April 392), a group of Jews who had been expelled from the
Jewish community in an unknown eastern location by the decision of the local
communal leaders appealed to the provincial court, which restored them to
their community; apparently the expelled Jews, by misrepresenting the facts
of the case, had secured a favorable imperial rescript, whose decision the
Roman judges were legally constrained to follow. In the law in question (not
a rescript addressed to the injuredprimatesbut a constitution issued to a
high imperial official), the emperor rectified the situation and concluded by
recognizing theprimates’jurisdiction over their own religion (sua de religione
sententiam).
We would like to know more. Where did this incident occur? Why and
how were the Jews expelled from their community, and how, precisely, did
the decision of a Roman court secure their readmission? But for our purposes
the law is important even without such details, indicating as it does the exis-
tence (though not the extent of the diffusion) of the partly self-governing Jew-
ish community, which offered enough to its members that expulsion from it
was something to be avoided. It implies the existence of a class of Jewish
leaders, though as we have seen we should probably not assume that this class
was well defined. And finally this law shows that the emperors recognized the
existence and legal rights of the community and its leaders, as well as its
authority to establish its own boundaries. But the law also implies a limitation:
the Jews are asecta, followers of areligio, and their primates’ authority is
limited to the religious sphere.
This implication is spelled out in two laws of roughly the same period. The
first of these is of interest because it supplements one of the other implications
of the law just discussed, that the legal separation of the Jews from their neigh-
bors suited the interests of (the? some?) Jews. In CTh 13.5.18, a law of 390
issued by Theodosius I to the governor of Egypt, it is the non-Jewish (presum-
ably mainly Christian) citizens who benefit from the Jews’ separation. The
municipal, or perhaps imperial, administrators in Alexandria, or another Egyp-
tian town, were in the habit of holding the local “corpus Iudaeorum” collec-
tively responsible for the transport of grain to the capital cities (or rather, some
share of it, presumably), in violation of the previous practice, in which the