296 A History of Judaism
symbols for their own use without thinking of themselves, or being con-
sidered by Jews, to be Jewish. Since we have seen in Chapter 10 that it
is by no means clear that before the end of the first millennium ce all
Jews believed it necessary to be buried only in the company of other
Jews, the labelling as ‘Jewish’ of specific catacombs in Rome at Monte-
verde or Vigna Randanini, just because their epitaphs reveal that some
of the deceased buried there were certainly Jews, may be misleading.
Some of the apparently liberal Jews who included what look to us like
pagan images at their burial site may not have been Jews at all. And it is
of course impossible now to discern the religious outlook of those Jews
whose epitaphs contained no Jewish images at all.^11
The relationship of all these Jews to the wider world of the Roman
empire was affected by the Christianization of the empire after Con-
stantine not just because the state inaugurated a policy, as we have seen,
of restricting but protecting the practice of Judaism within the empire,
but also because the state came to assume that Jewish communities
would be organized along lines similar to Christians. In the pagan
empire of the first three centuries ce Jewish communal leaders adopted
titles and received honours in a fashion similar to the elites of the cities
in which they lived, organizing themselves on the model of the volun-
tary associations. They were often established as mutual burial societies,
which were a common feature of Greek and Roman urban life. But the
Christian state treated Jews simply as a religious community along the
same lines as local Christian churches, referring to a ‘synagogue of
the Jewish law’ as a ‘place of religion’. In 330 ce the emperor Constan-
tine even exempted from burdensome duties on behalf of the state ‘those
who have dedicated themselves with complete devotion to the syna-
gogues of the Jews’. Such treatment of Jewish communities as essentially
religious did not always operate to their advantage as the Rome elite
became more enthusiastic from the late fourth century in imposing
Christian orthodoxy and jealous of the protection of Christian worship.
The emperor Justinian in the mid- sixth century required, for instance,
that the Jews alter the date of Passover so that it did not fall before the
Catholic Easter, as Procopius recorded in his Secret History :
Constant and daily interference with the laws of the Romans was not all
that the Emperor did: he also did his best to abolish the laws reverenced
by the Hebrews. Whenever the returning months happened to bring the
Passover feast before that kept by the Christians, he would not permit the
Jews to celebrate this at the proper time, nor to offer anything to God at