The Jews of the Graeco-Roman Diaspora The inscription is perhaps even more remarkable than it may appear at first
sight; and it also raises more problems than are immediately apparent. What
is clear is that Aurelius Samohil proclaims himself unambiguously as a Jew,
with a proud attachment to Jewish religious tradition. When he records that
theLord(dominus)gavelicemto the Jews, he almost certainly means the Law
(lex), though he might have meant ‘‘the light’’ (lux). What is clear at any rate
is that he is living by a combination of a secular dating system and calendar
and a Jewish one. ‘‘Friday’’ is expressed asdi(a)e Veneris, ‘‘the day of Venus,’’
the term which would evolve intovenerdi/vendredi. But the month referred
to must be Mareshvan. It cannot be certain that he knew Hebrew himself;
but at the very least he was in a position to have some appropriate Hebrew
words inscribed.
Who are thepatriarchaeto whosehonoreshe refers? He may well mean the
biblical patriarchs. But the inscription might alternatively be evidence of the
extension to Sicily of the influence of the contemporary Jewish patriarchs in
Palestine, to whom imperial legal pronouncements (see text to n. below)
first refer in asclarissimi et illustres(most renowned and illustrious)Patri-
archae.^2 If Aurelius Samohil is referring to them, that in its turn raises the
much wider question of the nature of diaspora Judaism in the late Roman
period. Are we to think of a relatively integrated and homogeneous Jewish
world, in which all or most of the communities in the provinces of the Ro-
man Empire observed a Judaism closely resembling that ‘‘rabbinic’’ Judaism
of Palestine, which was just giving birth to the ‘‘Palestinian’’ or ‘‘Jerusalem’’
Talmud—or which the Talmud presents to us as ‘‘the’’ Judaism of late Ro-
man Palestine? And if so, was this integration achieved by active contacts
and supervision from Palestine? There is in fact one item of Roman legal
evidence, an instruction sent in by Arcadius and Honorius to (Valerius)
Messalla, praetorian prefect of Italy and Africa, which implies that thePatri-
archawas sending emissaries (apostoli) to collect money in this area, that is to
say the Latin-speaking West.^3 How far suchapostoliexercised any religious
authority or influence is of course a more complex question.
But the Roman legal evidence also raises another possibility: for it shows
that among the numerous and varied Greek terms used to designate the offi-
cials of individual Jewish diaspora communities, the termpatriarchaalso fig-
umes ofInscriptionesJudaicaeOrientisI:EasternEurope, ed. D. Noy, A. Panyatov, and A. Bloed-
horn; II:Kleinasien, ed. W. Ameling; III:Syria and Cyprus, ed. D. Noy and H. Bloedhorn.
The corpus is abbreviated asIJudO; cross-references are entered below.
.Cod.Theod.,,A.Linder,The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation(), no. .
.Cod.Theod.,,Linder(n.),no..