192 CHAPTER SIX
All this changed in the later fourth century. The emperors now explicitly
recognized the Jews as a legitimate religious organization, with a clergy whose
authority and privileges approximated those of the Christian clergy, and with
the right to police their own boundaries of membership without state interfer-
ence. This recognition should be seen not as traditionalism but as an innova-
tion of the 380s and 390s, which in the end helped redefine the relation
between the Jews and the state in a radical way (see below). Admittedly, the
legislation of the late fourth century and following was no less reactive than
that of earlier periods; the emperors were responding in part to changes in the
position of the Jews in cities that were increasingly dominated by Christians.
Whatever strategies the Jews had developed to cope with life in the pagan
cities were, we may infer, no longer working. If these strategies consisted in
part of religious eclecticism, as they had in high imperial Palestine, then it is
easy to understand why: to be eclectically Jewish and pagan marked you as a
successful accommodationist; but to be eclectically both Jewish and Christian
marked yo uas a heretic.^37
Recognition and Its Limits
The structural tension between the growing religious exclusivity of the Chris-
tian Roman cities, and the desire of some hitherto integrated Jews to retain a
sense of separation, demanded assiduous imperial response. The emperors
did so by both empowering and marginalizing the Jews, in effect declaring
that the Jews were for most purposes a unique category of humanity, like
neither orthodox Christians nor pagans and heretics, who were gradually out-
lawed. Some of the elements of official recognition have already been dis-
cussed in connection with the patriarchs. In brief, laws of the 380s and follow-
ing consistently regard the Jews as constituting a religious community with an
authoritative and privileged clergy. This clergy was based in local communi-
ties throughout the empire but derived its authority from its dependency on
the patriarchs, who for several decades were ardently patronized by Theodos-
ius I, Arcadius, and those who ruled on behalf of the child emperor Theodos-
ius II. The patriarch’s privileges were limited in a law of 415, and under un-
known circumstances abolished about ten years later, perhaps with the death
of Gamaliel “VI” (the identity and chronology of the patriarchs of the fourth
and early fifth century are very obscure). Though the emperor, not the re-
before affirmed the right ofcollegia licitato claim legacies, this law probably implies that the
Jewish community of Antioch, and by extension Jewish communities in general (?), had no legal
standing. See the comments of Linder, no. 3. The suggestion of Rabello that theuniversitas
Judaeorumwas not the Jewish community (who, then?), is apologetic special pleading.
(^37) A status far more dangerous than Jewishness, as a glance at the laws in CTh book 16 demon-
strates.