Early Judaism- A Comprehensive Overview

quested Roman support and, as far as we can judge from the evidence

quoted by Josephus, they often got it, but the new letters and the new de-

crees issued by the Roman government did not get better results, and few

practical consequences followed.

This somewhat apathetic attitude on the part of the Romans should

occasion no surprise since it was a common feature of Roman politics. The

Romans seem to have had a very limited interest in what happened in the

provinces and perhaps did not even expect their decisions to be imple-

mented. It was therefore only theoretically that the Romans sided with the

Jews and only, it must be emphasized, when religious issues were at stake.

In other areas, the situation was ambiguous. The issue of taxation pro-

vides a case in point. Several times the Jews appealed to the Roman author-

ities, claiming that they did not have to pay the taxes imposed upon them

by the Greek cities. In spite of the Jewish sources’ desire to present the

Romans as generous partners, it appears that the Romans simply refrained

from dealing with the matter. A dispute concerning taxes owed to a Greek

city took place in Asia in the time of Augustus. Josephus tells us that the

emperor granted the Jews “the same equality of taxation as before” (Ant.

16.161), but this is not confirmed by the edict quoted immediately below

(JRRW22), which deals only with Jewish traditional rights and does not

mention taxation at all. Josephus’s remarks, therefore, are misleading. In

Libya, too, a letter written by Agrippa to the magistrates and the people of

Cyrene (JRRW25) mentions the Jewish claim to the effect that they do not

owe the taxes imposed upon them by the Greek city. Agrippa’s own state-

ment, however, concerns only the Jewish sacred monies, not taxes.

Philo and Josephus would often like us to believe that the Romans

sided with the Jews, but this was not always the case. When the Alexan-

drians introduced images of the emperor Caligula into Jewish synagogues

in the city — effectively terminating the Jewish religious cult, in open vio-

lation of their traditional rights — the Roman prefect Flaccus could have

ordered the statues removed, but he did not, possibly out of fear that his

act might be interpreted in Rome as hostility toward the emperor. What-

ever the reasons, Flaccus sided with the Greeks, had the leaders of the Jews

taken and publicly scourged in the theater, and issued an edict proclaiming

that Alexandrian Jews were “foreigners and aliens” in the city (Philo,Flacc.

54). Modern scholars have labored to explain and even justify Flaccus’s be-

havior in an attempt to counterbalance the perspective of Philo and

Josephus. But the fact remains that Flaccus was either unwilling or unable

to stop the anti-Jewish pogrom, and that is why he was later condemned

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Jews among Greeks and Romans

EERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:04:16 PM