But in order to clarify how large a section of the Jewish inhabitants achieved citizenship in their cities, and when this process began, a broader discussion of the whole problem is desirable.
It may be said at once that in discussing the question of Jewish rights in the hellenistic and Roman towns of the eastern Mediterranean, scholars have generally paid far too much attention to the problem as reflected in Alexandria, and tended to assume that any conclusion drawn from the material affecting the Egyptian capital must apply also to other Greek towns. For all that, it is necessary to begin by examining what Josephus has to say on this and other cities, and to determine how his statements are to be interpreted.
He refers to Jewish status in Alexandria five times. In Antiquities XII, 8, he says that the Jews of the capital were made citizens with rights equal (ἰσοπολίτας) to the Macedonians by Alexander the Great, after he had recruited them to the garrison. This is supplemented by the information (Against Apion, II, 35), that a phyte of Jewish “Macedonians” still existed in his own day. In Antiquities XIV, 188 he alludes to the stele set up in the town by Julius Caesar (he probably meant Augustus) recording Jewish rights, which included their citizenship of the city. He repeats this information in Against Apion (II, 37-8). A third passage (Ant.. XIX, 281 sq.) cites what has been held to be the famous letter of the Emperor Claudius to Alexandria,[1006] written in A.D. 41, to settle the dispute that had led to riots between the Jews and Greeks there under his predecessor Gaius. Another view however, holds that the citation relates to an earlier rescript of the Emperor. Here he writes: “As we have long known that the Jews of Alexandria who are called Alexandrians have lived from the earliest times together with the Alexandrians and obtained equal citizen rights (ἴσης πολιτείας) from the kings, as is made clear by letters which they possess and also by orders etc.” Finally Josephus writes in the Jewish War (II, 487) that Alexander had granted the Jews the right of residence in the city and equal status (ἰσομοιρίας) with the Greeks, including the permission to call themselves “Macedonians”.
There is no point in discussing here the question of whether Jewish troops served under Alexander the Great in Egypt,[1007] but the information on their membership of the garrison and their title “Macedonians” is open to more than one interpretation; Tcherikover[1008] considered that it meant simply that the Jews who bore the title “Macedonians” were troops of a “pseudo-ethnic” unit trained and armed to fight after the Macedonian manner, their phyle being, not a division of the citizen body, but a military formation. Whether or not this had nothing to do with citizen rights, however, is open to argument, for one of these Jewish “Macedonians”, recorded in the early Roman period, held land in the Alexandrian city-territory, and was therefore almost certainly a citizen.[1009] Josephus’ alleged version of Claudius’ rescript, on the other hand, although based on a genuine document sent by the Emperor to Alexandria to settle several issues, including that of Jewish status, faces the fact of the discovery of another, perhaps later papyrus version of a similar letter,[1010] which states in clear language that “I order the Jews not to aspire to more than they already have had till now in a city not theirs.”[1011] Thus, even if we argue that the papyrus document was preceded by another, that cited by Josephus, which said something different, i.e. that two distinct pronouncements by the Emperor are involved, this would not resolve the difficulties created by the differences between the two.[1012] It is in any case difficult to trust the accuracy of Josephus’ report on the Alexandrian stele which allegedly recorded Jewish rights in the city: it may, indeed, have recorded the internal rights enjoyed by the Jewish communal organization (politeuma) in the city, but these do not bear on the problem of citizen status.[1013]
On the other hand, some individual Jews did hold Alexandrian citizenship. Philo Judaeus certainly possessed it (Ant. XVIII, 159, 259; XIX, 276; XX 100; cf. Philo, quod omnis probus liber, 6), as did the father of the Jewish petitioner Helenos in the early Roman period.[1014] The Jewish “Macedonians” were probably citizens, and others may have obtained the status in the Ptolemaic period by medium of a gymnasium education (Cf. CPJ, I, p. 23, n. 58). But there is no evidence that their number was ever large.
What then are we to make of Josephus’ various other seemingly unequivocal statements concerning the ἰσονομία, ἰσοτιμία and ἰσομοιρία, of the Jews of Alexandria, of the ισονομία and ίσοτελεία of the Jews of Cyrene — or of his attribution to the Jews of the status of πολῖται and ἰσότιμοι in the cities of Asia Minor and in Antioch (Ant. XII, 119-121), where they enjoyed an “equal share” of the city (ἐξ ἰσοῦ... της πόλεως μετέχειν) with the Greeks?
Before we seek a solution for this problem, we must consider the evidence of Philo Judaeus, who, as an Alexandrian and leader of the city’s Jewish community, was directly concerned with Jewish status when it was under critical attack. Philo does not use the terms ἰσοπολιτεία, ἴσης μοίρᾶς or ἴσης τιμῆς with regard to Jewish status in the two works in which he deals directly with the problem, the Legatio and the In Flaccum. Only once, in de Vita Mosis, does he use the expression ἰσοτιμία in relation to metics aspiring to the status of ἀστοί (I, 34-6). For him πολιτεία denotes the rights enjoyed by Jews within their organized community, which he also calls a πολιτεία. These rights he terms δίκαια; in one place (Flacc., 53) he calls them τὰ πολιτικὰ δίκαια. But he consistently refers to the Jews as Ἀλεξανδρεῖς, and appears to use the expression in a purely general geographical sense. For him, it had no strictly juridical meaning with reference to citizen status.
1006
P. Lon. 1912; I. Bell,
1011
1012
The independent identity of each document has been argued by Dr. A. Kasher in his Ph. D. dissertation “The civic status of the Jews of Egypt in the Hellenistic and Roman periods” (Tel Aviv University, 1972), chap. 9, pp. 299 sqq. See also I. D. Amusin, The Letter and Edict of Claudius Caesar,