The Jews, on the other hand, presented the unique synthesis of an ethnic unit with a geographical centre and a specific code of conduct based on a coordinated philosophy. There was no distinction amongst them between the religious and the secular, which sprang from a common source.[1295] In other communities social evolution from a tribal structure had caused the separation of law from religious experience; the Jews had achieved a certain continuity of evolution which preserved the unity of the personal ethical (the prophetic) and legalist currents, and made them identical with a definite ethnic group. It was this peculiar complex which formed in the ancient world (as it does today) the source of confusion and misunderstanding among non-Jews. For the gentile of the hellenistic period and the Roman Empire, religion was a matter for the individual or an expression of loyalty to the state; he could not understand the unity of a religious-ethical group and an ethnic entity, and frequently feared it. The Jew felt his ethical code and ethnic identity to be inseparable; the effective application of the first was ensured by the preservation of the second, and this made him a force in gentile society — a group individuality in an empire that possessed, otherwise, an almost unlimited power of cosmopolitan absorption. It might be true to say that Judaism was the only fully-fledged nationalism of the ancient world. Thus the Jewish fusion of group identity and ethical code has widespread repercussions when the Jewish diaspora began to expand; it became a missionary force that made numerous converts. Although borderline groups of half-proselytes arose, full proselytes inevitably became assimilated to the Jewish community: the Jews presented in the diaspora the anomaly of a persistent sub-nation, active and distinct. That their “exclusiveness” alienated the gentile is, however, unconvincing, since their widespread proselytizing activity could never have been carried on had they maintained it. Nor are proofs lacking of active assimilation by Jews to the gentile world, whether internally or externally. Hellenistic Jewry sought various compromises with its environment, and tried to make itself comprehensible to the non-Jew; there is no doubt that the wealthy Jewish upper class saw no contradiction between loyalty to the Ptolemies or the Caesars, and loyalty to Judaism; this is amply evidenced by the Aristeas Letter, by the attitude and apology of Josephus, by the conduct of the House of Herod and the Jewish groups which deserted to Rome during the war of 66-73, or by the behaviour of the Jewish upper class of Alexandria and Cyrene in the years 70-73. But the Jewish fate was not to be decided either by these or by the assimilated elements; the gentile was quicker than many Jews to reject the reconcilability between a nation-religion imposing a complete way of life, and the demand for complete equality of status on the part of its adherents living in alien communities. The Jewish nation-religion was ultimately unrealizable except on its own soil. Not Jewish “exclusiveness” (a historical anachronism in this period) alienated the Greeks, but Jewish difference.
In the fact of Jewish difference the Greek and Roman world encountered a phenomenon which it did not understand and to which it ultimately reacted with hostility; the active Jewish social offensive further increased this hatred. In contradiction to this reality stood the generally moderate policy of most of the emperors towards the Jews until Hadrian’s time. The reason for this moderation, expressed in the defence of Jewish internal rights throughout the Empire, was not connected with any sympathy for Jewish doctrine or for the Jewish people. The populous diaspora communities, their distribution on both sides of the eastern frontier, and the military potential ascribed to oriental Jewry by the Roman commanders, combined to deter Rome from provoking Jewish hostility so long as this could be avoided. Even Vespasian, after his victory in Judaea, did not abolish the rights of Diaspora Jewry, and Hadrian was the only emperor who attempted to root out Judaism by prohibiting the performance of its fundamental commandments. But concomitantly with Vespasian’s imposition of the discriminatory Jewish tax, two warning notes are heard in the first century. Claudius, in confirming the internal communal rights of the Jews of Alexandria, warns them not to encourage the arrival of additional Jews in the city, lest he be compelled to take measures against them “as those provoking a general sickness throughout the world” (καθάπερ κοινόν τεινα τῆς οἰκουμένης νόσον ἐξεγείροντας).[1296] Domitian, although he did not infringe Jewish rights, took aggressive steps against judaization among the Roman aristocracy.[1297] The conception of Jews, therefore, as authors of an “international conspiracy”, as a nuisance and an anomaly which might be tolerated but could become intolerable, because they were the agents of a world-wide disease, was near to Claudius, and Domitian saw in the diffusion of Jewish ideas in Roman society a danger to the Empire’s established order.
The situation leading to Domitian’s murder in 96 was indeed closely bound up with the impact of Judaism on Roman society. Its occasion was the execution of Flavius Clemens, Domitian’s close kinsman, for judaization. It came as the culmination of the Emperor’s widespread persecution of members of the senatorial order, in which the charge of judaizing frequently figured. Both Dio Cassius and Epictetus, himself the slave of a high equestrian official who probably had Jewish contacts, testify to the widespread influence of Judaism in contemporary Roman society, and Epictetus[1298] describes clearly the intense struggle for influence throughout the Empire between the Syrian, Egyptian and Jewish cults. The opposition to Domitian’s absolutism on the part of the Stoic and Cynic philosophers of the time was considerable, and probably constituted a far more serious factor than historians have appreciated, while Epictetus, who constituted a link between them and the influential circles that suffered from his tyranny, was fully cognizant of the determined stand of the Jewish revolutionaries against imperial oppression.[1299] In the years following the destruction of the Second Temple, in fact, Judaism became closely associated with the protest of the Roman upper classes against Domitian’s repressive rule.[1300] It was Domitian who not only converted the collection of the Jewish tax into an aggressive hunt for secret judaizers, but also investigated collateral descendants of Jesus whom he suspected of messianic aspirations. How far conservative senatorial groups continued to see in Judaism, even after Domitian’s death, a threat to the moral order, is revealed by Tacitus’ anti-Semitic travesty of Jewish history in the Histories (V, 1-13), the more scandalous and calculated because Tacitus was certainly better informed on Jewish character and beliefs than his text could convey.[1301] Yet the apprehensions of these circles were not exaggerated, as time was to show.
1296