Judeans in Asia Minor and Greece During the Late Republic and the Early Empire

CHAPTER 8 Judeans in Asia Minor and Greece during the Late Republic and the Early Empire After the immigration of Judeans into the Greek cities of Asia Minor as early as the start of the second century BCE, the documents preserved in Josephus’s Antiquitates reveal evidence for the Greek cities’ resistance to Judean meetings (in Ephesus) and to money collection for the payment of the Temple tax (in Miletus and later Ephesus), strong enough that one city issued a formal com- plaint to a proconsul on account of his intervention (as in Tralles) on behalf of Judeans. Judeans were not always permitted to organize, although the ubiquity of voluntary associations such as synodoi and thiasoi might suggest that such practices were everywhere permitted. These documents indicate that Judeans needed the assistance of the high priest’s diplomacy, and they themselves often needed to petition the proconsul in order to compel cities to allow meetings and the collection of the Temple tax. By the early first century CE, they still found themselves required to attend court on the Sabbath and were subject to the occasional theft of their funds reserved for the Temple tax. Although Josephus uses the language of rights to describe the Judeans’ allowance to practice ancestral customs, those rights were not universally recognized as such. Moreover, a detailed narrative of one conflict over these issues, from 14 BCE, reveals that the picture was even more complicated. At least by 14 BCE, if not sooner, Greeks were no longer seeking, at least through official means, to restrict the Judeans’ capacity to organize to keep the Sabbath or collect the Temple tax (although this would still happen, on occasion), but they were imposing certain obligations that seemed to flow from the Judeans’ civic sta- tus, such as the payment of liturgies from monies collected to pay the Temple tax, appearances in court on the Sabbath and military service. These two sets of obligations of local Judeans, their practice of ancestral customs and obligations as citizens, came into seemingly irresolvable conflict. Documents spanning the history of Judean settlement in Asia Minor in the Hellenistic and early Roman era describe this long-running cultural struggle. An examination of Acts of the Apostles further shows connections between the silversmiths’ riot during Paul’s stay in Ephesus between 52 and 54 CE and the earlier conflicts. Josephus’s two collections of letters to Greek cities by provincial governors, by Agrippa and Augustus, as well as these cities’ own decrees, provide a wealth © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�9�35�_004 Judeans In Asia Minor And Greece 199 of knowledge about the Judeans of Asia in the second and first centuries BCE. In recent debate, the individual documents have been, by and large, accepted as authentic.1 Most, but not all, of the documents given by Josephus at A.J. 14.190–264 and 16.162–173 pertaining to the Diaspora can be divided among a few discrete his- torical episodes. Two documents, one from Sardis and one from Laodicea, date to the reign of Hyrcanus I between 134 to 104 BCE and concern his diplomatic endeavors in Asia Minor. Two early documents from Ionia, from Ephesus in 74 BCE and from Miletus in the 60s BCE, are the result of Roman proconsu- lar governors’ interventions to order Greek cities to allow Judeans to celebrate the Sabbaths and do all things according to their paternal customs. Another group of documents concerns the exemption of Judean Roman citizens from military service during the Roman civil wars of the 50s and 40s BCE, periods of intensive recruitment of Roman forces in the East. Finally, a series of decisions beginning early in Augustus’s principate addressed civic interference with the sending of Judean sacred money from Ionia (and perhaps Asia generally) and the conflict between court dates and the Sabbath. The documents suggest widespread cultural conflict between the Diaspora Judeans and the communities they lived within. The collection concerns a handful of cities, some of which figure more than once: Ephesus, Miletus and perhaps other cities of Ionia; from outside Ionia, Tralles, Sardis, Laodicea, and Halicarnassus; and from the islands of Delos and perhaps Parium. It is true that we read nothing here of Judean communities in Apamea, Acmonia, Antioch by Pisidia, and Iconium, where we know significant Judean populations existed, in the case of Apamea at least from the mid-first century BCE, and in the case of Antioch, Acmonia and Iconium from the mid-first century CE.2 Limitations aside, the evidence that does exist suggests serious and long-lasting conflicts in many of these cities. 1 For the most recent argument for the authenticity of the documents, which also convinc- ingly explains the various errors found in them, see Pucci Ben Zeev 1998, 357–68. For use of the documents as authentic, see Smallwood 1976, 120–43, where their authenticity is merely assumed, as well as Vermes, Millar, et al. III.1, 116–7. See also Rajak 1984, 109, 1985, 20–1, Gruen 2002, 85, and with some misgivings, Barclay 1996, 262–3. The last attempt to discredit them (Moehring 1975, 135–140) was made over forty years ago, but its argument has not found a sympathetic audience. 2 On Apamea, see Cicero, Pro Flacco 68, and on Acmonia see MAMA VI 262. Acts of the Apostles describes the Judean communities in Antioch (13:14–50) and Iconium (13:51–14:5) in some detail..

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