The history of the Jews in the Roman Empire traces the interaction of Jews and Romans during the period of the Roman Empire (27 BC – 476 AD). A Jewish diaspora had migrated to Rome and to the territories of Roman Europe from the land of Israel, Anatolia, Babylon and Alexandria in response to economic hardship and incessant warfare over the land of Israel between the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires from the 4th to the 1st centuries BC. In Rome, Jewish communities thrived economically. Jews likely became a significant part of the Roman Empire's population in the first century AD, though there is no agreement in academia about the exact numbers and most numbers are speculative at best.
Roman general Pompey conquered Jerusalem and its surroundings by 63 BC. The Romans deposed the ruling Hasmonean dynasty of Judaea (in power from 140 BC) and the Roman Senate declared Herod the Great "King of the Jews" in 40 BC. Judea proper, Samaria and Idumea became the Roman province of Judaea in 6 AD. Jewish–Roman tensions resulted in several Jewish–Roman wars between the years 66 and 135 AD, which resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple and the institution of the Jewish Tax in 70 AD (those who paid the tax were exempt from the obligation of making sacrifices to the Roman imperial cult).
In 313, Constantine and Licinius issued the Edict of Milan giving official recognition to Christianity as a legal religion. Constantine the Great moved the Roman capital from Rome to Constantinople 330, and with the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, Christianity became the state church of the Roman Empire. Christian emperors progressively restricted Jewish legal rights and communal autonomy over several centuries, while also legislating to protect Jews from violence and preserve their religious practice.
Roman Republic
Even before Rome annexed Judea as a province, the Romans had interacted with Jews from their diasporas settled in Rome for a century and a half. Many cities of the Roman provinces in the eastern Mediterranean contained very large Jewish communities, dispersed from the time of the sixth century BC. Though the Romans guaranteed the practice of Jewish religion, they resented the spread of foreign religions among Roman natives and for this reason expelled the Jews from Rome in 139 BC (as had also happened to the cult of Bacchus in 186 BC).
Before the Romans got involved in Judaean politics, they supported the Maccabean Revolt and Judah Maccabee obtained an alliance with the Roman Republic. Rome's deeper involvement in the Eastern Mediterranean dated from 63 BC, following the end of the Third Mithridatic War, when Rome made Syria a province. After the defeat of Mithridates VI of Pontus, the proconsul Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great) remained to secure the area, including a visit to the Jerusalem Temple. The former king Hyrcanus II was confirmed as ethnarch of the Jews by Julius Caesar in 44 BC.Jos., AJ XIV 190–195. In 37 BC, the Herodian Kingdom was established as a Roman client kingdom and in 6 AD parts became a province of the Roman Empire, named Iudaea Province.Benjamin Isaac The Near East under Roman Rule: Selected Papers (Leiden: Brill 1998). Herod's temple was world-famous and important gentiles offered sacrifices for pious reasons, such as Herod's friend Marcus Agrippa, who offered a hecatomb in 15 BC.
Roman Empire
During the first century AD, Roman rule in Judaea was often clumsy and unsuccessful. Due to chronic insolvency, raids on the Temple were frequent and led to outrage, there were numerous bands of brigands and the mixed Greek-Jewish populations in the towns often led to tensions. There were at least three uprisings: one led by Judas of Gamala in 6 AD, another one in 44 AD led by Theudas, and one in the time of Procurator Felix (52–60 AD). With the slow adoption of emperor worship, relations deteriorated swiftly between the once allies, and Jewish refusal to participate in the formalities of state worship was seen as disloyalty. Roman hostility was enthusiastically supported by Greek intellectuals and especially Alexandria, a large Jewish center, was a center of antisemitic propaganda. These included slanders that the Jews had no claim on Israel, that the Jews worshipped asses and had an ass's head in the temple or that they conducted secret human sacrifices in the temple. Feldman suggests that the many messianic movements in Judaea around the first and second century AD were likely a source of anxiety to the Romans.
The efforts of Caligula to install a statue of himself in the Temple (37–41 AD), which required the intervention of Philo of Alexandria and Herod Agrippa to prevent, has been proposed as the "first open break between Rome and the Jews"; although problems were already evident during the Census of Quirinius in 6 AD and under Sejanus (before 31 AD). The emperor Tiberius had rectified the latter by intervening and ultimately recalling Pontius Pilate to Rome.H.H. Ben-Sasson, A History of the Jewish People, Harvard University Press, 1976, , The Crisis Under Gaius Caligula, pages 254–256: "The reign of Gaius Caligula (37–41 CE) witnessed the first open break between the Jews and the Julio-Claudian empire. Until then – if one accepts Sejanus' heyday and the trouble caused by the census after Archelaus' banishment – there was usually an atmosphere of understanding between the Jews and the empire.... These relations deteriorated seriously during Caligula's reign, and, though after his death the peace was outwardly re-established, considerable bitterness remained on both sides.... Caligula ordered that a golden statue of himself be set up in the Temple in Jerusalem.... Only Caligula's death, at the hands of Roman conspirators (41), prevented the outbreak of a Jewish-Roman war that might well have spread to the entire East." During the time of Emperor Nero the Jews seem to have had some influence at the court, possibly through the Jewish actor Alityros and even the emperor's wife, who might have been a symphathiser with the Jews.
In the Greek cities in the east of the Roman empire, tensions often arose between the Greek and Jewish populations. One major point of contention were the privileges granted by certain Roman rulers to the Jews. Writing around 90 AD, the Jewish author Josephus cited decrees by Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Augustus and Claudius, endowing Jewish communities with a number of rights.Jos., AJ XIV 185–267; 301–323; XVI 160–178; XIX 278–311. Central privileges included the right to be exempted from polis religious rituals and the permission "to follow their ancestral laws, customs and religion". Jews were also exempted from military service and the provision of Roman troops.Jos., AJ XIV 228. Contrary to what Josephus wants his readers to believe, the Jews did not have the status of religio licita (permitted religion) as this status did not exist in the Roman empire, nor were all Roman decrees concerning the Jews positive. Instead, the regulations were made as a response to individual requests to the emperor. The decrees were deployed by Josephus "as instruments in an ongoing political struggle for status".Rajak, Tessa (2007), 'Document and Rhetoric in Josephus: Revisiting the "Charter" for the Jews', in: Shaye J. D. Cohen and Joshua J. Schwartz (eds.), Studies in Josephus and the Varieties of Ancient Judaism Louis H. Feldman Jubilee Volume (Leiden: Brill), p. 178. .
Because of their one-sided viewpoint, the authenticity of the decrees has been questioned many times, but they are now thought to be largely authentic.Except for: Still, Josephus gave only one side of the story by leaving out negative decisions and pretending that the rulings were universal. This way, he carried out an ideological message showing that the Romans allowed the Jews to carry out their own customs and rituals; the Jews were protected in the past and were still protected by these decisions in his own time. However, Romans seem to have been opposed in general to Jewish missionary activities.
Though Jews seem to have been numerous in the Roman Empire, there is no consensus on the number of Jews in the Roman Empire. Some authors have suggested as high as 7 million people. but this estimation has been questioned.McGing, Brian: Population and proselytism: how many Jews were there in the ancient world?, in Bartlett, John R. (ed.): Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman Cities. Routledge, 2002.Feldman, Louis H.: Judaism And Hellenism Reconsidered. p. 185. Brill, 2006. Specifically, the number seems to be based on the misreading of a medieval text of the 13th-century author Bar Hebraeus.
Jewish–Roman wars
In 66 AD, the First Jewish–Roman War began after a Graeco-Jewish lawsuit in which the Greek party won. Violence escalated when the Roman governor Gessius Florus plundered the Temple treasury, followed by the suspension of sacrifices at the temple in honour of the people and the emperor of Rome and the massacre of several civilians as well as the Roman garrison. The revolt was both a civil war between the Greek and the Jews as well as between various Jewish factions, specifically the Hellenised Jews and more traditional Jews. The revolt was ultimately crushed by the future Roman emperors Vespasian and Titus. During the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the Romans destroyed the Temple and plundered its artifacts, including the menorah, and its inhabitants killed or enslaved. In the aftermath of the antisemitic sentiment continued to spread and the fall of Jerusalem was taken as evidence that God hated the Jews, such as by the author Philostratus or Tacitus who repeated also previous Greek antisemitic smears. Nevertheless, the Romans did not reverse their policy of toleration of the Jews and did not diminish the privileges granted to Jewish communities across the empire, with the only retribution being the conversion of the Temple tax into a humiliating poll tax called the Fiscus Judaicus for the upkeep of temple of Jupiter Capitolinus.
According to rabbinic sources, Yohanan ben Zakkai, a prominent Pharisaic leader who had opposed the revolt, was smuggled out of Jerusalem in a coffin and was able to obtain permission from the Roman authorities to set up a center for regulation of the Jewish religion at Jamnia. Both Yohanan and the synagogue of Jamnia became normative institutions in Judaism and established many Jewish rules while also completing the canonization of the Tanakh. Yohanan's pupil Joshua ben Hananiah urged the Jews to accept Roman suzerainty and it is likely that many rabbis were reconciled with Roman rule. The Jewish leaders of Alexandria even handed over 600 Sicarii, who had fled after the defeat to Egypt, to the Roman authorities in order to prove their loyalty and restore the relation. Under Emperor Domitian the fiscus iudaicus was collected strictly and converts to Judaism punished, but this seems to have ended under Emperor Nerva and also the Diaspora Revolt in 115–117 did not change Roman policy.