Roman legislation on the Jews constitutes one of the major sources for the study of Jewish history in late antiquity and in the Middle Ages.1

Its official origin and character make it particularly useful for observ­ing the interplay between individuals and institutions, between ideolo­gies and practical contingencies, whenever the Imperial government acted on matters specifically Jewish.

This documentary evidence falls into three categories. The first, chronologically of a relatively short duration, is identical with the life­duration of the individual law. It consists of a series of events that begins with the immediate causes and circumstances of the specific legislation and ends with the eventual repeal or obsolescence of the law. The second, of a longer duration, consists of distinct legal tradi­tions on specific subjects. These traditions encompassed individual acts of legislation and exerted influence considerably stronger than that of any individual law. Legal traditions guided the government when it took a position on such problems as the legality of synagogues or the ownership by Jews of non-Jewish slaves. The third has the codes as its source material and deals with the fusion of individual laws and legal traditions into systematic and comprehensive codes. One is able to observe the subsequent effects of these codes, far removed—in time and in space—from the original contexts in which they evolved. The history of the codes promulgated by Theodosius II and Justinian is an excellent example of the possibilities of research on this level.

The extant legal texts bearing on the Jews and preserved in Roman legal collections date from the middle of the second century to the middle of the sixth, but they do not reflect a sustained legislative activity throughout these centuries. They constitute five chronological groups: (1) remains of pagan legislation, consisting of six texts dating from the middle of the second century to the late third century (Nos.

The greater part of our source material derives from the late fourth and the first third of the fifth centuries. This corpus is of prime impor­tance for research on all three levels of inquiry. The large concentra­tion of material from a period measured in decades makes it particu­larly useful for the study of developments within a short or medium period of time. Slightly more laws were enacted in the Eastern part of the Empire during the period represented by group 3 than in the Western part, twenty-four as against seventeen, but this slight differ­ence does not warrant any real distinction between the policies adopted by the two Imperial administrations on the subject of the Jews. The legal unity of the Empire, professed in principle and gener­ally maintained in practice, was confirmed by the relevance of these laws for the Empire as a whole. The three codes, officially promul­gated by Theodosius II in 438, Alaric II in 506, and Justinian between 529 and 534, reflect Empire-wide legal processes of a long duration.