The Mishnah gives in considerable detail the laws that governed the life of the Jew at this period, and also those that regulated the intercourse of Jew and non-Jew. But the Mishnah may after all have been the expression of an ideal as often as it was the record of real occurrences, and the range of its influence during the time of its compilation may have been more limited than its necessarily general phraseology indicates. The Mishnah of Rabbi Judah became the standard text-book in the Jewish academies of Palestine and Babylonia, although not to the total exclusion of other sources of Halakah. That did not occur at once; and even when it was complete, the authority of the presidents of the schools over the Jews resident throughout the world is more or less problematic.
For that reason it is especially necessary to note the invaluable records of actual life that appear in the papyri and inscriptions, especially where they show that the intercourse between Jews and pagans was far from being as precisely limited as the Mishnah would compel us to suppose, and men who are at no pains to conceal their Jewish origin permitted themselves certain indulgences that would certainly not have met with the approval of the doctors at Jamnia and Tiberias.
The tractate of the Mishnah which is called Aboda Zara, “Idolatry” or “Foreign Worship,” lays down the rules under which Jew and heathen may transact such business as common citizenship or residence made inevitable. The essential point throughout is that the Jew must not either directly or indirectly take part, or seem to take part, in the worship accorded the Abomination. Nor are the seemingly trivial regulations despicable for their anxious minuteness. In all probability they are decisions of actual cases, and derive their precision from that fact.[[354]]
Certain passages in Aboda Zara (ii. 1) would unquestionably have made intercourse between Jew and pagan practically impossible except in public or semi-public places. But in the very same treatise it is implied that a pagan might be a guest at the Jew’s table (v. 5); and indeed much of the detail of the entire tractate would be unnecessary if the provision contained in ii. 1 were literally followed out.
The Epigrams of Martial (above, p. [326]), if we believe them, indicate that so far from fleeing the society of pagans for its sexual vices, some Jews at least sought it for the sake of these vices, as was the case with the rival of the Syrian Greek Meleager, more than two centuries before Martial. But it will be noticed that the subject of the last Epigram (xi. 94) is a renegade, who swears strange oaths, and is taunted by Martial with what he is obviously trying to conceal. Besides, as to the particular vice there mentioned, it rests on the malice of the satirist alone. The victim of his wit denies his guilt.
Indeed it is just this particular vice, so widely prevalent in the Greek and Roman world, that the Jewish antagonists of the pagans seized upon at all times. It unquestionably characterized continental Greece and Italy much more than the eastern portions of the empire. For the Jews it seemed to justify the application of the words “Sodom and Gomorrah,” particularly to the general city life of the Greeks. Some Jew or Christian scratched those names on a house wall of Pompeii.[[355]]
It is quite untrue to say that unnatural sexual excesses were so prevalent as to pass without comment among Greeks and Romans generally. However large they loom in the writings of extant poets, we may remember that poets are emotionally privileged people. The sober Roman and Greek did not find any legal or moral offense in illicit love, but unnatural lust was generally offensive from both points of view, and, however widely practised, it was at no time countenanced. Still, Jews and Christians would be justified in comparing their own unmistakable and specific condemnations in this matter with the mere disapproval with which decent heathens regarded it. For the Greek legend that made the fate of Laius, father of Oedipus,[[356]] a punishment of his crime in first bringing pederasty into the world, the Jews had the much more drastic punishment of Sodom; and, in many passages of the Apocrypha, the fact of this vice’s prevalence is dwelt upon as a characteristic difference between Jewish and gentile life.[[357]]
In many other matters there are evidences that not all the regulations of Aboda Zara were carried out by all Jews. In the Tosefta[[358]] we meet the express prohibition of theatrical representations to the Jews, a prohibition which, in view of the fact that dramatic performances were at all times theoretically and actually festivals in honor of Dionysus, seems perfectly natural. But in spite of that, in the great theater at Miletus, some extremely desirable seats in the very front rows are inscribed τόπος τῶν Εἰουδαίων φιλοσεβάστων, “Reserved for His Imperial Majesty’s most loyal Jews.”[[359]] It will therefore not be safe to assume that the Halakic provision which forbade Jews to attend the theater actually meant that Jews as a class did not do so.
But we find even stronger evidences of the fact that the amenities of social life in Greek cities seemed to some Jews to override the decisions of the law schools in Palestine. In Asia Minor a Jew leaves money not merely for the usual purposes of maintaining his monument, but also for the astounding purpose of actually assisting a heathen ceremonial.[[360]] The instance is a late one, but perhaps more valuable for that reason, because the spread of the schools’ influence increased constantly during the third century.
At the fall of the temple the voluntary tax of the shekel or didrachm, which had formerly been paid to the temple at Jerusalem, and which was a vital factor in the very first instances of conflict between the Jews and the Roman authorities (comp. above, p. 226), was converted into an official tax for the support of the central sanctuary of the Roman state on the Capitoline Hill. Whether Roman citizens who were Jews paid it, does not appear. All others however did. The bureau that enforced it was known as the fiscus Iudaicus, the word fiscus indicating here, as always, that the sums so collected were considered as belonging to the treasury of the reigning prince during the time of his reign, rather than to the public treasury.