It is easy to understand how important this item of state service became, when we recall how large a part of the municipal budgets in England during many centuries was concerned with the care of the poor. But after the disintegration of the slave system on its economic side, the number of persons for whose care this provision had to be made must have been much greater than it was in England at any time. If nothing else, the minute care with which the burdens of wardship were apportioned, the precautions against their evasion, the great part its discussion played in legal literature,[[393]] will make it evident that wardship of minors was a vitally important matter, and its administration one of the chief functions of citizenship in the empire. Many groups of men were practically exempted from all other state dues, provided the guardianship of minors within that group was assumed.
The maintenance of the poor is almost a corollary of the compulsory wardship of women and minors. The artisan whose efforts no longer sufficed to maintain his family often absconded, or in very many cases succumbed physically to his tasks, leaving in either case a family for whose wardship his kinsmen or colleagues had to provide. The state foundations instituted and maintained by Trajan and his successors were probably abandoned during the third century, when the tutela was systematized and minutely regulated.
All in all, every member of the state as such had certain fiscal duties to the state, munera, and his performance of these munera determined his place in the state. The social cleavage between the honestiores, the “better classes,” and the humiliores, “the lower classes,” was of very great importance in criminal law, since the severity of the penalty varied according to the class to which the convicted criminal belonged; but we are not told on what basis the judge determined whether any given man was honestior or humilior, and the whole distinction seems somewhat un-Roman.[[394]] For other purposes the various honors and ranks which multiplied in spite of the sinking significance of the many constituent communities were much less important than the drastically enforced classification of citizens by the taxes they paid.
The Jews of the Roman empire were to be found in all the classes that existed. As long as innumerable forms of local citizenship existed, distinct from citizenship in the Roman state, Jews might be met in all those groups. But when the Constitution of Caracalla merged all the local forms of citizenship in the civitas Romana, practically all the Jews then living in the empire became Roman citizens, although it is highly likely that the old names did not at once disappear.
Only one exception is known to have been made by Caracalla. A certain class of inhabitants known as the dediticii were excluded from his general grant. To analyze the exact position of these dediticii would demand more detailed argument than can here be offered, especially since it is a highly controversial matter. Recently it has been urged that all those who paid a poll-tax, particularly in Egypt and Syria, were classed as dediticii and consequently excluded from Roman citizenship. For this, however, there is not the remotest evidence. In the Institutes of Gaius[[395]] there is an unfortunate lacuna where the matter is discussed, but from what is said there, it is likely that as early as the Antonines the dediticii in Rome were a class of freedmen suffering legal disabilities for proven offenses, and that there were few others. The exemption of the dediticii from the benefits of the Edict of Caracalla was therefore perfectly natural, and did not in the least imply the exemption of those who paid the poll-tax in Egypt and Syria, among whom were many Jews.
As Roman citizens domiciled in the various quarters of the empire, the Jews were subjected to the obligations that went with that domicile. So in Egypt a great number of Jews paid a poll-tax, although many of them, especially in Alexandria, were exempt. In Syria and Asia, where many communities still had tribute to pay, the Jewish members of those communities were equally assessed.
But besides being legally domiciled in some definite place, the Jews in every place formed cult-organizations. Apostasy in the case of the Jew meant no more than the abandoning of this organization, “separating himself from the congregation.”[[396]] Those who did so found themselves at once obliged to perform the rites of the state worship in the many cities where such rites were legally enforced, or to enter other cult-associations, since it was only as a member of the Jewish corporation that he secured the privilege of abstention.
These Jewish corporations were known as “synagogues,” a term more properly denoting the meetings of the societies. The word was used of other associations as well as of the Jewish. A word of kindred origin and meaning, synodos, was almost a general term for corporation everywhere.[[397]] However “synagogue” became gradually appropriated by the Jewish collegia, and in inscriptions in which the word occurs it is generally safe to assume a Jewish origin.
Like all other similar corporations or guilds, the Jewish synagogues had special munera. One which was almost unique was the Jewish tax, the fiscus Iudaicus, or didrachm, which, since 70, had been levied on all the Jews, originally for the support of the Capitoline temple, but probably long merged into the general fiscus, or imperial treasury. It is unique, because there does not seem to have been any other tax which, like this one, was wholly devoid of local basis, and did not depend on domicile at all. Otherwise membership in the Jewish synagogue conferred a highly valued and general exemption. The Jews could not be required to perform any task that violated their religious conviction. This privilege is formulated in a constitution of Caracalla, but it seems rather a confirmation of one already existing than a new grant.[[398]]
According to this privilege, Jews were immediately relieved from all dues connected with local or state worship or with the temples. As many Jews were in a financial position that would ordinarily invite the imposition of just these liturgies, that meant a very great relief. All other liturgies, including the tutela both of Jews and of non-Jews, we are expressly told the Jews were subject to.