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ZAKHORIUM
PTEN

Protected by law, marginalized by society

Date

312CE

312–414 CE

With Constantine, the Church gained a defender on the throne. Judaism remained legal, but Jews became a minority vulnerable to Christian mobs, from Callinicum to Alexandria.

Religious historyAntisemitism and persecutionPolitical history41.8900°N 12.4913°E
50 BCE
50 CE
100 CE
Between Caesar and God: each bar is an event of the period; this one is in coral.

Sourced narrative

Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.

5 statements

01A minority that grew

In the first two or three centuries, Christian hostility may have threatened Jews no more than Samaritan hostility did. Even after the punishments that followed the revolts, Judaism's legal standing changed little: Rome treated it as a legitimate, protected religion, whereas Christianity went through several waves of official persecution. The Samaritans today number a few hundred; the Christians, by contrast, grew quickly, and their anti-Judaism weighed more as their influence increased. In the first century they were already in Syria, Asia Minor, Greece and Rome (where the agitation caused by Christian preaching led to another expulsion of the city's Jews in the 40s) and were winning African converts; by the second century they were throughout the empire and beyond. Still persecuted in the early fourth century, they then won over the emperor himself: in 312, before a battle, Constantine I had a vision and ordered his troops to put a sign of Christ on their equipment. From then on, nearly every emperor protected the Church.

02Legal but vulnerable

The Christian empire never outlawed Judaism, but Jews became exposed as they had not been before. Christian mobs attacked synagogues, as they did pagan temples, and turned some into churches; they could also expel Jewish residents from their towns, as in Alexandria in 414. The authorities did not always approve and sometimes stepped in, but not even the emperor could do everything: in 388, after the synagogue of Callinicum in Mesopotamia was burned, Theodosius wanted to have it rebuilt and backed down before Saint Ambrose. The Church did not seek to wipe out the Jews, who were kept, much as the Old Testament itself was kept, but they became a marginal minority in a society premised on their alleged theological failings.

Context

Not everything, however, is explained by conflict. The Roman world itself was changing: it split into two halves in the third century, gained a new eastern capital, Constantinople, faced migrations, invasions and economic crises, and gradually became Christian. Historians therefore usually call the span from the third century through the Muslim conquests of the 600s and 700s 'late antiquity', a transition between the pagan empire and the medieval cultures, marked by the growing strength of monotheism. Jesus and the disciples kept the Sabbath. He allowed debatable practices, such as letting his hungry disciples pluck ears of grain, but what was permitted on the Sabbath was argued among Jews generally, and Jesus never suggests changing the day of worship. The switch to Sunday, day of the resurrection, came after Paul, among Christians of Gentile origin who did not feel bound by the 'Old Covenant'; a landmark was the official adoption of Sunday as a day of rest in the fourth century. The change proclaimed a new beginning and distance from the Jews, but by carrying features of the Sabbath over to Sunday, Christians also acknowledged a tie to Judaism.

§ 01Geography

Where it happened

Gazetteer coordinates (Pleiades for ancient places; Natural Earth and Wikidata for modern ones) over modern physical geography (Natural Earth). Coastlines and the Dead Sea have changed since antiquity.
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§ 04Network

Connections

§ 05Bibliography

Further reading

No specific reading recorded for this event.

§ 06Apparatus

Sources on this page

  1. 01Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 118; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 520inspect
  2. 02Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 118; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 520inspect
  3. 03Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 117inspect
  4. 04Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 119inspect
  5. 05Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 116; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 116inspect
  • Documented evidenceAttested by contemporary evidence: texts, inscriptions, coins, papyri or archaeology.
  • Scholarly reconstructionHistorians' inference from indirect evidence.
  • Tradition or narrativeA literary, traditional or religious account; significant in itself, but not independently verified.
  • Contested interpretationScholars explicitly disagree; see the positions in the debate.
  • Illustrative reconstructionA hypothesis or visual scheme to guide reading; not a historical claim.