Bishops, mobs and the emperor
Date
388CE
388 CE
A mob instigated by the bishop destroyed the synagogue, and the bishop of Milan talked the emperor out of rebuilding it: a sign of the bishops' new power over the fate of Jewish communities.
Sourced narrative
Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.
6 statements
Legally weakened, Jews were exposed to assaults by local Christian communities led by bishops, whose power grew from the fourth century on. The synagogue was a frequent target. Roman law formally shielded it from destruction and seizure, but the very need for the government to step in reveals how much violence there was. A notorious case: in 388 CE, at Callinicum in present-day Syria, the synagogue was destroyed by a crowd stirred up by the town's bishop. Theodosius the Great wanted it rebuilt, but Ambrose, the powerful bishop of Milan, persuaded him to drop the idea.
02Alexandria, 414
According to the book's timeline, in 414 Christian mobs drove the Jews out of Alexandria.
03Hard to generalize
There is no general rule for Christian-Roman conduct toward the Jews: sometimes the government acted against them, sometimes it defended them. As the empire fragmented from the fifth century, the picture grew more varied still, and in the West, without central imperial power, bishops gained even more weight.
Context
From the fourth century Christianity was no longer a minority but the ruling power. Its laws did more than contain Jews as rivals: they lowered them to second-class citizens, set apart from Christians, deprived of safeguards they had had under the pagan empire and dependent on a government hostile to their faith. Under Christian Rome, Jews faced stereotypes spread by theologians, pressure to convert and assaults, in a situation where the state protected them less, laws hemmed them in and they could be caught between Christian factions or in Rome's wars against the Sasanians and, later, the Muslims. They came off better than the pagans, who all but vanished, but their condition worsened, above all compared with that of the Jews of Babylonia.
§ 01Geography
Where it happened
§ 04Network
Connections
§ 05Bibliography
Further reading
No specific reading recorded for this event.
§ 06Apparatus
Sources on this page
- 01Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 125; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 125inspect
- 02Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 125inspect
- 03Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 520inspect
- 04Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 125inspect
- 05Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 125inspect
- 06Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 127inspect
- 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.