For three centuries, the Roman Empire had no official religion. It had gods - dozens of them, ranked by province and patronage - and it had Jews, who were exempted from the requirement to honour those gods on the sound administrative reasoning that the Jews were old, numerous, and difficult. The exemption was not warmth. It was pragmatism. But it was real, and it held. Then, in the fourth century, everything shifted. Constantine legalised Christianity in 313 CE; his successors promoted it; and by the reign of Theodosius I the question was no longer which gods Rome would tolerate but which faith it would enforce. In 380 CE Theodosius issued the Edict of Thessalonica, making Nicene Christianity the empire's required orthodoxy. The world the Jewish community had navigated for generations - awkward, sometimes dangerous, but legally predictable - was now organised against a different principle entirely.
The Jews were not expelled. That is the important first thing to say. The older Roman habit of toleration was not abolished overnight, and the rabbis of the Galilee continued assembling the discussions that would become the Jerusalem Talmud under this very sky. But permission is a different thing from right. What had been a status embedded in Roman pluralism became, from the 380s onward, a tolerance granted by a Christian state that regarded Jewish practice as an inferior remnant, spiritually superseded, to be contained rather than protected. The law codes that followed - collected in the Codex Theodosianus of 438 CE - are a careful map of exactly where the fence now ran.
The record
The Edict of Thessalonica (Cunctos populos), issued 27 February 380 CE by Emperors Theodosius I, Gratian, and Valentinian II, declared that all Roman subjects must profess the faith held by the bishops of Rome and Alexandria - explicitly Nicene Christianity - and that those who did not would be punished by divine judgement and imperial authority. Alongside it, repeated edicts through the 380s and 390s prohibited sacrifice, closed pagan temples, and banned heretical Christian sects. The Jewish position in this legal restructuring was ambiguous: synagogues retained a formal protection, but Jews were barred from holding public office over Christians, from building new synagogues (in principle), and from proselytising. These provisions appear in Books 16.8 and 16.9 of the Codex Theodosianus (published 438 CE), the empire's first systematic legal code, which preserved the earlier edicts. (Codex Theodosianus, ed. Mommsen & Meyer, 1905; English translation: Pharr, Princeton University Press, 1952.)
What this meant on the ground varied enormously by place and decade. In the Galilee, the Patriarchate - the institution of the Nasi, the hereditary head of the Jewish community recognised by Rome - survived until around 429 CE, when Theodosius II abolished it and diverted its tax revenues to the imperial treasury. That abolition was itself a legal statement: the body that had mediated between Roman authority and the Jewish world since the second century simply ceased to exist. In Alexandria, in Antioch, in the coastal cities of the Land of Israel, the mood in these decades ran hotter. Bishop Ambrose of Milan famously intervened in 388 CE when Theodosius ordered the reconstruction of a synagogue in Callinicum (modern Raqqa, Syria) that a Christian mob had burnt down - arguing, successfully, that the emperor could not compel Christians to rebuild a Jewish house of worship. The emperor backed down. The synagogue was not rebuilt. The principle had been tested and the answer was clear: in a Christian empire, Jewish property did not have the same claim on state protection that it once had.
The record
The Callinicum synagogue affair of 388 CE is documented in two letters by Ambrose of Milan to Emperor Theodosius I (Epistles 40 and 41, in Patrologia Latina vol. 16). Ambrose argues that no Christian bishop should be compelled to rebuild a synagogue, frames the burning as a legitimate religious act, and threatens to withhold the Eucharist from the emperor if he persists in demanding restitution. Theodosius, who had already imposed a penalty on the local bishop responsible, rescinded it. The episode is analysed by Neil McLynn in Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (University of California Press, 1994), which reads it as the moment Ambrose established the principle of episcopal immunity from imperial correction on religious matters - with Jews as the incidental test case.
There is something important to hold onto here, alongside the record of restriction. The Jewish community did not wait passively for the empire to decide its fate. The decades bracketing 390 CE are precisely the period in which the Jerusalem Talmud (Yerushalmi) reached something close to its final edited form, in the academies of Tiberias and Caesarea. The rabbis were not recording a community in retreat. They were building the intellectual and legal architecture of a civilisation that intended to outlast whatever political arrangement currently obtained. The empire was Christianising. The academies kept going. The Talmud, compiled under a Christian empire that regarded Judaism as superseded, became one of the most durable structures of thought in human history. The hostile framework and the creative defiance exist in the same generation, in the same landscape.
The record
The Jerusalem Talmud (Talmud Yerushalmi) is conventionally dated to c. 350-400 CE in its final redaction, compiled at the academies of Tiberias and Caesarea in Roman Palestine. Unlike the Babylonian Talmud, it was never fully edited and shows signs of abrupt closure - plausibly reflecting the deteriorating conditions of the late fourth century. The standard critical edition is the Talmud Yerushalmi (Venice, 1523-1524, the editio princeps); modern scholarship on its redaction is summarised in Gunter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (2nd English ed., T&T Clark, 1996), pp. 164-180. The text is studied at traditional yeshivot and is available in critical edition from the Academy of the Hebrew Language, Jerusalem.
The Christianisation of the Roman Empire did not destroy the Jewish community. It changed the terms on which that community existed - from awkward-but-recognised to tolerated-but-subordinate - and it set a template that mediaeval Europe would inherit and intensify. The fence built by the Codex Theodosianus was not the last fence. But the community on the other side of it was producing the Talmud, and the Talmud outlasted every empire that ever tried to contain it.
