Palestine Exploration Fund - Quarterly Statement for 1894/The Jews under Rome

by Palestine Exploration Fund

 

THE JEWS UNDER ROME.

By Major C. R. Conder, R.E., D.C.L., &c.

In a former number of the Quarterly Statement (October, 1890) I gave some account of the foreign influences on Jews in Palestine after the Christian era. It is here proposed to give some account of Jewish life in the first and second centuries a.d., under Roman rule in Syria, which—in spite of the terrible episodes of the sieges of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and 132 A.D.—was for the greater part of the period a peaceful domination over a very mixed population at a time when the Jews were very prosperous and fairly contented.

The most authentic sources of information are the inscriptions of the age—Greek, Roman, and Aramaic—and the scattered notes which occur in the most unexpected places in the Mishnah or "Second Law," completed before 200 A.D. at Tiberias, and written in the later Hebrew. The Mishnah is the Rabbinical comment on the Law, a work divided into six orders (Seeds, Feasts, Women, Damages, Holy Things, and Purifications), including 63 tracts in all. The well-known edition of Surenhusius including the comments of Maimonides, Bartenora, and others, occupies three stout folios, and gives the Hebrew text unpointed. The great lexicon of Buxtorff is indispensable for its study. The work, as a whole, is a dry digest of the decisions of famous Rabbis on cases connected with the subjects above-named, but the incidental notices include most valuable accounts of Jewish customs during the time when Herod's Temple was still standing, taken from the remembrances of the earlier Rabbis who survived its fall, and also notices of Jewish practices, occupations, and manners during the times when the Sanhedrin sat at Jamnia, and finally at Tiberias.^[1] To these subjects—sometimes illustrated by the evidence of existing buildings, inscriptions, coins, and also by modern customs, it is proposed to draw attention under the various headings which follow.

1. After leaving Jamnia in 135 A.D. the Sanhedrin sat for a time at Ousha (now Húsheh), east of the plain of Acre. It then removed to Shafram (Shefr 'Amr), two miles north-east. Thence it migrated to Beth Shaaraim, probably Sha'rah, on the plateau east of Tabor, and finally settled at Tiberias (see Dr. Neubauer's "Geog. Tab," pp. 198-200).