Economy AI 27: Tironia - Tax of the Jewish "novices" in the Roman army

The obligation to provide recruits-rookies for the Roman army, and not for the police units, rests on the village as a whole, and the amount of money paid by the population makes it clear that it is intended to finance equipment and supplies for the village's rookies and not to obtain an exemption for the village from the obligation to recruit those rookies

The political and military situation in the Roman Empire naturally dictated, from the beginning of the third century AD onward, the obligation of military service within the Roman army, when it was placed on the ground. In other words, landowners were obliged to invent recruits for the Roman units from among the peasants and/or the harris. The alternative to the recruitment charges in person was converted into a monetary payment under the title of aurum tironicum, that is, in direct translation - "the gold of the apprenticeship". Although this method did not make skin and sinew from the beginning of the fourth century CE, nevertheless its initial traces can definitely be found as early as the Syrian period, right at the same time as the wars that Rome imposed on different regions, or those that were imposed on it.

In light of a Roman inscription discovered in Lod (Lydia) which is in Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) and dated to the beginning of the third century CE, after the granting of the rights of the Roman emperor Caracalla in 212 CE, and which agrees with another inscription in Thrace (northern Greece) from 202 CE. From it we will learn about a privilege given to the residents of the city of Pisos, which frees them from the obligation to man the ranks of the Roman army in the "burgarei" - in the small fortresses, as guards and responsible for the means of transport for man and beast.

The inscription from Lydia confirms that the obligation to provide recruits-novices to the Roman army, and not to the police units, rested on the village as a whole, and that the amount of money paid by the population makes it clear that we are here dealing with the financing of equipment and supplies for the village's novices and not in order to obtain an exemption for the village from the obligation to recruit those newbies. And that responsibility for this munus (service) was piled on the shoulders of the village council.

The question that arises is - why did the emperors of the third century abandon the same old method of recruiting soldiers for the Roman army and adopt a new approach? The answer lies in those new conditions and circumstances that necessitated taking a different path. That is, the multiple wars, mainly foreign wars, which escalated during the time of the emperors Marcus Aurelius (180-161 CE), who took care to expand the borders of the empire and at the same time devoted a lot to the perpetuation of his personality and Commodus his son (192-180 CE), who indulged in a life of pleasure and lust, set up the mechanism The Roman army witnessed unprecedented efforts to recruit soldiers, and this because the multiple dangers - the foreign wars - and all that was implied, and that were involved in those wars did not encourage the Roman population to enlist in the army. The granting of Roman citizenship to the discharged soldiers, together with the discharge grants and other pensions, no longer dazzled the conscript's eye, with the exception of the provision of money, so it is no wonder that the emperors of this period chose to offer tempting salaries to the new soldiers, and often often.

This procedure squeezed the treasures of the Roman Empire and at the same time encouraged the empire to burden the burden of taxes on the people of the provinces, and out of a lack of sensitivity to the macro problems of the entire empire, the emperors chose to base the empire's budget on forced labor and services imposed on the locals.

The civil war with the death of Emperor Commodus greatly exacerbated the above problems and in vain the emperors raised the soldiers' incomes and due to the drop in morale and the spirit of patriotism among the army battalions the emperors decided to transfer the weight of moral power from the ranks of the Italian citizens in the "boot" and in the provinces to the rural population throughout the empire, and this Along with the granting of the exemption from service against monetary payment, the so-called aurum tironicum, and in order for this issue of services and forced labor to be conducted under discipline, organization and order and certainly efficiency, it became necessary to establish strong and proper units of an ad hoc police army, and these were the stationarii (commanders strongholds or police units) or the frumentarii (responsible for grain granaries and fruit stores)

The same recruitment is mentioned, similarly, in the sources of the Sages under the name "Tironia", such as: "And all the flocks were gathered to her - this is the Roman kingdom, which enjoins (obliges) Tyronea from all the nations of the world" (Beresheet Rabbah p. 7). Or "And the king of the Gentiles shall be exalted, this is the kingdom of conviction that she writes (recruits) her tyranny from all the nations of the world" (ibid. XNUMX). To teach us about the sage's interesting knowledge about the scope of the Roman recruitment in a chronological context for the third century CE.

However, there is no mention of the payment of the aforementioned money (aurum tironicum) in the Sage sources, and this matter involves controversy - were the Jews exempted from service in the Roman army forever.

The truth is, as Horni Mori and the late Rabbi Prof. Shimon Appelbaum, that there is no evidence of any privilege exempting the Jews from military service in the Roman Empire, and that exemption that was expressed in Asia as recorded by Joseph Ben Matthew in his composition "The Antiquity of the Jews" was due to the cause of civil wars, and included only Jews who had Roman citizenship in terms of a fairly limited sector.

And in this context it will be said, as the aforementioned Prof. Horni suggested, that the Roman army, in contrast to the Hellenistic, Seleucid and Ptolemaic (Ptolemaic), was mainly based on Roman worship, such as the miracles ("flags") of the legions and the imperial worship in general and the auspicious - the vision of the future in the light of a flight the birds). And from this we will understand the difficulties that were piled up before any Jew who wished to enlist in the Roman army. However, evidence has been found, albeit not many, of Jews serving in the Roman army and even the Midrash backs this up in his book about one student of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananiah who infiltrated the Roman army during the days of Emperor Hadrian (138-117 CE). This can perhaps be understood from the very interesting connections of his rabbi with the Romans and his clear tendency against any rebellion against the Romans. The late Prof. Appelbaum very kindly directed my attention to a Roman inscription referring to a Jew from Caesarea named Barsimau (probably son of Shimon) Callistanis who joined the Roman auxiliary regiment in 132 CE, right at the outbreak of the Ben Kusaba rebellion. And perhaps we can connect these testimonies with the admission of the Roman-Greek historian Dio Cassius about Jews in the Land of Israel who produced weapons for the Roman army in the Land in connection with the aforementioned rebellion, although they intentionally damaged the aforementioned production line so that they would be rejected, thrown away and used by the rebellious units of Ben Kusva. And does this testimony point to the "internship" service?

The Syrian imperial dynasty achieved a kind of modus vivendi with the Jews of the empire, which may have opened a crack in favor of Jews entering service in the Roman army, such as the Jew Germanus the Tammorite who was buried in Beit Shaarim, or Cosmos who had a commanding military position. And Christian authors such as Sulpicius Severus testifying to Jews who served in the Roman army in the fourth century CE, and another Jew buried in Jaffa with a relatively senior rank of cantorion (commander of a unit of a hundred in the Roman standard legion) and other Greco-Roman inscriptions regarding the service of Jews in the Roman army from around the empire will be mentioned. It should be noted, by the way, that the above-mentioned evidence paints an interesting picture of mutual and accurate relationships between Roman soldiers and Jewish soldiers as instructed by the late Prof. Safrai in his research (S.Safrai, The relations between the roman army and the jews of eretz-yisrael, Roman frontier studies, 1967, pp. 225-228).

As we saw above in relation to Thrace, the burgarii were also mentioned among the army recruits from the days of Emperor Hadrian and onwards they were considered military units of locals who were required to defend fortresses on the borders of the empire and along important roads. These received areas of land near them for settlement and agricultural cultivation (a kind of "Nahl" at that time?) and Jews were found among them. And in this regard it is difficult to ignore the following midrash: "The man of the land who made a face for the land... the man of the land is a burgher for its burghers" (Yalkot Shimoni XNUMX, and by the way they performed policing duties at the borders and in the interior of the land.

An echo of this is found in our sources, just as Rabbi Yehuda testified, for example, about the "burganin" (in terms of a corruption of the Greek term "pyrgos" which refers to a citadel, a fortress) related to the agricultural farm, that is to say a villa in the Roman style, and so in the supplement - "the shepherds and the gardener (Uri Thani Keitz or Ela those who dry them) and the burghers and fruit keepers, while they are on their way to spend the night in the city (in Villa Rustica), even though they have darkened outside the boundary (Sabbath), they are like the people of the city and have two thousand cubits for each wind (direction), and while they are on their way to spend the night in the field, they have only two thousand cubits (Tosefta Eruvin 9:XNUMX). The mention of the "Burganin", that is Burgarii, discusses the Jews due to their commitment to the Sabbath. And if so we find Jews in Roman military service long before the time of the Syrian Empire.

It should be noted that there is a settlement called "Borgata" in the Sharon area on Route 57 in the Hefer Valley, named after the ancient settlement of Tengfat of the Talmud, and its origin is from the Latin burgus and the Greek "pyrgos" which refer to a small fort, a watch tower.

In conclusion, we discussed above the function of Jews in the Roman army, those who were not exempted from service, and except for those cases mentioned above, they died according to the same arrangement of the "tenure", or simply preferred/agreed to serve in the Roman army, and perhaps, due to the fact that their registration Most of it does not remain in the literature of the Sages, it can be assumed that these were somewhat swallowed up in general by the other obligations such as "acsania" and "afsania".

for all episodes of the series The economy of the Land of Israel

• AI Economy in Antiquity 24: The Jewish Tax
• Economy AI 23: How did the Jews in the land in the Roman period monitor fairness in trade?
• Economy AI 26: Arnona and Acsania - the Roman taxes