Economy AI 27: Tironia - the 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

By G.dallorto - Own work, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1336844
By G. dallorto – Own work, Attribution,

The political and military situation in the Roman Empire naturally dictated, from the beginning of the third century CE onward, the obligation of military service within the Roman army, when it was placed on the ground. That is, landowners were obliged to invent recruits for the Roman units from among the peasants and/or the harris. The alternative of the recruitment charges in their bodies 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 tendons from the beginning of the fourth century AD, 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 AD, after the granting of the rights of the Roman emperor Caracalla in 212 AD, and which agrees with another inscription in Thrace (northern Greece) from 202 AD. 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 "Borgrei" - in the small fortresses, as guards and responsible for means of transportation 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 AD), 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 AD), who indulged in a life of pleasure and desire, set up the mechanism The Roman army witnessed unprecedented efforts to recruit soldiers, and this because of the dangers The many - the foreign wars - for all that this implies, 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 the 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 aforementioned problems and in vain the emperors raised the soldiers' incomes and due to the decline 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 granting the exemption from the service against a 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 efficient, it became necessary to establish strong and proper units of an ad hoc police army, and these were the stationarii (commanders of strongholds or police units) or the frumentarii (responsible for grain and fruit stocks)

The same recruitment is mentioned, similarly, in the sources of the Sages under the name "Tironia", such as: "And all the flocks were gathered together - this is the Roman kingdom, which enjoins (obliges) Tyronea from all the nations of the world" (Beresheet Rabbah p. 7). Gentiles, this is the kingdom of conviction which writes (mobilizes) its tyranny from all the nations of the world" (ibid. MA). To teach us about the sage's interesting knowledge about the scope of the Roman recruitment in a chronological context for the third century AD.

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

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 above-mentioned 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 faced by any Jew who wanted to enlist in the Roman army Much about the service of Jews in the Roman army and even the Midrash backs this up in his book about one student of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hanania who infiltrated the Roman army in the days of Emperor Hadrian (138-117 CE). This can perhaps be understood from the fact that his rabbi had interesting connections with the Romans and his rabbi's clear tendency against Any rebellion in the Romans The late Prof. Appelbaum very kindly directed my attention to a Roman inscription referring to the Jew From Caesarea named Barsimao (probably son of Shimon) Callistanis who joined the Roman auxiliary regiment in 132 AD, right at the outbreak of the rebellion of Ben Khosba. Perhaps this evidence can be connected with the admission of the Roman-Greek historian Dio Cassius about Jews in Israel who produced weapons for the Roman army in the land of Zika to the above-mentioned rebellion, although they intentionally damaged the above-mentioned production line in order for them to be disqualified, thrown away and will be 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 writers 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 correct 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 recruits to the army. From the time of Emperor Hadrian 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 burghered for its burgherness" (Yalkot Shimoni 36, and carried out By the way, policing duties at the borders and inside the country.

An echo of this is found in our sources, just as Rabbi Yehuda testified, for example, about the "borganin" (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 the 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 Borgenin and fruit keepers, while they were on their way to spend the night in the city (at the Villa Rustica), even though it got dark After all, they are like the people of the city and have two thousand cubits for each wind (direction), and while they spend the night in the field, they only have two thousand cubits (Tosefta Irubin 9:XNUMX). The commitment to the Sabbath. And if so we find Jews in a Roman military function long before the time of the Syrian Empire.

It should be noted that a settlement called "Borgata" in the Sharon region on highway 57 in the Hefer Valley, is named after the ancient settlement of Tengfat the Talmud, and originates from the Latin burgus and the Greek "pyrgos" which refer to a small fortress, 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".

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5 תגובות

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  2. Peace be upon Jacob. thank you for your response.
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  4. Borgata is also mentioned in the New Testament. I guess you are very careful about the honor of ultra-Orthodox people. Christians come from us.
    Magdala, Borgata, Nazareth.

    They respect the Psalms very much - the nose that in Latin the sharpness of the words loses its luster.

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