Sharing the Burden: Jewish Soldiers in the Roman Army in the Second and Third Centuries CE

The purpose of this article is to elucidate the contribution of Jewish soldiers to the defense of the Roman Empire in the third century. The first part discusses Jewish soldiers in the Roman army during the second and third centuries by looking at literary and epigraphic sources. The second part focuses on a passage of Zosimus’s Historia nova that provides evidence that Jewish soldiers played an important, if not decisive, role in the Battle of Emesa in 272 CE. These Jewish soldiers may have been part of the nasi’s Gothic Guard, whose existence is attested in the Jerusalem Talmud. I establish that Jewish soldiers were attested in the Roman army throughout the third century and that, while their contribution was relatively minor, the nasi’s Gothic Guard, supplemented by other paramilitary forces composed of his tenants, helped secure Roman rule in the Near East during this politically unstable period.