The position of the Jews in the Roman Empire was naturally not improved by the great risings under Nero, Trajan (in Cyrene, Cyprus, Mesopotamia), and Hadrian.  The East strictly so called, became more and more their proper home.  The Christianization of the empire helped still further in a very special way to detach them from the Western world. 1

*********************************** 1.  For a brief time only were they again favoured by Julian the Apostate; compare Gibbon, chapter xxiii. ***********************************

They sided with the Persians against the Byzantines; in the year 614 they were even put in possession of Jerusalem by Chosroes, but were not long able to hold their own against Heraclius. 2

************************************* 2.  Gibbon, chapter xlvi. *************************************

With Islam also they found themselves in greater sympathy than with Christianity, although they were cruelly treated by Mahomet in Arabia, and driven by Omar out of the Hejaz, and notwithstanding the facts that they were as matter of course excluded from citizenship, and that they were held by Moslems as a whole in greater contempt than the Christians.  They throve especially well on what may be called the bridge between East and West, in Mauretania and Spain, where they were the intellectual intermediaries between the Arab and the Latin culture.  In the Sephardim and Ashkenazim the distinction between the subtler Oriental and the more conservative Western Jews has maintained itself in Europe also.  From the 8th century onwards Judaism put forth a remarkable side shoot in the Khazars on the Volga; if legend Is to he believed, but little was required at one time to have induced the Russians to accept the Jewish rather than the Christian faith.

In the West the equal civil rights which Caracalla had conferred on all free inhabitants of the empire came to an end, so far as the Jews were concerned, in the time of Constantine.  The state then became the secular arm of the church, and took action, though with less severity, against Jews just as against heretics and pagans.  As early as the year 315, Constantine made conversion from Christianity to Judaism a penal offence, and prohibited Jews, on pain of death, from circumcising their Christian slaves.  These laws were re-enacted and made more severe by Constantius, who attached the penalty of death to marriages between Jews and Christians.  Theodosius I. and Honorius, indeed, by strictly prohibiting the destruction of synagogues, and by maintaining the old regulation that a Jew was not to be summoned before a court of justice on a Sabbath-day, put a check upon the militant zeal of the Church, by which even Chrysostom, for example, allowed himself to be carried away at Antioch.  But Honorius rendered them ineligible for civil or military service, leaving open to them only the bar and the decurionate, the latter being a privilegiium odiosum.  Their liberty to try cases by their own law was curtailed; the cases between Jews and Christians were to be tried by Christian judges only.  Theodosius II. prohibited them from building new synagogues, and anew enforced their disability for all state employments.  Most hostile of all was the orthodox Justinian, who, however, was still more severe against Pagans and Samaritans. 1