Roman law and the Jews. 139-59 BCE

From the Greek and Roman decrees quoted by Josephus, which probably preserve copies of copies of genuine documents, we learn that from the days of Julius Caesar onward, the Jews were legally allowed to live according to their traditional customs. The question addressed here is what happened before that. The examination of a number of Roman sources in their juridical context sheds some light on the position of the Jews vis-à-vis the Roman law in the previous period. It appears that there was no discriminatory policy against the Jews, and that some of their rights were already somehow acknowledged and accepted de facto in Roman society at least as early as Cicero's days.