The emperors respected the antiquity and morality of Israelite religion and had granted Jewish communities a degree of autonomy in the Greco-Roman cities. But this was often resented by local elites who were smarting under their own loss of independence, so periodically anti-Jewish tension erupted among the townsfolk. To counter this, some Greek-speaking Jews had developed a militant diaspora consciousness that they called ioudaismos, a defiant assertion of ancestral tradition combined with a determination to preserve a distinctly Jewish identity and forestall any political threat to their
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