Adding Insult to Victory

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An article in the January/February issue of BAR asked why the Roman emperor Nerva (96–98 C.E.) repealed the fiscus Judaicus, the tax imposed on Jews by the Romans to support the pagan temple of Jupiter, thus redirecting the half-shekel tax previously paid by Jewish males to support the Jerusalem Temple before the Romans destroyed it in 70 C.E.^a Nerva’s repeal of the fiscus Judaicus is evidenced by a striking Roman coin (pictured above) bearing a legend that the “insulting” (calumnia) tax is annulled or repealed (sublata). Our author, Shlomo Moussaieff, speculated that Nerva did this under the influence of Berenice, a Jewish princess known as the “Little Cleopatra” who enticed Roman rulers.

Several readers have called our attention to an entirely different explanation of the Nerva coin. They also explained where they learned of this competing explanation—in an issue of BAR published nearly two decades ago!

In the November/December 1993 BAR, Manfred Lehmann argued that the fiscus Judaicus that Nerva revoked, as evidenced on his coin, was not the tax imposed by the Romans after the destruction of the Jewish Temple, but the half-shekel tax Jewish males continued to pay in the early years after the Temple was destroyed when the Jews hoped to rebuild their temple, just as they had done after the Babylonian destruction in 586 B.C.E.^b

As Lehmann explains it: “According to Jewish law, the Temple taxes, as well as voluntary offerings, continued even after the destruction of the Temple. These offerings were collected in anticipation of the rebuilding of the Temple.” Indeed, according to Lehmann’s argument, the famous Copper Scroll, found among the Dead Sea Scrolls and detailing 64 sites of buried treasure, records the burial of these post-destruction taxes and offerings to await the time when the call would come to rebuild the Temple. Nerva, however, forbade the continued collection of this rebuilding fund.

Scholars have long noted that the Hebrew of the Copper Scroll is similar to that of post-destruction Hebrew, or pre-Mishnaic in scholarly terms. And the Mishnah, the first collection of Jewish law (c. 200 C.E.), contains lengthy discussions of, and even arguments regarding, the interpretation of the laws about Temple offerings, perhaps in anticipation of its rebuilding.

According to Lehmann, the Romans in Nerva’s day discovered that the Jews had “continued to collect various taxes right under the noses of their Roman occupiers … It was the Jewish tax system that was the ‘insult’ (calumnia) to Rome, not the Roman tax imposed on the Jews, that the Fisci Judaici (in the plural!) coin refers to, because the Jews collected several types of taxes. It was the cessation of this insult—these Jewish taxes—that the coin celebrates.”

Lehmann’s argument is supported by evidence that the fiscus Judaicus imposed on the Jews by the Romans continued to be collected long after Nerva’s time, contrary to what would have been the case if it had been effectively repealed.

Perhaps our readers—scholarly and otherwise—will weigh in on the validity of these opposing arguments purporting to explain the legend on Nerva’s coin.—H.S.