Since the time of Claudius, whose suppression of Jewish worship in Italy (p. 199) is at least the last measure of the sort which we know of, residence and the free exercise of religion in the whole empire appear to have been in law conceded to the Jew. It would have been no wonder if those insurrections in the African and Syrian provinces had led to the expulsion generally of the Jews settled there; but restrictions of this sort were enacted, as we saw, only locally, _e.g._ for Cyprus. The Greek provinces always remained the chief seat of the Jews; even in the capital in some measure bilingual, whose numerous body of Jews had a series of synagogues, these formed a portion of the Greek population of Rome. Their epitaphs in Rome are exclusively Greek; in the Christian church at Rome developed from this Jewish body the baptismal confession was uttered in Greek down to a late period, and throughout the first three centuries the literature was exclusively Greek. But restrictive measures against the Jews appear not to have been adopted even in the Latin provinces; through and with Hellenism the Jewish system penetrated into the West, and there too communities of Jews were found, although they were still in number and importance even now, when the blows directed against the Diaspora had severely injured the Jew-communities of the East, far inferior to the latter. [Sidenote: Corporative unions.] Political privileges did not follow of themselves from the toleration of worship. The Jews were not hindered in the construction of their synagogues and proseuchae any more than in the appointment of a president for the same (ἀρχισυναγωγός), as well as of a college of elders (ἄρχοντες), with a chief elder (γερουσιάρχης) at its head. Magisterial functions were not meant to be connected with these positions; but, considering the inseparableness of the Jewish church-organisation and the Jewish administration of law, the presidents probably everywhere exercised, like the bishops in the Middle Ages, a jurisdiction, although merely _de facto_. The bodies of Jews in the several towns were not recognised generally as corporations, certainly not, for example, those of Rome; yet there subsisted at many places on the ground of local privileges such corporative unions with ethnarchs or, as they were now mostly called, patriarchs at their head. Indeed, in Palestine we find at the beginning of the third century once more a president of the whole Jewish body, who, in virtue of hereditary sacerdotal right, bears sway over his fellow-believers almost like a ruler, and has power even over life and limb, and whom the government at least tolerates.[194] Beyond question this patriarch was for the Jews the old high priest, and thus, under the eyes and under the oppression of the foreign rule, the obstinate people of God had once more reconstituted themselves, and in so far overthrown Vespasian’s work. [Sidenote: Public services.]