Napoleon's Sanhedrin and the Halakhah 23
of any struggle between the Jewish legal system and that of the occupiers. The New Testament statement attributed to Jesus “Give unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God ” 53 was the earliest Jewish source which dealt with this issue. There was no similar statement in the rabbinic literature even later in the time of the Mishnah.
Jewish life in the Diaspora should have raised the question of competing legal systems and jurisdictions. Even if we concede that the Pharisaic system was not developed until late in this period, Jews seem to have expressed more than superficial loyalty to their Mesopotamian or Roman rulers. Even after the Pharisaic system was fully developed, no clashes between the legal system have been recorded. Although there were substantial Jewish settlements outside the Land of Israel from 586 B.C.E. onward, we hear nothing of a clash of jurisdictions in Babylonia , among the Egyptian Jewish mercenaries of Elephantine , or in the Hellenistic and Roman world. There were rebellions in Alexandria which wished to define the citizenship status of the Jewish group, but they sought to settle the question by force rather than legal debate. From 586 B.C.E. the majority of the Jewish population lived outside the land of Israel and any problems which arose through a clash of legal systems led to solutions which have not been recorded.
The Talmudic Sources
The talmudic scholar Samuel's famous statement dina demalkhuta dina-“The law of the land is the law” came rather late, probaly between 165 and 267 C.E.(Git.10b; Ned. 28a; B.K. 113a; B. B. 54b). The four citations in the Talmud were incidental and indicated that this was not as major issue. Each citation dealt with the authority of the governmental tax or customs collectors, or the authority of governmental documents issued by a non-Jewish court or witnessed by Gentiles. Alternatives were presented in every instance and dina demalkhuta dina was never fully discussed and played virtually no role