that conquerors permitted local autonomy to the native population, so that through Ezra, Nehemiah and their followers, Jewish leadership controlled their internal affairs and governed. This policy was continued by Egyptian , Persian, Seleudic, Ptolemaic, and Roman rulers. The only major exception came through Antiochus Epiphanes and led to the Maccabean revolt. Unrest under the Romans was caused by a harsh taxation policy and occasional insensitivity to Jewish feelings about the images of the Roman legions and not through a clash of legal systems. We know little till Roman times about the extent of outside domination aside from the payment of taxes and the restraint on wishes for independence. We have no record 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 ” 2 was the earliest Jewish source that dealt with this issue. There was no similar statement in the rabbinic literature even later in the time of the Mishnabh.
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 seems 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 of those who wished to define the citizenship status of the Jew ish 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 that arose through a clash of legal systems led to solutions which have not been recorded.
The Talmudic Sources
Samuel’s famous statement dina demalkhuta dina—*“The law of the land is the law”—came rather late(165-267 C.E.).3 The four