Replies

RobbyS: "my point was to emphasize the wealth and power of Jews in Antioch and maybe Asia and the Straits, which is where the Arian Party and later the Nestorian Party were strong...
The diatribes of Chrysostrom against the Jews would have been pointless unless they had not been a plausible threat..."

First of all Chrysostom lived nearly 100 years after Constantine, mostly indeed after 380 AD, when Christianity became the Empire's state religion, and Judaism was being suppressed everywhere.

Second, from the time of Constantine (300 AD) to Chrysostom (400 AD), the Christian population rose from 5 million to 10 million, while the numbers of Jews continued to fall, from perhaps two million toward fewer than one million.

If Antioch in 400 AD represented a last remnant of Jewish strength, it's Christian population had already grown to 100,000 out of 200,000 total inhabitants.
Of those, many remained loyal to Jewish traditions, and these are precisely the Christians Chrysostom denounced.

So, the point is not that Jews represented some kind of powerful threat, suppressing Christians, but rather that many Antioch Christians still loved their Jewish neighbors.

Imagine that!!!

RobbyS: "Furthermore, in Parthia Christians began to be persecuted after they gained religious freedom from the Roman government because they could be accused of being disloyal.
Jews in that land suffered no disabilities.
After all, the Jews had supported the Diaspora uprising against Trajan, which came damn close to success."

Again, it is highly instructive to note that in your desperate attempts to find some example, any example, of Jews persecuting Christians, the best you can come up with is:

Go back to 200 years before Constantine: to the Kitos War of 117 AD,
To the middle of the (2nd of three) Jewish Revolts against Rome,
At a time when the Jewish population was being reduced by half (4 million to two million), and Christians growing from 500,000 to 2 million --
And, you must look in a country (Parthia) which was then outside the borders of the Roman Empire.
Even then, the nature of alleged persecutions of Christians is not specified, and was not clearly at the hands of Jews.

And this Parthia example is enough to justify millennia of Christians persecuting and exterminating Jews?

The Parthian example shows that religion and politics make a witch’s brew. Paul Johnson proposes in his History of the Jews, that the number of Jews who became Christians was probably larger than we are inclined to think. The break between Church and Synagogue occurred in the 2nd century and was as much a break in Judaism as anything. Nothing more bitter than a family quarrel, or in the political realm, a civil war, because the parties have so much in common, their differences so small but critical, like a cracked vase.