In the year 284 C.E., the soldiers serving under Diocletian proclaimed him Emperor of Rome. As emperor, Diocletian was notable for his friendliness toward the Jewish community. When he ordered all of his subjects to accept his divinity and to offer sacrifices to his cult, he excused his Jewish subjects from the decree, acknowledging their right to worship their God. The sages even memorialized him in a remarkable tale found in the midrash.
According to the legend, as a child, Diocletian, a swineherd in northern Palestine [1], suffers constant ridicule and even beatings at the hands of local Jewish students. Once he becomes emperor, he demands that the Jewish leaders answer for the crimes of his youth. The rabbis concede that they had acted insolently towards Diocletian the swineherd, but they always showed respect towards Diocletian, the emperor. The Emperor, for his part, accepts their apology, but cautions them against treating even the lowest ranking Roman citizen or servant disrespectfully.
The moral of the story is quite clear: Romans must be afforded the same respect as any Jew, and any failure to do so could result in disastrous consequences for the entire Jewish people.
This represents a heavy burden for the individual Jew to carry, and unfortunately, this burden remains very real, more than 1,700 years later. All too often, humans stereotype entire groups of people, especially Jews, based upon the actions of a few individuals, with drastic consequences for the whole. Fair or not, each of us serves as a representative of our People, often serving as the basis of someone’s opinion about Jews. As such, we would do well to remember Diocletian’s warning, “You must never disrespect even a minor Roman citizen or the lowest ranking Roman servant [2].”
[1] This was the given name for the region at that time, according to Roman law.
[2] Genesis Rabbah 63:8.
— Rabbi Josh Knobel