Introduction

In the Letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul writes “so that from Jerusalem and as far around as Illyricum I have fully proclaimed the good news of Christ” (Rom. 15:19 NRSV). This fragment of a passage, picked out of its context, is just one example of the fact that even the first Christians counted the territory of Illyricum (Pannonia and Dalmatia) as a place where they could possibly win new people over to their religion. Paul and the first apostles used to go to places where they were listened to with an open heart, and these places – as we can read in the New Testament – were mostly synagogues. This supports the assumption that some Jews lived in Illyricum. Moreover, later tradition holds Andronicus, a follower of Paul, to be the first bishop of Sirmium (Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia), the most important town of Pannonia. Although both this tradition and the possibility of Paul’s journey to Pannonia are not very well-founded historically, we can count on the possibility of an existing Jewish population in the province. Jerome, who was born on the border of Pannonia and Dalmatia (Stridon) and who for this reason knew the region well, wrote in his commentaries on Amos that “they (the Jews) are moved ‘from sea to sea,’ from the British Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, that is from the west to the south and from ‘the north to the east,’ foreigners in all the world, they do not have the power to find the word of God.”

According to a generally accepted theory, which is also supported by most of the available archaeological and epigraphical sources, the first Jewish settlers appeared in Pannonia at the end of the second century or in the third century C.E. As we will see below, most of the epigraphical evidence shows that Greek-speaking Semitic people, with Jews among them, arrived in Pannonia during the reign of the Severus dynasty (193-235 C.E.), after the Marcomannic wars (166-180). Only one inscription, a building inscription from Mursa, shows the existence of a proseucha, a place of prayer, earlier than before the end of the second century.