The Jews in Rome
Even though a foreign labor force had increasingly become a necessity in
the Roman economy, the Romans did not particularly enjoy the presence
of foreigners in their city. They feared that foreign manners, customs, and
cults — which often differed significantly from their own — might influ-
ence their society negatively and contaminate Roman values and ancestral
traditions, the so-calledmores maiorum.Between the second century
b.c.e.and the first centuryc.e., foreigners were periodically expelled from
Rome. In the second centuryb.c.e., the Jews were kicked out along with
the astrologers, who were accused of disturbing fickle and silly minds with
a fallacious interpretation of the stars, while the Jews were accused of “in-
fecting” the Roman customs with their cult (Valerius Maximus,Facta et
Dicta Memorabilia1.3.3). In the early years of Tiberius’s reign, a strong re-
action occurred against foreign cults, and the Jews were expelled along
with the adherents of the Egyptian cult of Isis (Josephus,Ant.18.81-84;
Cassius Dio,Roman History57.18.5a).
The attitudes toward Jews preserved in Latin literature are not partic-
ularly friendly. In the middle of the first centuryb.c.e., some years after
the conquest of Jerusalem by Pompey, Cicero, the well-known Roman pol-
itician, lawyer, and statesman, held that, since they resisted Pompey’s
troops, the Jews were to be regarded as enemies. He stressed the great cul-
tural discrepancy between the Roman and the Jewish people: even “when
Jerusalem was still standing and the Jews were at peace with us, the prac-
tice of their sacred rites was at variance with the glory of our empire, the
dignity of our name, and the customs of our ancestors” (Pro Flacco28, 69).
Poets such as Tibullus, Horace, and Ovid were less interested in political is-
sues; what provoked their satire and ridicule were Jewish customs such as
observance of the Sabbath, circumcision, and abstinence from pork.
Pompeius Trogus, the first historian to deal at some length with the past
history of the Jewish people, displays a rather objective tone but quotes
anti-Jewish Egyptian sources that were percolating into Roman conscious-
ness, thereby making them more widely known in the capital.
The attitude of the Roman upper classes became more rigid and hos-
tile in the course of the first centuryc.e., perhaps as a result of the spread
of Jewish customs in Roman society and of the intensified rebel move-
ments in Judea. Seneca resented the popularity of Jewish customs in Rome,
singling out for adverse comment especially the observance of the Sabbath
and the custom of lighting Sabbath lamps, a visible and apparently attrac-374miriam pucci ben zeevEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:04:15 PM