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The Jewish experience under Rome, as is by now clear, was widely divergent, ranging from deep acculturation to pagan ideas and political organization, to stubborn resistance. The Jewish rejection of the Roman cult was respected by Rome on account of Judaism’s antiquity; but this erected a civic barrier between Jews and Romans no less than a religious and cultural one. Still, Jews performed in a range of ways to make the empire work in their favor. Their position was nonetheless vulnerable, and the empire’s aims and those of any given Jewish community did not always align, sometimes with violent results. Pagan writings about Judaism reflect this range.³⁸

Some gentile authors found much to admire about Judaism, drawn especially to its monotheism—lauded as devout and philosophically sophisticated—as well as Judaism’s piety, and antiquity.³⁹ More, however, were off-put by Judaism’s alien ways. Pagan authors seem to fixate on a rather short (and oft-recycled) list of Jewish practices that seemed to them especially strange: circumcision which piqued Roman abhorrence of castration⁴⁰; dietary laws (especially the refusal of pork) which transgressed the bedrock Mediterranean value of hospitality; Sabbath observance, which was seen to enshrine laziness. They added up to a broad impression of Jewish misanthropy.

The early second-century Roman historian Tacitus (d. c. 120 CE) penned a well-known description of the Jews in book 5 of his Histories calling the religion »sinister and revolting,« and accusing Moses of inventing a religion in which »everything that we hold sacred is regarded as sacrilegious; on the other hand, they allow things which we consider immoral.«⁴¹ If we read this and other anti-Jewish writing by Greek and Roman authors out of context, it can easily make us think that Romans reserved a special bile for the Jews, but this reductive and anachronistic take misses much.

Interest in Jews tended to accompany political or military conflict, and so virtually no pagan writing on the Jews happens in an objective or context-free condition. Moreover, as scholars of the so-called »rhetorical Jews« of Patristic polemic make clear,⁴² Jews served a range of functions for non-Jewish writers—standing in for everything from the embodiment of Roman anxiety about empire, to a range of Christian heresies, to a competitive foil in the eyes of other provincial elites. For some others, Jews served as an idealized ethnic exemplar. While it may not yet have penetrated popular perception, scholarship has largely decoupled anti-Jewish writing of the pre-Christian Roman period from the label of Anti-Semitism, with its weighty and anachronistic baggage.⁴³ One must read pagan writings about Jews in the context of imperial reflections on a range of conquered and absorbed peoples and assess the content against the particular rhetorical aims of each given source.

Romans understood themselves to be deeply pious, and their sanctity (pietas) was tightly linked to a conservative embrace of tradition and loyalty to the state. Foreign cults were tolerated when ancient and untroublesome but could become enemies of the state when they breached established boundaries and practices or otherwise offended Roman sensibilities. As such, religious communities could provoke Rome by subtler assaults than armed conflict—such as proselytization, sacrilege and other perceived threats to Roman mores.

Tacitus weaves these themes together in all of their complexity. As anticipated, Tacitus is inspired by an instance of military conflict. In the middle of his account of Titus’s leadership in the Judean war of 66–73 CE, the Roman historian takes the opportunity to introduce his Roman readers to the Jews. The author packs his text with information, and the few pages provide us a masterclass in the multiple tropes, conventions, and functions of ancient ethnography.

Tacitus serves up several theories on the origins of the Jews, affording us a glimpse into the sources circulating in elite Roman circles. It is notable that these sources include neither the Greek Torah (Septuagint) nor Josephus. His sources were primarily polemical anti-Jewish texts:

Some say the Jews were refugees from the island of Crete who settled in the remotest parts of Libya […] Others believe that in the reign of Isis the surplus population of Egypt was evacuated to neighbouring lands under the leadership of Hierosolymus and Juda. Many think that the Jews are descended from those Ethiopians who were driven by fear and hatred to leave their homes during the reign of Cepheus. Some say that a group of Assyrian refugees, lacking their own land, occupied a part of Egypt […]. Others again posit a famous ancestry for the Jews in the Solymi, a tribe celebrated by Homer in his poems: these people allegedly founded Jerusalem and named it after themselves.⁴⁴

The grab-bag of theories is collectively incoherent and without basis, so why include them? With its use of »some say,« »others believe,« and the like, Tacitus flags that he is going to reject these positions, but intends a residue of their innuendo to remain. We get a better sense of Tacitus’s purpose as the text progresses.

Whatever their origin, these observances are sanctioned by their antiquity. The other practices of the Jews are sinister and revolting, and have entrenched themselves by their degeneracy. All the worst types abandoned the religious practices of their forefathers and donated tribute and contributions to the Jews in heaps. That is one reason why the resources of the Jews have increased, but it is also because of their stubborn loyalty and ready benevolence towards fellow-Jews. Yet they confront the rest of the world with a hatred reserved for enemies. They will not eat or sleep with gentiles, and despite being a most lecherous people, they avoid sexual intercourse with non-Jewish women. Among themselves nothing is barred. They have introduced the practice of circumcision to show that they are different from others. Converts to Judaism adopt the same practices, and the very first lesson they learn is to despise the gods, shed all feelings of patriotism and consider parents, children and brothers as readily expendable.⁴⁵

Tacitus’s frontal assault claims that Jews are the pure opposite of Romans. Yet a closer reading of these two passages shows a different dynamic at work. In the early 2nd century, Rome was a sprawling empire and ethnic patchwork. With so many foreign peoples as part of the empire, gaining success, citizenship, and other types of enfranchisement, what is a »Roman« anymore? This anxiety drives Tacitus, an aristocrate of senatorial family. From this angle the Jew—with his Cretan, Ethiopian and Syrian origins—stands in for all of the foreignness in the empire bundled into one. The final sentence quoted lets us know that the problem for Tacitus is less Jews as Jews. His problem, instead, is with Romans who are drawn to Judaism: »Converts to Judaism adopt the same practices, and the very first lesson they learn is to despise the gods, shed all feelings of patriotism and consider parents, children and brothers as readily expendable.«

For Tacitus, Jewishness stands for the permeability, and thus fragility, of what he values in Romanness. Tacitus’s depiction of the Jews sits adjacent to his ethnography of the Germans tribes against whom the Flavians were also fighting (Tacitus admires the German character), allowing us to see in even sharper relief how Jews and other ethnic enemies function to define Roman’s own self-understanding.⁴⁶

For Christian polemicists, Jews are not just one religious group among many, but Judaism was precisely that against which many Christian authors define themselves. As such »real Jews« vanish ever more deeply behind »rhetorical Jews«—meaning Jews as depicted in polemical writing, created by authors to serve arguments that have little or nothing to do with actual Jews.