Jews and Romans in the Early Empire, Part I
In dealing with her often refractory Jewish subjects, writes E. Mary Smallwood, Rome followed a policy of toleration and protection but insisted that the Jews must “repay toleration with toleration.”
The question of Rome’s treatment of the Jews is a double one. It concerns her relations with the Jews of Palestine, and her relations with the Jews of the Dispersion in Italy and in the provinces. For the very numerous Jews who lived away from their homeland did not merge with the surrounding population as did expatriate Gauls, Spaniards and others, but presented special problems. With the possible exception of the Greeks, there was no other race in the Roman world so widely scattered.
The dispersion of the Jews was begun by the Exile of the Old Testament, which caused large Jewish communities to be formed in Mesopotamia and Babylonia, lands that later lay on the fringe of the Roman empire. The Ptolemaic period saw large-scale immigration of Jews into Egypt, and particularly into Alexandria, where a special section of the city was set aside as their residence; by the first century A.D., the Jewish community there had become one of the biggest outside Palestine, forming perhaps thirty per cent of the city’s total population.
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