Eutropius is not a name well-known to many outside the scholarly realms of the classics and as such his comments on the jews - or rather in those instances where Roman history crossed with jewish history - are often forgotten. This is in part because Eutropius' only know work his Compendium of Roman History is largely just a summary of what was known or believed about history to that point in time.
This isn't helped by Eutropius' distance - in terms of time elapsed - from most of the events that he describes, but never-the-less his comments about the jews should be brought to the fore once more so that we may be complete in our investigation of ancient and classical authors who commented on the jews.
However, before we look at what he has to say about them we should explain that Eutropius was not a man of small station in the Roman Empire in his lifetime as he served the Emperor Julian faithfully as his secretary and then served in a significant administrative capacity up to at least the Emperor Valens. This gives additional weight to what Eutropius has to say in part because he - as a member of the Imperial household - would have had access to a wide range of sources that he could condense and would have been able to very easily check the sources of claims before deciding whether to credit them or not.
This makes Eutropius a very useful 'fact check' if you like, but it also makes him a difficult author to use if he was our only source for a particular claim. Hence historians tend to use Eutropius more as a 'fact check' and a guide to Roman historical thinking than a source in his own right.
Having described Eutropius as an individual and also commented on the use of his work by historians: we can then move on to what Eutropius has to say about the jews. The answer to that is that he - because of his purpose to write a summary of Roman history - only touches on the jews twice in the course of the Compendium.
The first mention that Eutropius makes of the jews is as follows:
'Shortly after he subdued the Itureans and Arabians; and, on entering Syria, rewarded Seleucia, a city near Antioch, with independence, because it had not admitted King Tigranes. To the inhabitants of Antioch he restored their hostages. On those of Daphne, being charmed with the beauty of the spot and the abundance of water, he bestowed a portion of land, in order that their grove might be enlarged. Marching from thence to Judea, he took Jerusalem, the capital, in the third month; twelve thousand of the Jews being slain, and the rest allowed to surrender on terms. After these achievements, he returned into Asia, and put an end to this most tedious war.' (1)
This is then followed and clarified by the following comment:
'In the six hundred and ninetieth year from the building of the city, in the consulate of Decimus Junius Silanus and Lucius Muraena, Metellus triumphed on account of Crete, Pompey for the Piratic and Mithridatic wars. No triumphal procession was ever equal to this; the sons of Mithridates, the son of Tigranes, and Aristobulus, king of the Jews, were led before his car; a vast sum of money, an immense mass of gold and silver, was carried in front. At this time there was no war of any importance throughout the world.' (2)
What Eutropius is referring to here is the conquest of the near east by the famous General Pompey as part of the endgame of the prolonged Roman campaign against King Mithridates of Pontus and King Tigranes of Armenia, which were then and are now more commonly called the Mithridatic Wars. One of the countries which aligned with Mithridates and Tigranes was Judea under King Aristobulus II and which was brought under Roman control by Pompey's destruction of the Mithridatic armies (although it was not ruled by a Roman governor till the time of the Emperor Vespasian). (3)
Eutropius' comments however do have a slight anti-jewish tinge to them in that Pompey showed great favour to most other cities and countries that had aligned with Mithridates and Tigranes, but then in the case of the jews he slaughters twelve thousand of them, forces them to beg for their lives and then promptly marches King Aristobulus II off to be humiliated in his triumph in Rome.
This suggests that the jews were somewhat different to cities like Antioch that had sided with Mithridates and Tigranes precisely because Pompey shows mercy to them, but shows very little towards the jews.
We also should note the interesting addition of Aristobulus to the sons of Mithridates and Tigranes as part of the central element of 'defeated enemies of Rome' in Pompey's triumphal procession. This strongly suggests that either Aristobulus had dared to defy Rome after his side had been beaten or that Pompey wanted to teach the jews - who we know were close allies of Mithridates (as many of them were in Pontus) - a particularly harsh lesson as part of Mithridates' inner circle of confederates with Tigranes.
Either solution works with the former being the more likely as it includes less assumptions about Pompey's mindset than the latter. That said the latter is strongly supported by the fact Pompey had Aristobulus poisoned on his way home to Judea (4) and then had his son beheaded at Antioch (5) in order to make sure the jews got the message (which, as history informs us, they did not).
Regardless of which solution is in fact the truth: we should note that Eutropius very clearly depicts the jews as the particular enemies of Rome. A fact that cannot have been lost on his readers given that at the time of the writing of the Compendium: the jews were numerous and played a powerful role in Rome, while the bodies of Mithridates and Tigranes were dust.
This slight anti-jewish tinge to Eutropius' compendium is also indicated by the fact that he does not credit anything done by the jews to be worthy of the label 'civilized', but rather states that only when outsiders have built cities in Palestine: have they been worthy of note and become great hubs of intellectual and commercial activity. (6)
All-in-all Eutropius' mentions of the jews are few, but considering what he says and also the environment in which he said it: it is very clear that Eutropius had no particular love for the jews and regarded them very simply as the enemies of Rome with little to no capacity for building creditable civilizations.
References
(1) Eutro. 6:14
(2) Ibid. 6:16
(3) Ibid. 7:19
(4) Joseph. Bell. Jud. 1:9.1
(5) Ibid. 1:9.2
(6) Eutro. 7:10