Valerius Maximus on the Expulsion of the Jews in 139 BC
Valerius Maximus is one of the least known of classical Roman writers in part because his only extant work 'Memorable Deeds and Sayings' is merely a collection of excerpts culled from the work of other writers. That said in his day Maximus was a significant literary figure (although we know of no other work by him extant or otherwise) as he was part of the literary circle that included such writers as Ovid, and he appears to have had some connection via patronage to the Julio-Claudian Imperial dynasty: specifically the Emperor Tiberius.
Even though Maximus isn't well known: his work is invaluable for historians, and this is particularly so in relation to the issue of the jews in the city of Rome. The reason for this is quite simple as Maximus tells us that the jews were expelled from Rome in 139 BC. (1) The passages concerned (which are Maximus' only mention of the jews) are as follows:
'Story as recorded by Julius Paris: During the consulship of Marcus Popillius Laenas and Gnaeus Calpurnius, the praetor for foreigners, Gnaeus Cornelius Hispanus, issued an edict ordering the Chaldaeans to leave the city and Italy within ten days. The praetor felt that they deceived frivolous and silly people with their dishonest interpretation of the stars and cultivated a money-making air of obscurity with their lies. The Jews had tried to corrupt Roman values with their cult of Jupiter Sabazius, so the praetor forced them go to back to their home.
Story as recorded by Nepotianus: Cornelius Hispanus expelled the Chaldaeans from the city and ordered them to leave Italy within ten days to prevent them making money out of their foreign science. The Jews had tried to pass their religion on to Romans, so Hispanus expelled them from the city and demolished their private altars in all public places.' (2)
The interpretation of this is fairly straight forward in that we can see that Cornelius Hispanus sought to purge the city of Rome of non-Romans who were causing harm to Roman citizens by alternatively cheating them out of their money or trying to corrupt them by luring them into anti-Roman religious cults.
The Chaldaeans [= Mesopotamians] are held to be proverbial soothsayers with a particular focus on the divination of the future via the use of the Zodiac ('the stars') and to be using the idea that their predictions are prophetic in order to make money from the Roman people.
The jews on the other hand are held to be trying to - in Maximus' words - 'pass their religion onto Romans' in the form of the cult of Jupiter Sabazius.
The reader at this point may very well be scratching their head wondering how this should be understood, but we can quickly shed light on the meaning by pointing out that the likeliest explanation is that Maximus confused Yahweh (who is primarily worshipped on the Sabbath) with the eastern variant of the cult of Dionysus (i.e., the cult of Sabazius) (3) which was often done by early Roman writers. (4)
So, the passage from Maximus should actually read as follows:
'The Jews had tried to corrupt Roman values with their cult of Yahweh, so the praetor forced them go to back to their home.'
This makes a lot more sense now: doesn't it?
In essence: the jews were in Rome proselytizing among the Roman people in the name of Yahweh and probably on the basis that the worship of Yahweh was but another mystery religion. What is interesting about this is very simply that Simon Maccabee's envoys had arrived in Rome some three years before this in 142 BC. (5)
This is unlikely to be a coincidence given that the emissaries of a jewish zealot arrive in Rome and three years later Rome promptly throws out the Chaldaeans and the jews for duping the locals on the one hand and proselytizing on the other. Regardless of whether this was a Roman public relations move to blame foreigners (as Gruen argues) (6) what is difficult to cogently explain away is the historical coincidence.
The solution to this conundrum is actually fairly simple in so far as Gruen and Feldman assume that the Chaldaeans and the jews are two different groups of people, because Maximus suggests they were. However, as Gruen tells us, (7) the Seleucid monarch Antiochus III had resettled a large community of jews from Mesopotamia and Babylonia (i.e. the descendants of the jews of the Babylonian captivity) between 188 and 191 BC to Phrygia in what is now western central Turkey. (8)
This is likely to be the main origin of the community of jews in Rome as those that Antiochus III had settled were intended to be troops in his army and some would have inevitably been taken prisoner and been transported back to Rome as slaves in the myriad of three way wars between local client kings, Rome and the Seleucid empire.
On the other hand, one has to ask the question - which Gruen notably does not- of how the Mesopotamians and Babylonians also came to be in Rome at this time as well as why those two groups? Why not other groups such as Syrians which were more numerous in the Seleucid armies and had their own religious traditions?
In short: why the Mesopotamians/Babylonians and the jews?
Well, we know that the likeliest group origin for the jews concerned would from Mesopotamia and Babylon [i.e. before they were transplanted into Phrygia by Antiochus III] so then why do we separate the groups? Maximus - as well as the Roman authorities at the time - wouldn't have been able to distinguish between the jews who took their ancestral religion very seriously identifying as jews and those jews who preferred more secular lives identifying as Babylonians/Mesopotamians.
Is it not more likely than instead of two groups (one jewish and one not) from Mesopotamia and Babylon that we in fact have one and those labelled the jews by Maximus were the highly religious element, while the one labelled as Chaldaeans were the secular element?
This is further suggested by the fact that the Chaldaeans were not expelled for trying to convert Romans to their religious ways, while the jews were. This would be odd precisely because Babylonia and Mesopotamia had a very strong religious heritage and identity as well as the fact that their belief system - from what we know of it - was based (like most) on confession of faith as opposed to ancestral caste (like Judaism) so would have been an ideal candidate for a spreading foreign faith among the Roman people.
In essence we have to ask ourselves why the Chaldaeans were expelled for secular crimes and the jews expelled for religious crimes?
The simple answer is that they were two groups of jews: one more secular which self-described as being Babylonian/Mesopotamian (hence the Roman description of them) while the other was more religious and self-described as jewish based on their religious tradition (hence their being ascribed correctly as jews).
This is further pointed to by the entry into the city of the ambassadors of Simon Maccabee in 142 BC as the presence of these envoys of revived and fanatical jewishness may have acted as a catalyst for a substantial split in the jewish community between those who embraced this new identity (i.e., the jews of Maximus) and those who embraced the traditional identity of their captivity (i.e. the Chaldaeans of Maximus).
This would then have caused an increasingly vicious split between the two groups of jews leading to the increased visibility of what both groups were up to in the streets of Rome: one conning the Romans with false divination and the other trying to con the Romans into becoming initiates into the cult of Yahweh (as 'god-fearers' rather than jews bearing in mind that jewishness in Judaism then as now is equated with being descended from the Israelites).
The Roman praetor responsible for overseeing this increasingly problematic group Hispanus then simply decided to be rid of the problem the community presented and expelled them all from the city. That the jews found their way back in and had a flourishing community some 80 years later does not detract from this, but should rather be seen in the typical cycle of expulsion and then - after some years have elapsed - the re-admittance of the jews that is found in both the ancient and the medieval/early modern world.
However, there is another angle to this expulsion that does need to be briefly brought out in relation to the subversion of Roman religion by the jews. In that we know that Hellenized jews had a big hand in writing the Sibylline Oracles (particularly the third book) [composed circa 140 to 160 BC] which declared that Rome would be enslaved by an Asian power which ruled all the Asian peoples (in the jewish view this power would have been Judea and accorded with Yahweh's gift to the jews of their 'chosen' status). (9)
Further - as Feldman notes - (10) Hellenized jews (which the Maximus' 'Chaldaeans' could also refer to in whole or in part) had long been trying to convert Romans to the worship of Yahweh of which the famous 'Letter of Aristeas' is but the best known example. (11)
We need to recognise that both of these independent facts suggest to us that the jewish religious activity in Rome was not nearly as benign or harmless as is commonly believed, because we know of jewish communities across the Mediterranean taking part in conspiracies to kill Romans (in 88 BC), we also know that the jews were faking religious prophecy to cause panic among the Romans (part of the Sibylline Oracles) and that the less religious jews (the 'Hellenizers' as opposed to the 'Zealots') were also engaging in anti-Roman activity in addition to their fundamentalist kin.
This suggests – when combined with the neat coincidence of jews faking religious prophecy explicitly for Roman consumption in the years before the expulsion and the so-called Chaldaeans doing more or less the same thing but for profit, suggests that the expulsion of the jews from Rome in 139 BC was a preventative measure taking by Hispanus in order to remove the threat of the jews - divided into two squabbling factions - from the city.
It also provides suggestive evidence for why the jews were able to conspire and revolt across the eastern Mediterranean at least three times in the course of the three centuries that followed in so far as the key issue was control. The jewish community needed to be closely controlled by religious leaders which was the case in the later jewish revolts, but was likely not the case in Rome in 139 BC as the two factions (the secular jews and the religious jews) were openly squabbling leading to the unearthing of their activities before they were in a powerful enough position to attack the city of Rome from the inside as they later did to other Roman cities in the third jewish revolt.
References
(1) Erich Gruen, 2002, 'Diaspora: Jews against Greeks and Romans', 1st Edition, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, p. 15
(2) Val. Max. 1:3.3 (cf. Henry John Walker, 2004, 'Valerius Maximus: Memorable Deeds and Sayings', 1st Edition, Hackett: Indianapolis, p. 14)
(3) Gruen, Op. Cit., p. 16
(4) Louis Feldman, 1993, 'Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian', 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, p. 151
(5) Gruen, Op. Cit., p. 17; Menahem Stern, 1980, 'Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism', 1st Edition, Vol. II, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities: Jerusalem, pp. 359-360
(6) Ibid, pp. 17-19
(7) Ibid, p. 17
(8) The descendants of these same jews were also involved in the mass murder of Romans across the eastern Mediterranean in 88 BC (see Adrienne Mayor, 2010, 'The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy', 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, pp. 19; 153)
(9) Ibid, p. 35
(10) Feldman, Op. Cit., pp. 150-151
(11) For the text of this see: http://www.ccel.org/c/charles/otpseudepig/aristeas.htm