He checked the spread of foreign rites, particularly the Egyptian and Jewish. He compelled those who followed the former superstition to burn their ritual vestments and all their religious utensils. The younger Jews he transferred to provinces of rigorous climate under the pretense of assigning them to military service. All the rest of that nation, and all who observed its rites, he ordered out of the city under the penalty of being permanently enslaved if they disobeyed.
Undoubtedly the same incident is mentioned by Tacitus in the Annals (ii. 85), where we hear that “action was taken about the eradication of Egyptian and Jewish rites. A senatusconsultum was passed, which transferred four thousand freedmen of military age who were affected by this superstition to Sardinia in order to crush brigandage there.... The rest were to leave Italy unless they abandoned their impious rites before a certain day.”
Between these two accounts there are discrepancies that cannot be cured by the simple process of amalgamating the two, as has generally been done. These divergences will be treated in detail later. For the present it will be well to compare an independent account, that of Josephus, with the two.
Josephus (Ant. XVIII. iii. 5) tells us of a Jew, “a thoroughly wicked man,” who was forced to flee from Judea for some crime, and with three worthy associates supported himself by swindling in Rome. This man persuaded Fulvia, a proselyte of high rank, the wife of a certain Saturninus, to send rich gifts to the temple. The presents so received were used by the four men for themselves. Upon the complaint of Saturninus, “Tiberius ordered all the Jews [πᾶν τὸ Ἰουδαϊκόν] to be driven from Rome. The consuls enrolled four thousand of them, and sent them to the island of Sardinia. He punished very many who claimed that their ancestral customs prevented them from serving.” Apart from the incident which, Josephus says, occasioned the expulsion, we have a version here which is not quite in accord with the one either of Tacitus or of Suetonius.
Of these men Josephus is probably the nearest in time to the events he is describing, but also the most remote in comprehension. Besides the story just told, Josephus tells another, in which it is a votary of Isis who is deceived, with the connivance of the priests of the Egyptian goddess. The two incidents which he relates are placed in juxtaposition rather than connection by him, but the mere fact that they are told in this way indicates that a connection did exist in the source, written or oral, from which he derived them. Josephus does not mention that the Egyptian worship was attacked as well as the Jewish, and indeed he takes pains to suggest that the two incidents were not really connected at all.
From all these statements, and from the reference that Philo makes in the Legatio ad Gaium,[[332]] there is very little that we can gather with certainty. This much, however, seems established: an attempt was made to check the spread both of Judaism and of Isis-worship. In this attempt a certain number of Jews were expelled from the city or from Italy. Four thousand soldiers—actual or reputed Jews—were transferred to Sardinia for the same reason. There are certain difficulties, however, in the way of supposing that it really was a general expulsion of all Jews, as Josephus and Suetonius, but not Tacitus, say.
Tacitus’ omission to state it, if such a general expulsion took place, is itself a difficulty; but like every argumentum ex silentio, it scarcely permits a valid inference. It seems strange, to be sure, that a severe and deserved punishment of the taeterrima gens, “that disgusting race,” should be represented to be something much milder than really was the case. But Tacitus is neither here nor in other places taking pains to cite the decree accurately, and the omission of even a significant detail may be laid to inadvertence.
But what Tacitus does say cannot be lightly passed over. Four thousand men, libertini generis, “of the freedmen class,” were transferred to Sardinia for military service. All these four thousand were ea superstitione infecti, “tainted with this superstition.” Now, the Jews who formed the community at Rome in the time of Cicero may have been largely freedmen, but their descendants were not classed as libertini generis. The phrase is not used in Latin of those who were of servile origin, but solely of those who were themselves emancipated slaves. There is, however, scarcely a possibility that there could have been at Rome in 19 C.E. so large a body of Jewish freed slaves of military age. There had been no war in recent times from which these slaves could have been derived. We may assume therefore that most, if not all, of these men were freedmen of other nationalities who were converts to Judaism.
This is confirmed by the words ea superstitione infecti, “tainted with this superstition.” These words are meaningless unless they refer to non-Jewish proselytes.[[333]] Men who were born Jews could not be so characterized. If Tacitus had meant those who were Jews by birth, it is scarcely conceivable that he would have used a phrase that would suggest just the opposite. The words, further, imply that many of these four thousand were rather suspected of Jewish leanings than definitely proselytes. Perhaps they were residents of the districts largely inhabited by Jews, notably the Transtiberine region.
Again, to suppose that all the Jews were banished by Tiberius involves an assumption as to that emperor’s methods wholly at variance with what we know of him. A very large number of Jewish residents in Rome were Roman citizens (Philo, 569 M), and so far from being a meaningless distinction in the early empire, that term through the influence of the rising science of jurisprudence was, in fact, just beginning to have its meaning and implications defined. A wholesale expulsion of Roman citizens by either an administrative act or a senatusconsultum is unthinkable under Tiberius. Exile, in the form of relegation or expulsion, was a well-known penalty for crime after due trial and conviction, which in every instance would have to be individual. Even in the Tacitean caricature[[334]] we find evidence of the strict legality with which Tiberius acted on all occasions. No senatusconsultum could have decreed a general banishment for all Jews, whether Roman citizens or not, without contravening the fundamental principles of the Roman law.