Study Notes

This essay asks you to examine the complex relationship between Jews and Rome — a relationship involving power, religion, culture, and conflict across several centuries.

Key questions to consider:

- How did Romans view Jews? (Tacitus gives one perspective)

- How did Jews understand themselves in relation to Rome? (Josephus gives one perspective)

- Where did these two civilizations clash, and where did they overlap?

- What does each civilization's founding narrative reveal about how they understood themselves?

The primary sources span several centuries and perspectives:

- Livy establishes what Romans valued and how Rome understood its own founding

- Hadas draws a parallel between the Roman founding hero Aeneas and the Jewish hero Moses

- Tacitus shows how a Roman intellectual viewed Jews — from the outside, often with hostility

- Josephus shows how a Jewish intellectual navigated life inside the Roman Empire

As you write, consider: how do both Rome and Israel understand themselves as peoples with a special destiny? What does each source reveal about how civilizations construct their own identity?

Livy (59 BCE–17 CE) wrote Ab Urbe Condita ("From the Founding of the City"), a massive history of Rome from its legendary founding. The stories assigned establish what Romans valued as their core virtues:

Romulus and Remus:

Rome's founding myth involves twin brothers — Romulus and Remus — raised by a she-wolf. When they disagreed over the location of the new city, Romulus killed Remus. This is a striking beginning: Rome's founding involved fratricide (killing one's own brother).

What this story reveals about Roman values: The founding of a civilization may require difficult, even violent acts. The state's survival and proper order override personal bonds — even family. This is a hard, unsentimental view of politics.

Cincinnatus:

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (519–430 BCE) was a Roman nobleman who was called from his farm to serve as dictator during a military crisis. He defeated Rome's enemies in 15 days and immediately resigned his dictatorship and returned to farming.

What this story reveals: Roman virtus (virtue/excellence) means civic duty above personal ambition. Cincinnatus is great precisely because he doesn't want power for its own sake — he serves and steps down. The ideal Roman leader serves the state, then returns to private life.

Camillus and the Schoolteacher:

During Rome's siege of the Etruscan city Falerii, a schoolteacher brought the children of the city's leading citizens to the Roman general Camillus, offering them as hostages to end the siege. Camillus rejected this treachery, had the teacher stripped and beaten, and sent him back to the Faliscans. Rome subsequently won the city through the Faliscans' admiration for Roman honor.

What this story reveals: Romans win through superior virtue, not through treachery or underhanded tactics. Honor even toward enemies is a Roman value. Rome's greatness comes from moral excellence, not clever manipulation.

The scholar Moses Hadas draws a remarkable set of parallels between Aeneas (Rome's founding hero in Virgil's Aeneid) and Moses (Israel's liberating hero in the Torah). This comparison asks you to think about how both Rome and Israel understood themselves as peoples with a divinely ordained mission.

Key Parallels Between Aeneas and Moses:

1. Flight from a destroyed homeland under divine command:

- Aeneas: flees the burning city of Troy after its defeat by the Greeks, commanded by the gods to found a new civilization

- Moses: leads the Israelites out of Egypt, commanded by G-d to bring them to the Promised Land

2. A long, difficult journey to a promised land:

- Aeneas: wanders the Mediterranean for years (like Odysseus) before reaching Italy

- Moses: leads the Israelites through 40 years in the desert before reaching Canaan

3. Divine guidance and protection throughout:

- Aeneas: receives guidance from his mother Venus, Jupiter, and other gods

- Moses: receives direct communication from G-d throughout the journey

4. Founding a new civilization with a divine mission:

- Aeneas: his descendants will found Rome, destined to rule the world

- Moses: establishes the covenant and the Torah that will define the Jewish people

What this parallel suggests:

Both Rome and Israel understood themselves as peoples with a special divine destiny — chosen to fulfill a mission that justified their founding struggles and hardships. This idea of a "chosen people" or "destined civilization" is a powerful way of constructing collective identity.

The parallel also raises challenging questions: If both civilizations claimed divine support and special destiny, how should we understand their conflicts? What does it mean for two "chosen peoples" to clash?

The Roman historian Tacitus (c. 56–120 CE) describes Jewish customs and history in Book 5 of his Histories, written in the context of describing the Jewish revolt against Rome (66–73 CE). His account is one of the most important Roman perspectives on Judaism, though it is often hostile and reflects significant misunderstanding.

What Tacitus Notes About Judaism:

- Jewish monotheism: "The Jews conceive of one G-d only" — Tacitus finds this strange; most Romans were polytheists

- Sabbath observance: Tacitus notes the Jewish day of rest with puzzlement, theorizing it was because the Jews were lazy

- Dietary laws: Jewish refusal to eat pork and other restrictions struck Romans as antisocial

- Separation from non-Jews: Tacitus notes that Jews do not eat with non-Jews, intermarry, or worship with others — he interprets this as hostility toward all other peoples ("adversus omnes alios hostile odium")

- Various origin theories: Tacitus presents multiple theories about Jewish origins (exiles from Egypt, refugees from various ancient peoples) — all with a skeptical or negative tone

Tacitus's Perspective:

Tacitus is not writing as an observer sympathetic to Judaism. He views Jewish practices as strange, antisocial, and contemptible. His description of Jewish "hatred of all other peoples" is not objective reporting — it reflects Roman frustration with a subject people who refused to assimilate into Roman culture and religion.

Historical Value:

Despite its biases, Tacitus's account is historically valuable because it:

- Confirms from an outside perspective that Jewish practices (monotheism, Sabbath, dietary laws, separation) were distinctive and consistent

- Reveals how Rome perceived the Jewish community — a perception that influenced how Jews were treated

- Shows the clash between Roman universalist culture (which expected conquered peoples to adopt Roman religion and customs) and Jewish particularism (the insistence on maintaining distinct religious practices)

Josephus (37–100 CE) occupies a unique and controversial position in history: he was a Jewish general who fought against Rome in the Jewish War (66–73 CE), then surrendered and spent the rest of his life writing history under Roman patronage. His complex position — between two worlds — makes him an invaluable but complicated source.

His Major Works:

- The Jewish War: a detailed account of the catastrophic Jewish revolt against Rome (66–73 CE), culminating in the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. Written partly to explain to a Roman audience why the revolt happened and partly to prevent future revolts by showing how hopeless resistance was.

- Jewish Antiquities: a massive 20-volume history tracing Jewish history from creation to Josephus's own time. It presents Jewish civilization, history, and culture to a Roman audience — an act of cultural advocacy.

Josephus's Theological Interpretation:

In The Jewish War, Josephus argues that G-d was punishing the Jews through Rome — that the destruction of the Temple was divine judgment for Jewish sins and internal divisions. The Romans, in his view, were unwitting instruments of divine will.

This is a deeply painful theological accommodation. Josephus was trying to explain a catastrophe: how could G-d allow Rome to destroy the Temple? His answer — divine punishment — preserved Jewish theology while accepting Roman military reality.

Josephus and His Critics:

Many Jews in his own time and later viewed Josephus as a traitor — someone who surrendered to save his own life and then helped Rome present its conquest sympathetically. Later generations, however, recognized that without Josephus, much of what we know about first-century Jewish history would be lost entirely.

Key Tensions in Using Josephus as a Source:

- He writes under Roman patronage — does this bias his account?

- He was a military failure who later justified his surrender as divinely ordained

- Yet his works are among our most important primary sources for Jewish history and the origins of Christianity