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takeaway
context, they were everywhere.
    Marseilles, a Greek colony, had thousands of Jews centuries before Christ. Jews may have been in England with the Phoenicians, exploiting the mines of Cornwall. They deferred to no central
religious authority (unlike the equally ubiquitousRoman Catholics of our day) and their only common link was a sentiment for Jerusalem, realized in the obligatory temple tax
of one drachma 6 a year. Jews were particularly strong in Alexandria, feuding with the Greeks and interrupting the Games. They were also prominent in Antioch,
Cappadocia, Pontus, Phrygia and Pamphylia – everywhere in fact visited by Paul on his journeys. When he arrived, under praetorian escort, in Rome in AD 62, he would
have found 40,000 Jews and fourteen synagogues. The first swathe of Jews, thousands of them, had arrived as prisoners-of-war in Pompey’s triumphal procession 100 years before in 61 BC , and were sold into slavery as part of the successful general’s perks. But as we have seen (
vide
chapter on slaves), with a bit of
nous
and
application a slave in Roman times could be manumitted, and once they were free they had settled down on the wrong side of the Tiber – in what is now Trastevere – as butchers, bakers,
candlestick-makers, in any kind of métier except that of moneylending, which was enjoined upon them by the Christians in a later era. Some gained unpopularity (and were occasionally banned)
as fortune-tellers. A Jewish actor (as we have already seen, a questionable profession) who welcomedJosephus to Rome had insinuated himself into Poppaea’s circle,
probably as master of (a certain kind of) ‘ceremonies’ at the palace.
    Paul rented a flat near the praetorian barracks, and lived there for two years, at his own expense, practising without let or hindrance the gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ – to paraphrase
the last two verses of the Acts. He would have been the only Jew on the block. One wonders what happened then. Legends abound. Paul might have died before the fire of Rome in AD 64, but it is unlikely that he could have survived Nero’s persecution of the Christians – as they were not yet called – because although they did not, of course,
start the fire (nor did Nero) it suited the Emperor to pretend that they had. Poppaea, the Emperor’s mistress and eventual wife, was not a Jewish proselyte but favoured Jews and protected
them against the accusation of arson which fell so savagely on the Christians, a sect indistinguishable, to the Romans, from the Jews.
    Few Romans could, or would, have said ‘some of my best friends are Jews’. The Emperor Gaius could have and should have because Herod Agrippa
was
his only friend, but being
Caligula he didn’t and indeed planned a grotesque insult, which nearly broke Agrippa’s heart
(vide
chapter on Caligula). Jews in the Roman Empire, however successful, rarely
assimilated with the powers-that-were, unlike the Jews of South Africa or at the court of Edward VII during the British Empire.
    Only one Jew, a nephew of Philo the philosopher and historian from Alexandria, abandoned his religion and became Prefect of Egypt, as well as Prefect of Police and Corn and of the Praetorian
Guard, one of the top jobs in the Empire. Josephus, of whom much more anon, having changed sides in the Jewish War, boasted of his Roman acquaintance; butthe family which
fraternized consistently with the Julio-Flavian dynasty was that of Herod the Great, who weren’t really Jews at all. 7
    Herod came from Idumaea, the biblical Edom, the bottom left-hand corner of what is now Israel, inland of the Gaza Strip. The Herod of the New Testament, he who massacred the Innocents, gross,
cruel and stinking, like Henry VIII at the end of
his
life but with four more wives, has left an impression of horror difficult to dent. Immobilized by advanced arterio-sclerosis, paranoiac
and communicating with his family, it would seem, only through torture and assassination, it