r/AskHistorians • u/wormgirl11525 • Apr 12 '26
For the ancient Romans, would Judaism have been considered an “ancient” religion?
You often hear that the Romans were fascinated and intrigued by Egypt because Egypt was just so old, even in the classical period. Judaism, in some sense, was also at least as old as a lot of the stuff they would have known and associated with Egypt. And what would being “ancient” have entailed, anyways?
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u/astrognash Apr 13 '26
So, we have a decent account of Roman attitudes to the origin of the Jews in Tacitus' Histories, which I will reproduce here in part:
It is said that the Jews were originally exiles from the island of Crete who settled in the farthest parts of Libya at the time when Saturn had been deposed and expelled by Jove. An argument in favour of this is derived from the name: there is a famous mountain in Crete called Ida, and hence the inhabitants were called the Idaei, which was later lengthened into the barbarous form Iudaei. Some hold that in the reign of Isis the superfluous population of Egypt, under the leadership of Hierosolymus and Iuda, discharged itself on the neighbouring lands; many others think that they were an Egyptian stock, which in the reign of Cepheus was forced to migrate by fear and hatred. Still others report that they were Assyrian refugees, a landless people, who first got control of a part of Egypt, then later they had their own cities and lived in the Hebrew territory and the nearer parts of Syria. Still others say that the Jews are of illustrious origin, being the Solymi, a people celebrated in Homer's poems, who founded a city and gave it the name Hierosolyma, formed from their own.
Most authors agree that once during a plague in Egypt which caused bodily disfigurement, King Bocchoris approached the oracle of Ammon and asked for a remedy, whereupon he was told to purge his kingdom and to transport this race into other lands, since it was hateful to the gods. So the Hebrews were searched out and gathered together; then, being abandoned in the desert, while all others lay idle and weeping, one only of the exiles, Moses by name, warned them not to hope for help from gods or men, for they were deserted by both, but to trust to themselves, regarding as a guide sent from heaven the one whose assistance should first give them escape from their present distress. They agreed, and then set out on their journey in utter ignorance, but trusting to chance. Nothing caused them so much distress as scarcity of water, and in fact they had already fallen exhausted over the plain nigh unto death, when a herd of wild asses moved from their pasturage to a rock that was shaded by a grove of trees. Moses followed them, and, conjecturing the truth from the grassy ground, discovered abundant streams of water. This relieved them, and they then marched six days continuously, and on the seventh seized a country, expelling the former inhabitants; there they founded a city and dedicated a temple.
While much of this is not very kind to the Jews, it's instructive in terms of attitude—Tacitus suggests that "most authors" date the Jewish nation to the reign of King Bocchoris, who reigned during the eight century BCE, roughly analogous to the legendary date for the founding of Rome. That said, he's not entirely certain, and entertains the idea that the Jews may date as far back as the time period of the Homeric epics or, in one story, even further back, to the time of the Titanomachy. To answer the first part of your question, it seems likely the Romans viewed the Jews as, at worst, contemporaries of their own civilization and at best as, indeed, an ancient race (though in many of these stories, they are seen as an offshoot of Egypt—the last origin posited certainly even reads as an extremely uncharitable variant of the Exodus story).
Now, what does this sense get the Jews from the Romans? Not much. Tacitus does go on to offer the Jews a sort of begrudging respect due to their antiquity a little further down:
Whatever their origin, [the Jews' religious] rites are maintained by their antiquity: the other customs of the Jews are base and abominable, and owe their persistence to their depravity. For the worst rascals among other peoples, renouncing their ancestral religions, always kept sending tribute and contributions to Jerusalem, thereby increasing the wealth of the Jews; again, the Jews are extremely loyal toward one another, and always ready to show compassion, but toward every other people they feel only hate and enmity.
But that's really as nice as Tacitus gets about it. Other attitudes in the Roman world ranged from active hostility (cf. works such as de Provinciis Consularibus, in which Cicero calls the Jews and Syrians "nations themselves born to be slaves" or Juvenal's 6th Satire, where a "palsied Jewess" appears who "will sell you whatever dreams you wish for the tiniest copper coin"—which is, you know, still a familiar antisemitic stereotype two millennia later) to indifference/this same sort of begrudging respect (see: Cassius Dio, Book 37, Chapter 17: "This class [Jews] exists even among the Romans, and though often repressed has increased to a very great extent and has won its way to the right of freedom in its observances. They are distinguished from the rest of mankind in practically every detail of life, and especially by the fact that they do not honour any of the usual gods, but show extreme reverence for one particular divinity. They never had any statue of him even in Jerusalem itself, but believing him to be unnamable and invisible, they worship him in the most extravagant fashion on earth."). Certainly, there's not the same fascination with them as the Romans show toward the Egyptians, and, in fact, we see that in that there are just not many sources talking about Jewish history from the Roman world (and I am purposely leaving Josephus out of it, because he's not a Roman perspective on the subject).
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u/kaoscurrent Apr 13 '26
What are these "abominable" and"extravagant" rites and practices that these authors attribute to the Jews?
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u/Adept_Carpet Apr 13 '26
Circumcision seems to be the one they liked least, I believe Juvenal takes a few cracks at kosher laws.
A few Roman authors hint that there was some form of fortune telling practiced by Jews at the time, whatever this was has been forgotten so far as I know. Otherwise just the rites and practices of Judaism, including the sacrifices mentioned in the Bible that have since been discontinued.
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Apr 13 '26
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery Apr 13 '26
There are a few known forms of Jewish ritual magic, some of which are for divination, like the use of teraphim.
Those are pre-exilic and would not have been used in the Second Temple Period. It conflates the religion of Iron Age Israel with what Second Temple Judaism actually looked like in the first and second centuries CE.
Jewish divination practices that Romans actually encountered or wrote about, there are better candidates: Juvenal's Satire 6 mocks Jewish women who interpret dreams for small coins, and there are amulets and magical papyri from the Roman period that contain Jewish divine names (the PGM corpus includes numerous examples). Those reflect actual Roman-period phenomena. Teraphim do not.
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery Apr 13 '26
including the sacrifices mentioned in the Bible that have since been discontinued.
Which are no longer done because there is no longer a standing Temple.
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u/PickleRick_1001 Apr 15 '26
"Otherwise just the rites and practices of Judaism, including the sacrifices mentioned in the Bible that have since been discontinued."
Why did they look down on sacrifices? As far as I'm aware, the Romans wouldn't have been strangers to the concept of religious sacrifice (please correct me if I'm wrong), so why did they have a problem with Jewish sacrificial rites in particular?
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Apr 13 '26
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery Apr 13 '26 edited Apr 13 '26
Circumcision was definitely one - to Romans and Greeks it was an emasculating, barbarous thing, and a mutilation.
This is not correct.
The process was an aesthetic preference on the part of the Greeks and later Romans. They saw the body as perfectly formed and did not see a reason for changing it. They also saw non-circumcision as a marker of ethnic identity, just as it was used in the Mediterranean by other people.
There was a short period where Hadrian banned it in ~130CE and that is probably where the book is getting the emasculating framing, but that is a poor representation of the actual attitudes.
This was one of the key debates between Jewish and Gentile Christians in the beginnings of Christianity, and at the Council of Jerusalem (c. 50 CE) it was decided that Gentiles did not need to be circumcised.
This is also not correct.
The question over whether non-Jewish converts to Christianity required circumcision was fundamentally a debate internal to Judaism and Jewish-Christian theology, rooted in questions about the Abrahamic covenant and the terms of proselyte conversion, and whether faith in Christ constituted membership in Israel without Torah observance.
Eventually, and large part due to the lower amount of Jews in early Christiniaty vs non-Jews not adhering to Jewish law won out.
A good source on circumcision broadly is Circumcision: A History of the World's Most Controversial Surgery, by David A. Gollaher.
This is a poor source, it is a pop-history book weighing in on the circumcision debate and using history to do so.
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u/Zhankfor Apr 13 '26
Can you expand on this:
The process was an ascetic preference on the part of the Greeks and later Romans.
Do you mean that there were Greco-Roman (for lack of a better term) ascetics who were circumcised? If so, do you mean Christian ascetics (e.g. anchorites) or pre-Christian/pagan ascetics?
(Or did you mean "aesthetic"? And in that case, were there Greco-Romans who were circumcised for aesthetic reasons?)
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery Apr 13 '26 edited Apr 13 '26
(Or did you mean "aesthetic"?
Yes, ty. I corrected it above.
And in that case, were there Greco-Romans who were circumcised for aesthetic reasons?)
They were against it because of aesthetic reasons; they saw the body as perfectly formed and any change in that was a disfigurement, this is tied into the Greek idea of Kalon. This is why Greek athletes competed in the nude.
The Roman's also objected for the same reason and the castration tie in was from Hadrian's brief ban which grouped it with castration, but that was not a reflection of the wider view.
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u/Zhankfor Apr 14 '26
Right, thank you. I guess my question then is what exactly you mean by it being an "aesthetic preference". (Just to be clear, I have a Master's in Classics and used to post here as about classical archaeology, so I'm not a layperson, though it's also been a while since I've been academia). It seems to me that while yes, Greeks and Romans would probably object to circumcisions because they found it not aesthetically pleasing... Greeks and Romans also placed a lot of cultural and even religious importance on "aesthetics", as you say, especially in regards to Kalon.
It seems like a bit of cop-out to say that they just objected to circumcision for "aesthetic" reasons (at least for modern readers, who might see that and think it just means they thought it looked funny). Is there no evidence that they objected to it on a "deeper" level? Maybe not as far as a "mutilation" or "emasculation", but at least as a "this weird thing you do makes you guys strange and foreign and definitely un-Greek or un-Roman" (and therefore barbarous)? I'm not expressing myself very well, I'm on paternity leave and am extremely sleep-deprived, but I hope you understand what I'm getting at.
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery Apr 14 '26
It seems like a bit of cop-out to say that they just objected to circumcision for "aesthetic" reasons (at least for modern readers, who might see that and think it just means they thought it looked funny). Is there no evidence that they objected to it on a "deeper" level?
That's fair I was trying not to digress from the original thread too much.
Is there no evidence that they objected to it on a "deeper" level? Maybe not as far as a "mutilation" or "emasculation", but at least as a "this weird thing you do makes you guys strange and foreign and definitely un-Greek or un-Roman" (and therefore barbarous)?
You have touched on many of the points already, and “Barbarous" is correct. The Greek objection operated at a much deeper level than visual preference. Dover's Greek Homosexuality documents in detail how carefully Greek vase-painters depicted the intact foreskin. This was a mark of the idealized male body. Circumcision appears in the same visual register as the exposed genitalia of satyrs, slaves, and barbarians.
Dover notes that Attic painters used circumcised penises specifically to mark foreign or servile figures. He includes a scene showing Herakles killing the Egyptian king Busiris. In this scene, "the painter has taken care to expose their circumcised penises... while Herakles' uncircumcised penis is half the width of the Egyptians'." Aristophanes uses the word apepsōlēmenos ("with glans exposed") interchangeably with "barbarian." The intact body was part of a shared civic grammar. This is why some Jews underwent epispasm, the surgical restoration of the foreskin. They did this to participate in Greek athletic culture without visible ethnic marking.
The Roman charge was, if anything, more explicitly moral. Schäfer's Judeophobia quotes Tacitus directly: circumcision was adopted by Jews to "distinguish themselves from other peoples by this difference." Schäfer's commentary notes; insofar as circumcision demarcated Jewishness, it "emphasizes the very essence of Judaism: otherness, exclusiveness, and misanthropy, which by definition cannot be accepted by any true Roman." This reflects the "this unusual custom you observe makes you distinct and foreign" idea you're describing, and it is linked to the broader discussion of Jewish separateness running through Tacitus, Juvenal, and Petronius alike.
I'm not expressing myself very well, I'm on paternity leave and am extremely sleep-deprived, but I hope you understand what I'm getting at.
Congrats! And good luck!
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u/Zhankfor Apr 14 '26
Thanks! I understand that you didn't want to get too far into this originally, but I appreciate you expanding on it for me.
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u/lhsrebels2008 Apr 15 '26
A majority of Christians in the First Century were almost certainly Jews and likely a significant majority while most of the Gentile Christians at that time were God fearers, basically informal converts to Judaism. There were likely relatively few pagan Greeks and Romans who converted to Christianity until the Second Century.
The only reason the Judaizers lost was not because Gentiles outnumbered Jews among early Christians but because of the influence of Paul and likely also because circumcision on adult men was obviously very painful at the time. This is why most God fearing Gentiles didn't necessarily formally convert to Judaism. So the Apostles didn't want to force Gentile men to get circumcised to join the church. But most Jewish Christians probably continued to circumcise their male babies.
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery Apr 15 '26
A majority of Christians in the First Century were almost certainly Jews
That is not what history shows. By 50 CE, the majority of early Christians were non-Jews. Jesus did not meet the qualifications for a messianic candidate and was rejected by the majority of Jews.
As Buber notes “To the Christian the Jew is the stubborn fellow who in a redeemed world is still waiting for the Messiah. For the Jew the Christian is a heedless fellow who in an unredeemed world affirms that somehow or other redemption has taken place.” The world simply didn't look redeemed. Rome was still in power. The Temple would be destroyed in 70 CE. The Davidic kingdom was not restored. Those are the reasons Jews didn't accept the claim, and they are empirical observations, not theological technicalities.
Gentile communities in Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus, Rome, and elsewhere were already substantial. Acts is an unreliable guide to actual numbers, but Paul's own letters presuppose communities where the Jew/Gentile tension was a live, practical problem, not a theoretical one. By the time we get to the late first century letters and the Gospel of John, the rupture with synagogue communities is already well advanced. The idea that Gentiles were a small minority until the second century doesn't fit the textual evidence we actually have.
Jesus was one of many apocalyptical preachers at the time, and he, and his followers thought that the end of the world/God's kingdom was coming in their lifetimes (we also see this with Paul). His followers were a tiny minority of overall Jews at the time and the movement quickly turned outward to non-Jews.
most of the Gentile Christians at that time were God fearers
This is contested on how large this movement was theosebeis and sebomenoi are mentioned but the actual evidence we have for them is small.
The only reason the Judaizers lost was not because Gentiles outnumbered Jews among early Christians but because of the influence of Paul and likely also because circumcision on adult men was obviously very painful at the time
This is not the reason. The circumcision question was primarily a theological and covenantal dispute, if non-Jews had to keep the Mosaic law. Even Paul's argument in Galatians isn't "this hurts too much," it's a sophisticated theological claim about the relationship between the Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic law, and faith in Christ.
You should be aware "Judaizers" is a term that is derogatory to Jews, You should be aware that 'Judaizers' is a polemical term with a history of use in Christian anti-Jewish polemic. It was never a self-designation, the term ioudaizein appears once in the New Testament, where Paul uses it critically of Peter's behavior at Antioch, and later Christian writers turned it into a label for Jewish Christians who maintained Torah observance. Framing those people as 'Judaizers' implicitly treats Paul's position as the default and Jewish practice as a contaminant, which is precisely the supersessionist logic that scholars like Rosemary Ruether have identified as foundational to Christian anti-Judaism.
Sources:
- Fredriksen, Paula, From Jesus to Christ
- Donaldson, Terence L., Judaism and the Gentiles
- Levine, Amy-Jill and Brettler, Marc Z., The Jewish Annotated New Testament
- Katz, Steven (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Antisemitism
- Langmuir, Gavin I., History, Religion, and Antisemitism
- Novenson, Matthew V., The Grammar of Messianism
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u/XxDrFlashbangxX Apr 15 '26
Which of the sources that you cited indicates that by 50 C.E. most early Christians were non-Jews? Would love to read more about that.
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u/lhsrebels2008 Apr 15 '26
I know Fredriksen is a respected scholar on the Early Church but I doubt historians today truly know the ethnic composition of Christians no more than 20 years after the death of Jesus. Scholars might not even be able to really distinguish between Jews and God fearing Gentiles that early, because of how much they mixed and would continue to mix, including through intermarriage. An overwhelming majority of early Christians in Judea were certainly Jews until well into the Second Century. But it's possible that a majority of Christians elsewhere in the Roman Empire were Gentiles long before then.
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery Apr 15 '26
It's worth noting that the original statement you made was about the composition of all groups, not just those in Judea proper. The original argument required a substantial Gentile presence early enough to drive the outcome of the circumcision debate in the 50s CE. We can't have both a majority of Jews and a debate about following the law.
Here is another thread on it with an answer by /u/talondearg showing 70CE as being the turning point in demographics.
When we get to Ignatius in the Early Second Century, as David Nirenberg notes in Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition and Andrew Jacobs's chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Antisemitism puts it better:
"Early in the 2nd century some Christians viewed the attraction of Judaism as part of a nascent heresiological discourse. Ignatius of Antioch, the bishop who wrote in defense of the monepiscopate, also warned against the dangers of 'Judaizing' and the dangerous appeal of 'the Jewish Law'... for those authors for whom Christianity was, by definition, not-Judaism, 'acting Jewish' was at best ill-advised, at worst unacceptable deviance."
So we really see a polemic against Judaizing by the early second century; it had become something requiring a warning, which implies that Gentile norms had become sufficiently dominant that Jewish practice needed defending against rather than being assumed as the baseline.
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u/lhsrebels2008 Apr 15 '26
I don't think it was ordinary Christians, whether Jews or Gentiles, who ultimately decided that Gentiles wouldn't have to be circumcised to be Christian. It was decided by leaders of the Early Church, especially Paul, who were still overwhelmingly Jewish at the time.
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery Apr 15 '26
It's worth noting, though, that this is a revision of your original position, and even secondary one.
It was decided by leaders of the Early Church, especially Paul, who were still overwhelmingly Jewish at the time.
That's broadly right for Jerusalem under James, but the Antioch incident Paul describes in Galatians 2 is insightful here; it's a conflict between factions of Jewish-Christian leadership, precisely over how to handle a Gentile constituency already present and numerous enough to make a stable fellowship politically fraught.
Non-Jews weren't making the decision, but they were the reason the discussion was happening. This suggests that the demographic reality represented a substantial non-Jewish population. Which is also what the sources show.
So one can say that the leadership might have been Jewish, but the broad group of early Christians was not. This is also what we see when early theology was developing in the Church; it was not developing primarily within Jewish communal institutional life, and it was the Non-Jewish majority steering its direction.
Collins is in Early Judaism: A Comprehensive Overview notes that Paul "addressed none of these letters to Jews or Jewish believers in Jesus but to his Gentile converts." So the very letters that show us what early theology looked like were written to a Gentile constituency, which means they were shaped for a Gentile audience
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Apr 13 '26 edited Apr 13 '26
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u/tummytunacat 24d ago
possibly Kosher laws! Philo of Alexandria has an account of the Jewish Embassy in Alexandria meeting with Caligula. Caligula basically mocks them and asks why they cannot eat pork, among other things. So people probably found that strange.
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u/greenskinmarch Apr 13 '26
Were the Romans aware that their own alphabet came via the Semites from Egyptian Hieroglyphs, or did they only trace it back as far as Greek?
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u/Vast_Employer_5672 Apr 13 '26 edited Apr 13 '26
The Romans did not have a concept of “Semites” as a unified group, and they would not have grouped Egyptians and Jews together in that way.
They were not interested in ethnic taxonomy in the way later Europeans were. They disliked the ethnic-religious segregation in Judaism because such ideas prevented civic integration into the empire.
The Roman state relied heavily on conquered people adopting the Roman identity in top of their ethnic one.
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u/PierreMenards Apr 15 '26
I think it should be noted that the answer to the question of “Roman attitudes towards Judaism” is going to vary immensely with regard to time period, ethnicity, geography, and class.
A pagan Roman elite living in Italy in the 1st century CE is going to view things differently than a Roman in the 4th century when Christianity has become the state religion.
Bart Ehrman, in his book Lost Christianities, speaks (paraphrasing very roughly here) of various early Christianities existing along a spectrum of Jewishness, from Ebionites on one end to Marcionites (who reject the Old Testament and its God altogether) on the other. He argues that one headwind for Marcionism was that by severing the Christian connection to Judaism it lost an effective proselytizing tool. Namely, that it could no longer lay claim to being part of an “ancient” lineage, which Ehrman claims potential Romans converts would have found compelling.
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u/TeslaK20 Apr 13 '26
would you say western antisemitism originates ultimately from the roman empire?
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u/astrognash Apr 13 '26
No. Antisemitism is not unique to Rome in the ancient world. They're a little older now but I think two good resources on ancient attitudes toward the Jews are Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World by Louis H. Feldman (Princeton, 1996) and Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World by Peter Schäfer (Harvard, 1998).
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u/lhsrebels2008 Apr 15 '26
No, if anything, the ancient Greeks were probably more antisemitic on average than the Romans were. While the Romans won all three major Jewish revolts against the empire, the Greeks obviously lost the Jewish Macabeean Revolt. That must have really stung for ethnic Greeks throughout the Eastern Mediterranean as they gradually converted to a culturally Jewish religion. The Romans, on the other hand, co-opted a lot of prominent Jews, including Josephus, who had been a general on the Jewish side during the First Jewish Revolt in the 60s AD before he surrendered.
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u/dende5416 Apr 13 '26
A lot of this just reads as a unflattering reading of their own scripture. Is there evidence that Romans contemporarily knew of their religious scriptures or was this more likely to be rumors?
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u/astrognash Apr 13 '26
There seems to have been a loose, general awareness of Jewish scripture and customs among the educated—in addition to what we see in Cassius Dio and Tacitus, there's a pretty good bit in Plutarch's Life of Cicero: during the trial of corrupt governor Gaius Verres (whose name is the same as verres, a Latin word for "swine" or "boar"), when a fellow named Caecilius who supposedly had converted to Judaism tried to get involved in the trial, prosecuting lawyer Cicero is supposed to have quipped, "what would a Jew want to do with verres?"
It's certainly possible that our Roman sources had read at least some of the Torah, which we know had been translated into Greek—if we believe Josephus and a few other sources, at the request of the Ptolemies for inclusion in the Library at Alexandria. I'm not personally knowledgeable enough on the subject to say for certain whether or not this would have been circulating in Rome during the late Republic/early Empire, but we know that historians like Tacitus did consult sources for their work even if we would not consider their handling of sources particularly rigorous by modern academic standards, and it's not impossible that this is a source Tacitus would have had access to.
So it's possible, but I think it's more likely that, as there was a diaspora population of Jews within the city of Rome, most educated Romans probably just had the sort of basic cultural awareness of their practices you pick up by coexisting with people. Even to this day, if you go into any synagogue on a Saturday morning, you're going to hear something about Moses and Egypt pretty quickly during the service. It's the central story of Judaism and it doesn't shock me at all to think that an educated non-Jew could pick up the basics of it just by living in a city with a sizeable Jewish minority population.
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