Tiberius Alexander: The Jewish General Who Destroyed Jerusalem

This piece is part of my recent wide-ranging book (available open-access on the Manifold site): The History of the Citizen Soldier: From Machiavelli to Mesopotomia (2024). (It will be published subsequently in physical form.) In an earlier detailed study, I show that Judeans were prized soldiers who served in foreign imperial armies from the time of the Neo-Assyrians; there I also explore ideologies and polemics in relation to Jewish soldiers in the Greco-Roman period: “Surviving in an Imperial Context: Foreign Military Service and Judean Identity,” in Judah and the Judeans in the Achaemenid Period: Negotiating Identity in an International Context, ed. Oded Lipschits et al. (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011).

Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt: From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian, trans. Robert Cornman (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society, 1995). Jews were the second largest population in Egypt and the largest minority. See Kerry Muhlestein and Courtney Innes, “Synagogues and Cemeteries: Evidence for a Jewish Presence in the Fayum,” Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 4 (2012): 53-59.

Katherine G. Evans, “Alexander the Alabarch: Roman and Jew,” in Seminar Papers: Society of Biblical Literature, ed. Eugene H. Lovering, Jr. (1995), 576–594.

For more on Berenice, including her marriages, see Malka Z. Simkovich, “Queen Berenice: A Woman of Contrasts,” TheTorah (2016).

Wright, “Surviving in an Imperial Context,” and Andrew J. Schoenfeld, “Sons of Israel in Caesar’s Service: Jewish Soldiers in the Roman Military,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 24 (2006): 115-126.

See b. Bava Batra 11a. Helena had converted to Judaism already in ca. 30 C.E., and she is known in Jewish tradition for benefaction for the Temple in Jerusalem (b. Yoma 37a) and extraordinarily strict observance of Jewish law (b. Nazir 19b). She was buried in Jerusalem where Louis Felicien de Saulcy, 1863, discovered her sarcophagus (bearing both a Palmyrene and Aramaic inscription). It was later brought to Paris and displayed at the Louvre. For more on Helena and her sons, see Malka Z. Simkovich, “Queen Helena of Adiabene and Her Sons in Midrash and History,” TheTorah (2018).

Modrzejewski, Jews of Egypt, 186.

This is an important history of the Roman Empire from the reigns of Emperor Tiberius to Nero.

The English translation can be found on the Perseus site here. The Latin reads:

Die pacta Tiberius Alexander, inlustris eques Romanus, minister bello datus, et Vinicianus Annius, gener Corbulonis, nondum senatoria aetate et pro legatoquintae legioni impositus, in castra Tiridatis venere, honori eiusac ne metueret insidias tali pignore; viceni dehinc equites adsumpti.

Victor A. Tcherikover, “The Decline of the Jewish Diaspora in Egypt in the Roman Period,” Journal of Jewish Studies 14 (1963): 1-32, and Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

See Oscar William Reinmuth, “The Edict of Tiberius Julius Alexander,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 65 (1954): 248-259, and Gérard Chalon, L’edit de Tiberius Julius Alexander, étude historique et exégetique, Bibliotheca Helvetica Romana, 1964.

See Robert A. Kraft, “Tiberius Julius Alexander and the Crisis in Alexandria According to Josephus,” in Harold W. Attridge et. al. (eds.) Of Scribes and Scrolls (University Press of America, 1990): 175-184, and Gregory E. Sterling, “‘Thus Are Israel’: Jewish Self-Definition in Alexandria,” in The Studia Philonica Annual: Studies in Hellenistic Judaism VII, ed. David T. Runia (1995): 1-18.

Josephus recounts a strikingly similar scenario for his own fate (Wars 3.400-407). Taken prisoner by Vespasian before he was emperor, Josephus claimed that an ancient oracle about a powerful leader rising from Judea referred to Vespasian’s rise over Rome. When Vespasian later became emperor, he supposedly rewarded Josephus by releasing him from prison and eventually making him part of his family, the Flavians (hence the name Josephus Flavius). Whether or not this took place, the Jew who really paved the way for Vespasian to become emperor was Tiberius. It is possible that Tiberius’ success shaped how Josephus presented Vespasian’s favor for himself, especially if he resented Tiberius’ influence (see below under “Polemics in Philo and Josephus”).

David Gurevich, “Why Did Vespasian and Titus Destroy Jerusalem?” TheTorah (2016).

According to Josephus, this happened on the tenth of the month Av, like the first Temple as per Jeremiah. But see Zev Farber, “Tisha B’Av: On What Day Were the Jerusalem Temples Destroyed?” TheTorah (2018), who argues that the destruction may well have happened on the ninth.

See Timothy D. Barnes, “The Sack of the Temple in Josephus and Tacitus,” in Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome, ed. Jonathan Edmondson et al. (Oxford University Press, 2005), 129–144.

“Tiberivs Ivlivs Alexander,” Journal of Roman Studies 44 (1954): 54-64, here p. 63.

See Margaret Williams, “Juvenal, the Jews, and Judaism: Two Puzzling Allusions re-Interpreted,” Latomus 75 (2016): 116-128.

The Latin reads:

atque triumphales, inter quas ausus habere
nescio quis titulos Aegyptius atque Arabarches,
cuius ad effigiem non tantum meiere fas est.

As Turner writes (“Tiberivs Ivlivs Alexander,” 64):

In Roman eyes, he united the triple handicap of being an Egyptian, an Alexandrian Greek, and a Jew; as brother of a former husband of Berenice and a friend of Agrippa, he may have shared the responsibility and can scarcely have avoided the odium popularly attached to the fancied promoters of the liaison between a Titus in his thirties and the Jewish princess in her middle fifties.

“Tiberivs Ivlivs Alexander,” 59.

His full name Tiberius Julius Alexander is modelled on the name of the important emperor Tiberius Julius Alexander Augustus, who ruled Rome from 14-37 C.E.

On religious activities in the war camp, see Mary Beard et al., Religions of Rome, Volumes I-II (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

For the original Greek, see here. And see Alexander Fuks, “Tiberius Julius Alexander,” in Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum II, ed. Victor A. Tcherikover and Alexander Fuks (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 188-197.

Wilhelmus Dittenberger (ed.), Supplementum Sylloges Inscriptionum Graecarum, 1905, p. 663.

Alan Appelbaum’s insightful, yet unpublished, paper (“The Apostasy of Tiberius Julius Alexander: An Intervention) provides a nuanced challenge to this interpretation.

Tiberius appears in perhaps more than one of Philo’s writings. See Maren Niehoff, Philo of Alexandria: An Intellectual Biography, Yale University Press, 2018; idem., Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001); Daniel R. Schwartz, “Philo, His Family, and His Times,” in The Cambridge Companion to Philo, ed. Adam Kamesar (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 9-31; and Robert A. Kraft, “Philo and the Sabbath Crisis: Alexandrian Jewish Politics and the Dating of Philo’s Works,” in The Future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester, ed. Birger A. Pearson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 131-141.

Niehoff, Philo of Alexandria, 72-73.

“How Later Contexts Affect Pauline Content, or: Retrospect is the Mother of Anachronism,” in Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries, ed., Peter J. Tomson and Joshua Schwartz (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 21. I owe this quote to Appelbaum, “Apostasy of Tiberius.”

For a fascinating fictional take on the career and identity of Tiberius, see Daniel M. Friedberg: Tiberius Julius Alexander: A Historical Novel (Prometheus, 2010).

On the biblical repudiation of martial sacrifice and political martyrdom, see Jacob L. Wright, “Honoring the Death of Soldiers,” TheTorah (2018).