We know from the ancient Roman historian Cassius Dio that the emperor Claudius (reigned 41–54 C.E.) ordered the Jews not to hold meetings in Rome around 41 C.E. (Cassius Dio 60.6.6). And yet Cassius does not explicitly reveal why Claudius would prohibit Roman Jews from meeting in synagogues. If we look at Claudius’s Letter to Alexandria, we see that he explicitly warns the Jews not to engage in certain activities, which, if carried out, would entice his “wrath” upon them. For example, he warns them “not to agitate for more privileges than they formerly possessed, and not in the future to send out a separate embassy … and not to bring in or admit Jews who come down the river from Egypt or from Syria” or else he will “by all means take vengeance on them as fomenters of which is a general plague infecting the whole world.”
It seems plausible, then, that Claudius’s ban on Jewish synagogue meetings was an attempt to restrict Jewish activity in general terms, with the intention of limiting any further religious or political disturbances.
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