Tiberius expels the Jews from Rome; 4,000 freedmen forcibly enrolled and sent to Sardinia (Tacitus, Josephus, Suetonius)

Under Tiberius, a Jewish community had been established in Rome for more than a century, concentrated on the right bank of the Tiber and enjoying the right to practice its religion. The senate voted for its expulsion the same year it drove out Egyptian cults, in a campaign of religious policing directed against "foreign superstitions."

Josephus links the measure to a fraud: four Jews were said to have diverted the donations of a converted patrician woman, Fulvia, intended for the Temple of Jerusalem. Tacitus, for his part, says nothing of it and presents the decision as a matter of principle. Men of military age were forcibly conscripted and sent to Sardinia to combat banditry — an island with a reputation for unhealthiness, where it was expected they would perish.

The expulsion was short-lived: the community is once again attested in Rome under the same reign, and the city's Jewish catacombs bear witness to its continuity over several centuries.