Tiberius Julius Alexander

While Prefect of Egypt (66–69), he employed his legions against the Alexandrian Jews in a brutal response to ethnic violence, and was instrumental in the Emperor Vespasian's rise to power.

The family of the older Alexander, a member of the Egyptian gentry, had Roman citizenship, something not infrequent among the wealthy Jews of Alexandria.

[6] However, some more recent scholars believe that Josephus is criticizing Alexander simply for his decision to take up the service of Rome, placing the interests of the Empire above the Jewish religion.

Tiberius' father, who had been imprisoned by Caligula, was released on Claudius' orders, and it was at this time that his younger brother Marcus became Berenice's husband.

[2] The province had returned to direct Roman rule only after the death of Agrippa in 44, and from the tenure of Alexander's predecessor Cuspius Fadus it had been a hotbed of zealot nationalism.

[11] Alexander appears to have risen in the ranks – though the details are unknown, until, with the reign of Nero, he served as a staff officer under the prominent general Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo during campaigns against Parthia, under whom he distinguished himself.

[15] The year he assumed office saw the outbreak of the First Jewish–Roman War in Judea, and aggression inevitably spilled over into the large Jewish community of Alexandria.

[16] The threat was ineffective, and Josephus describes the outcome: [Alexander] then let loose among them the two Roman legions, and with them 2,000 soldiers who happened to have come from Libya, with fearful consequences for the Jews.

[19] This denounces, and introduces measures against, a variety of abuses including inaccurate tax assessments, malicious prosecutions and the imprisonment of debtors by private creditors.

The edict's only allusion to the chaotic political situation comes as a call for trust in the benevolence of the new Emperor, Galba, and his ability to put right the wrongs of the past.

Alexander was making representations to Galba on behalf of the provincials, presumably representing the desired reforms as the price of loyalty from this vital grain-producing province.

[citation needed] Josephus's accounts of the sequence of events, and of who was responsible, is highly contradictory,[23] though, as in rabbinic tradition, both this and the earlier destruction of the Temple were due to God's will, Nebuchadnezzer and the Romans being but his instruments.

[26] In either case, Alexander attained a position in the Roman Empire that was unparalleled for a man of Jewish birth, not to mention one who suffered from the further stigma of an Egyptian origin.

The xenophobic speaker of Juvenal's first Satire, composed in the late 1st or early in the 2nd century AD, complains of passing the Forum's triumphal statues, "where some Egyptian Arabarch's had the nerve to set up his titles.