Religiously, it seems that the Romans viewed the Jews as victims of pernicious superstition, and classified them with the Egyptians in that regard. The conclusion that Jews were superstitious wasn't based on mere hearsay. Jews were to be found throughout the empire, in most of the larger cities and a large Jewish community resided in Rome. The Romans certainly had the opportunity to observe Jewish customs. They were not impressed with the Jewish refusal to eat pork, and were actively revolted with circumcision. The keeping of the Sabbath struck them as a celebration of indolence and sloth.

Juvenal wrote as follows:

"[The Jews] worship nothing but clouds and the numen of the heavens, and think it as great a crime to eat pork, from which their parents abstained, as human flesh. They get themselves circumcised, and look down on Roman law, preferring instead to learn and honor and fear the Jewish commandments, whatever was handed down by Moses in that arcane tone of his—never to show the way to any but fellow believers (if they ask where to get some water, find out if they're foreskinless). But their fathers were the culprits; they made every seventh day taboo for all life's business, dedicated to idleness."

Tacitus stated, "Among the Jews, all things are profane that we hold sacred; on the other hand, they regard as permissible what seems to us immoral." Tacitus found Jewish practices offensive partly because he could see no proper religious grounds for their customs and partly because he believed that they used their idiosyncratic customs to cut themselves off from others.

However, Tacitus did identify the fact that the Jews followed a spiritual monotheism and that they considered it to be impious to make representations of their deity out of perishable materials in the likeness of humans. He also observed that the Jews believed that their deity was eternal and that the Jews did not expect a "twilight of the gods" or any like phenomenon. Nevertheless, he found Judaism to be both superstitious and perverse because it deviated too far from the norms of traditional Roman society.

Of course "superstition" is a culturally derived concept. My religious belief might be your superstition, and vice versa. But I find it interesting to try to understand the Roman mind set with regard to both Judaism and Christianity.

See Wilken, Robert L., The Christians as the Romans Saw Them at 50-54 (discussing "Roman Religion and Christian Prejudice").