In the first century of the common era, a heathen queen converted to Judaism about the same time as an aristocratic Jew deserted his heritage; an acute crisis in Roman Judea would give both the opportunity to prove their priorities and sympathies.

They were like ships passing in the night, plying the churning waters of the Mediterranean Sea when it was a Roman lake, heading at full speed in opposite directions.

Superficially, they had certain commonalities: one was of royalty, the other of nobility. Both were highborn members of small nations subjected to imperial superpowers, and both would make their way from their birthplace to sojourn in Roman-occupied Judea, where each left an indelible mark whose vestiges remain visible to this day.

Known in the Talmud as Hilni, Helena of Adiabene (c. 15 BCE–56/58 CE) was the sister-wife of King Monobaz I of Adiabene—a semi-independent region, with its capital at Arbela (modern Erbil), in what was formerly the heartland of ancient Assyria and in what is today Iraqi Kurdistan—and the mother and aunt of the princes Monobaz II and Izates II. Although likely of Hellenistic origin, the pagan queen consort was influenced by a Jewish merchant named Hananiah and converted to Judaism around the year 30; her sons also embraced Judaism and were circumcised (Izates was influenced to do so by another Jewish visitor to Adiabene, a Galilean named Elazar).

Around the year 45, by which time Izates was well established upon the throne, Helena pilgrimaged to Jerusalem to worship in its famed Holy Temple and to offer a thanksgiving sacrifice therein to the singular God she had accepted as her own. In the event, her arrival proved fortuitous and, as the priestly historian Joseph ben Mattityahu (Flavius Josephus) records in his Antiquities of the Jews, “her coming was of very great advantage to the people of Jerusalem.” Although no one knew it just then, the Holy City was on the cusp of calamity.

But the proselyte Helena wasn’t the only notable outsider to arrive in Judea at the time.

Born during the reign of Emperor Tiberius around the year 15 CE in the bustling port city of Alexandria, Egypt, Tiberius Julius Alexander hailed from one of the leading Jewish families in the Roman East. He was the son of Alexander Lysimachus, the Jewish alabarch of Egypt—a high-ranking taxation official responsible for levying customs from the many civilian vessels docking in Alexandria’s busy western harbor, Port Eunostos; he was also the nephew of Philo Judaeus, the eminent religious philosopher and exegete, who was his father’s older brother.

Groomed to join the Roman administration, Tiberius studied classical languages, apparently received little traditional Jewish education, and as a young man entered Roman military service. His younger brother Marcus Julius Alexander became the first husband of Herodian princess Berenika (Berenice) II, daughter of King Agrippa I of Judea (r. 41–44 CE). His philanthropic father—whom Josephus refers to as “a principal person among all his contemporaries, both for his family, and wealth”—sponsored the adornment of nine gates in the Jerusalem Temple that were plated with gold and silver.

Yet unlike his pious father and his esteemed uncle, Tiberius himself seems to have had little connection to Judaism or to his fellow Jews; per Josephus, he “did not continue in the religion of his country”. His impiety is corroborated by his portrayal in his uncle’s philosophical dialogue On Providence, wherein he controverts divine........

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