Ananias of Adiabene

Origins and early life

Ananias was a Jewish merchant of the first century — 'a certain Jewish merchant, whose name was Ananias,' in the words of Josephus, who tells his story in the twentieth book of the Jewish Antiquities.

Work and career

Trading in Charax Spasinou, at the head of the Persian Gulf, he gained access to the women of the royal court and 'taught them to worship God according to the Jewish religion'; through them he reached the young prince Izates of Adiabene, a kingdom of northern Mesopotamia, and persuaded him to embrace Judaism — while his mother, Queen Helena, was won over separately by another Jew. What followed is one of the most remarkable episodes of ancient Jewish history: an entire royal house of the Parthian sphere converting to Judaism in the first century, sending famine relief and gifts to Jerusalem, and burying its dead there in tombs that still stand.

Ananias, prudent, at first advised the king against circumcision for fear of his subjects' anger — a detail the historian Isaiah Gafni's notice in the Encyclopaedia Judaica preserves. He belongs to this directory by the simplest route of all: a Jew whose faith changed a kingdom.