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A passage in Agrippa II’s speech aimed at preventing a Jewish revolt against Rome (BJ 2.346–401) points to the serious consequences of a rebellion for the Jews who were living in the Diaspora: there was no population across the world without a Jewish minority and these Jews would surely be massacred in case of a revolt (2.398–399; cf. BJ 7.43). Elsewhere Josephus quotes the geographer Strabo, stating that the inhabited world was filled with Jews (AJ 14.115; FGrH 91F 7). Josephus himself provides useful information about Diaspora communities. He fills, for example, some gaps in the largely unknown history of the Jews in Babylonia and confirms that part of the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, and Levi did not return from the Babylonian captivity (see AJ 12.149; 15.39; 17.24–26; 18.310–379; 20.34–35; Neusner 1969; Oppenheimer 1983; Goodblatt 2012). He mentions as Jewish settlements in Babylonia the cities of Seleucia on the Tigris, Ctesiphon, close to Seleucia (AJ 18.372–378), Nehardea (18.310–313, 379), Nisibis (18.379) as well as Charax Spasini between the mouths of the Euphrates and Tigris (20.34). Nehardea on the Euphrates became a major Jewish center in the rabbinic period. Josephus also informs us that Hyrcanus II, former high priest and ethnarch (c. 76–40 BCE), was living in exile in Babylon after his capture by the Parthians in 40 BCE (AJ 15.12; see also below). Although Hyrcanus had become unfit for the High Priesthood after his mutilation by Antigonus (AJ 15.17), Josephus’s information implies that the Jews east of the Jordan treated him as if he were a king and high priest. He must have acted as the leader of the Jewish community in Babylonia and was well received at the Parthian court as a person of royal descent who could act as a trait d’union between the community and the Parthian administration. Later on Herod the Great strengthened the connection with the Babylonian Jews by founding a military colony with a group of them in Batanea (AJ 17.23–29). Josephus further tells us that Jews, one of them a merchant named Ananias who operated in the area of Charax Spasini, brought about the conversion of the royal family of Adiabene to Judaism (AJ 20.34–35). Josephus’s most elaborate section about Jews in Babylonia concerns the brothers Asinaeus and Anilaeus, who benefited from the weakness of the Parthian king and succeeded in establishing a semi-independent Jewish robber-state for some years (AJ 18.310–373), with “the parting of the rivers” as its center (AJ 18.315, probably referring to Pumbedita, c. 40 kilometers upstream on the Euphrates; Goodblatt 2012: 271). Josephus points out that one of the brothers fell for a Parthian beauty and that the marriage with this woman not only led to violations of the Jewish customs but also was the beginning of the brothers’ downfall (18.340–343).