We shall have to distinguish these police measures, which, when aimed at religious bodies, constitute an undoubted religious persecution, from the mutual animosity with which hostile races in any community regarded each other and the bloody riots that resulted from it. In the new city of Seleucia in Babylonia, the Syrians, Jews, and Greeks that lived there were very far from realizing the purpose of the city’s founder and coalescing into a single community. Sanguinary conflicts, probably on very slight provocation, frequently took place. Sometimes the Jews and Syrians combined against the Greeks; sometimes the Greeks and Syrians against the Jews, as recounted by Josephus.[165] The situation in Alexandria, where Egyptians hated Greeks, Jews, and doubtless all foreigners with a scarcely discriminating intensity, is peculiar only because we are well informed of conditions there by the papyri. When any one of these nationalities gained the upper hand, there was likely to be a bloody suppression of its foes, often followed by equally bloody reprisals. Salamis, in Cyprus, is a grim witness of the frenzy with which neighbors could attack each other, when years of hostility culminated in a violent outbreak.[166] The attitude of Greek states toward the Jewish congregations in their midst was certainly not uniformly hostile. But in many cases there could not help being a certain resentment, owing to the fact that these congregations were by special grant generally immune from prosecution for impiety, although as a matter of fact they very emphatically “did not regard as gods those whom the state so regarded.” Of itself this circumstance might have been neglected, but the active and successful propaganda they undertook made them a source of real danger to the state. We therefore hear of attempts made sporadically to abrogate the immunity, to compel the Jewish corporations to conform to the local law of ἀσέβεια. Nearly always, however, the immunity was a royal grant, and therefore unreachable by local legislation, a fact that did not tend to alleviate friction where it existed.[167]