CHAPTER XI.

JUDAEA AND THE JEWS.

The history of the Jewish land is as little the history of the Jewish people as the history of the States of the Church is that of the Catholics; it is just as requisite to separate the two as to consider them together.

[Sidenote: Judaea and the priestly rule under the Seleucids.]

The Jews in the land of the Jordan, with whom the Romans had to do, were not the people who under their judges and kings fought with Moab and Edom, and listened to the discourses of Amos and Hosea. The small community of pious exiles, driven out by foreign rule, and brought back again by a change in the hands wielding that rule, who began their new establishment by abruptly repelling the remnants of their kinsmen left behind in the old abodes and laying the foundation for the irreconcilable feud between Jews and Samaritans--the ideal of national exclusiveness and priestly control holding the mind in chains--had long before the Roman period developed under the government of the Seleucids the so-called Mosaic theocracy, a clerical corporation with the high-priest at its head, which, acquiescing in foreign rule and renouncing the formation of a state, guarded the distinctiveness of its adherents, and dominated them under the aegis of the protecting power. This retention of the national character in religious forms, while ignoring the state, was the distinctive mark of the later Judaism. Probably every idea of God is in its formation national; but no other God has been so from the outset the God only of his people as Jahve, and no one has so remained such without distinction of time and place. Those men returning to the Holy Land, who professed to live according to the statutes of Moses and in fact lived according to the statutes of Ezra and Nehemiah,[157] had remained just as dependent on the great-kings of the East, and subsequently on the Seleucids, as they had been by the waters of Babylon. A political element no more attached to this organisation than to the Armenian or the Greek Church under its patriarchs in the Turkish empire; no free current of political development pervades this clerical restoration; none of the grave and serious obligations of a commonwealth standing on its own basis hampered the priests of the temple of Jerusalem in the setting up of the kingdom of Jahve upon earth.

[Sidenote: Kingdom of the Hasmonaeans.]

The reaction did not fail to come. That church-without-a-state could only last so long as a secular great power served it as lord-protector or as bailiff. When the kingdom of the Seleucids fell into decay, a Jewish commonwealth was created afresh by the revolt against foreign rule, which drew its best energies precisely from the enthusiastic national faith. The high priest of Salem was called from the temple to the battlefield. The family of the Hasmonaeans restored the empire of Saul and David nearly in its old limits, and not only so, but these warlike high priests renewed also in some measure the former truly political monarchy controlling the priests. But that monarchy, at once the product of, and the contrast to, that priestly rule, was not according to the heart of the pious. The Pharisees and the Sadducees separated and began to make war on one another. It was not so much doctrines and ritual differences that here confronted each other, as, on the one hand, the persistence in a priestly government which simply clung to religious ordinances and interests, and otherwise was indifferent to the independence and the self-control of the community; on the other hand, the monarchy aiming at political development and endeavouring to procure for the Jewish people, by fighting and by treaty, its place once more in the political conflict, of which the Syrian kingdom was at that time the arena. The former tendency dominated the multitude, the latter had the preponderance in intelligence and in the upper classes; its most considerable champion was king Iannaeus Alexander, who during his whole reign was at enmity not less with the Syrian rulers than with his own Pharisees (iv. 139) {iv. 133}. Although it was properly but the other, and in fact the more natural and more potent, expression of the national revival, it yet by its greater freedom of thinking and acting came into contact with the Hellenic character, and was regarded especially by its pious opponents as foreign and unbelieving.

[Sidenote: The Jewish Diaspora.]

But the inhabitants of Palestine were only a portion, and not the most important portion, of the Jews; the Jewish communities of Babylonia, Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, were far superior to those of Palestine even after their regeneration by the Maccabees. The Jewish Diaspora in the imperial period was of more significance than the latter; and it was an altogether peculiar phenomenon.

The settlements of the Jews beyond Palestine grew only in a subordinate degree out of the same impulse as those of the Phoenicians and the Hellenes. From the outset an agricultural people and dwelling far from the coast, their settlements abroad were a non-free and comparatively late formation, a creation of Alexander or of his marshals.[158] In those immense efforts at founding Greek towns continued throughout generations, such as never before and never afterwards occurred to a like extent, the Jews had a conspicuous share, however singular it was to invoke their aid in particular towards the Hellenising of the East. This was the case above all with Egypt. The most considerable of all the towns created by Alexander, Alexandria on the Nile, was since the times of the first Ptolemy, who after the occupation of Palestine transferred thither a mass of its inhabitants, almost as much a city of the Jews as of the Greeks, and the Jews there were to be esteemed at least equal to those of Jerusalem in number, wealth, intelligence, and organisation. In the first times of the empire there was reckoned a million of Jews to eight millions of Egyptians, and their influence, it may be presumed, transcended this numerical proportion. We have already observed that, on no smaller a scale, the Jews in the Syrian capital of the empire had been similarly organised and developed (p. 127). The diffusion and the importance of the Jews of Asia Minor are attested among other things by the attempt which was made under Augustus by the Ionian Greek cities, apparently after joint concert, to compel their Jewish fellow townsmen either to withdrawal from their faith or to full assumption of civic burdens. Beyond doubt there were independently organised bodies of Jews in all the new Hellenic foundations,[159] and withal in numerous old Hellenic towns, even in Hellas proper, _e.g._ in Corinth. The organisation was placed throughout on the footing that the nationality of the Jews with the far-reaching consequences drawn from it by themselves was preserved, and only the use of the Greek language was required of them. Thus amidst this Graecising, into which the East was at that time coaxed or forced by those in authority, the Jews of the Greek towns became Greek-speaking Orientals.

[Sidenote: Greek language.]

That in the Jew-communities of the Macedonian towns the Greek language not merely attained to dominion in the natural way of intercourse, but was a compulsory ordinance imposed upon them, seems of necessity to result from the state of the case. In a similar way Trajan subsequently Romanised Dacia with colonists from Asia Minor. Without this compulsion, the external uniformity in the foundation of towns could not have been carried out, and this material for Hellenising generally could not have been employed. The governments went in this respect very far and achieved much. Already under the second Ptolemy, and at his instigation, the sacred writings of the Jews were translated into Greek in Egypt, and at least at the beginning of the imperial period the knowledge of Hebrew among the Jews of Alexandria was nearly as rare as that of the original languages of Scripture is at present in the Christian world; there was nearly as much discussion as to the faults of translation of the so-called Seventy Alexandrians as on the part of pious men among us regarding the errors of Luther’s translation. The national language of the Jews had at this epoch disappeared everywhere from the intercourse of life, and maintained itself only in ecclesiastical use somewhat like the Latin language in the religious domain of Catholicism. In Judaea itself its place had been taken by the Aramaic popular language of Syria, akin no doubt to the Hebrew; the Jews outside of Judaea, with whom we are concerned, had entirely laid aside the Semitic idiom, and it was not till long after this epoch that the reaction set in, which scholastically brought back the knowledge and the use of it more generally among the Jews. The literary works, which they produced at this epoch in great number, were in the better times of the empire all Greek. If language alone conditioned nationality, there would be little to tell for this period as to the Jews.

[Sidenote: Retention of nationality.]

But with this linguistic compulsion, at first perhaps severely felt, was combined the recognition of the distinctive nationality with all its consequences. Everywhere in the cities of the monarchy of Alexander the burgess-body was formed of the Macedonians, that is, those really Macedonian, or the Hellenes esteemed equal to them. By the side of these stood, in addition to foreigners, the natives, in Alexandria the Egyptians, in Cyrene the Libyans and generally the settlers from the East, who had indeed no other home than the new city, but were not recognised as Hellenes. To this second category the Jews belonged; but they, and they only, were allowed to form, so to speak, a community within the community, and--while the other non-burgesses were ruled by the authorities of the burgess-body--up to a certain degree to govern themselves.[160] The “Jews,” says Strabo, “have in Alexandria a national head (ἐθνάρχης) of their own, who presides over the people (ἔθνος), and decides processes and disposes of contracts and arrangements as if he ruled an independent community.” This was done, because the Jews indicated a specific jurisdiction of this sort as required by their nationality or--what amounts to the same thing--their religion. Further, the general political arrangements had respect in an extensive measure to the national-religious scruples of the Jews, and accommodated them as far as possible by exemptions. The privilege of dwelling together was at least frequently added; in Alexandria, _e.g._ two of the five divisions of the city were inhabited chiefly by Jews. This seems not to have been the Ghetto system, but rather a usage resting on the basis of settlement to begin with, and thereafter retained on both sides, whereby conflicts with neighbours were in some measure obviated.

[Sidenote: Extent of the Diaspora.]

Thus the Jews came to play a prominent part in the Macedonian Hellenising of the East; their pliancy and serviceableness on the one hand, their unyielding tenacity on the other, must have induced the very realistic statesmen who assigned this course of action, to resolve on such arrangements. Nevertheless the extraordinary extent and significance of the Jewish Diaspora, as compared with the narrowness and poorness of their home, remains at once a fact and a problem. In dealing with it we may not overlook the circumstance that the Palestinian Jews furnished no more than the nucleus for the Jews of other countries. The Judaism of the older time was anything but exclusive; was, on the contrary, no less pervaded by missionary zeal than were afterwards Christianity and Islam. The Gospel makes reference to Rabbis who traversed sea and land to make a proselyte; the admission of half-proselytes, of whom circumcision was not expected but to whom religious fellowship was yet accorded, is an evidence of this converting zeal and at the same time one of its most effective means. Motives of very various kinds came to the help of this proselytising. The civil privileges, which the Lagids and Seleucids conferred on the Jews, must have induced a great number of non-Jewish Orientals and half-Hellenes to attach themselves in the new towns to the privileged category of the non-burgesses. In later times the decay of the traditional faith of the country helped the Jewish _propaganda_. Numerous persons, especially of the cultivated classes, whose sense of faith and morality turned away with horror or derision from what the Greeks, and still more from what the Egyptians termed religion, sought refuge in the simpler and purer Jewish doctrine renouncing polytheism and idolatry--a doctrine which largely met the religious views resulting from the development of philosophy among the cultured and half-cultured circles. There is a remarkable Greek moral poem, probably from the later epoch of the Roman republic, which is drawn from the Mosaic books on such a footing that it adopts the doctrine of monotheism and the universal moral law, but avoids everything offensive to the non-Jew and all direct opposition to the ruling religion, evidently intended to gain wider acceptance for this denationalised Judaism. Women in particular addicted themselves by preference to the Jewish faith. When the authorities of Damascus in the year 66 resolved to put to death the captive Jews, it was agreed to keep this resolution secret, in order that the female population devoted to the Jews might not prevent its execution. Even in the West, where the cultivated circles were otherwise averse to Jewish habits, dames of rank early formed an exception; Poppaea Sabina, Nero’s wife, sprung from a noble family, was notorious for her pious Jewish faith and her zealous protectorate of the Jews, as for other things less reputable. Cases of formal transition to Judaism were not rare; the royal house of Adiabene for example--king Izates and his mother Helena, as well as his brother and successor--became at the time of Tiberius and of Claudius in every respect Jews. It certainly was the case with all those Jewish bodies, as it is expressly remarked of those of Antioch, that they consisted in great part of proselytes.

[Sidenote: Hellenising tendencies in the Diaspora.]

This transplanting of Judaism to the Hellenic soil with the appropriation of a foreign language, however much it took place with a retention of national individuality, was not accomplished without developing in Judaism itself a tendency running counter to its nature, and up to a certain degree denationalising it. How powerfully the bodies of Jews living amidst the Greeks were influenced by the currents of Greek intellectual life, may be traced in the literature of the last century before, and of the first after, the birth of Christ. It is imbued with Jewish elements; and they are withal the clearest heads and the most gifted thinkers, who seek admission either as Hellenes into the Jewish, or as Jews into the Hellenic, system. Nicolaus of Damascus, himself a Pagan and a noted representative of the Aristotelian philosophy pleaded, as a scholar and diplomatist of king Herod, the cause of his Jewish patron and of the Jews before Agrippa as before Augustus; and not only so, but his historical authorship shows a very earnest, and for that epoch significant, attempt to bring the East into the circle of Occidental research, while the description still preserved of the youthful years of the emperor Augustus, who came personally into close contact with him, is a remarkable evidence of the love and honour which the Roman ruler met with in the Greek world. The dissertation on the Sublime, written in the first period of the empire by an unknown author, one of the finest aesthetic works preserved to us from antiquity, certainly proceeds, if not from a Jew, at any rate from a man who revered alike Homer and Moses.[161] Another treatise, also anonymous, upon the Universe--likewise an attempt, respectable of its kind, to blend the doctrine of Aristotle with that of the Stoa--was perhaps written also by a Jew, and dedicated certainly to the Jew of highest repute and highest station in the Neronian age, Tiberius Alexander (p. 204), chief of the staff to Corbulo and Titus. The wedding of the two worlds of intellect meets us most clearly in the Jewish-Alexandrian philosophy, the most acute and most palpable expression of a religious movement, not merely affecting but also attacking the essence of Judaism. The Hellenic intellectual development conflicted with national religions of all sorts, inasmuch as it either denied their views or else filled them with other contents, drove out the previous gods from the minds of men and put into the empty places either nothing, or the stars and abstract ideas. These attacks affected also the religion of the Jews. There was formed a Neo-Judaism of Hellenic culture, which dealt with Jehovah not quite so badly, but yet not much otherwise, than the cultivated Greeks and Romans with Zeus and Jupiter. The universal expedient of the so-called allegorical interpretation, whereby in particular the philosophers of the Stoa everywhere in courteous fashion eliminated the heathen national religions, suited equally well and equally ill for Genesis as for the gods of the Iliad; if Moses had meant by Abraham in a strict sense understanding, by Sarah virtue, by Noah righteousness, if the four streams of Paradise were the four cardinal virtues, then the most enlightened Hellene might believe in the Law. But this pseudo-Judaism was also a power, and the intellectual primacy of the Jews in Egypt was apparent above all in the fact, that this tendency found pre-eminently its supporters in Alexandria.

[Sidenote: Fellowship of the Jews generally.]

Notwithstanding the internal separation which had taken place among the Jews of Palestine and had but too often culminated directly in civil war, notwithstanding the dispersion of a great part of the Jewish body into foreign lands, notwithstanding the intrusion of foreign ingredients into it and even of the destructive Hellenistic element into its very core, the collective body of the Jews remained united in a way, to which in the present day only the Vatican perhaps and the Kaaba offer a certain analogy. The holy Salem remained the banner, Zion’s temple the Palladium of the whole Jewish body, whether they obeyed the Romans or the Parthians, whether they spoke Aramaic or Greek, whether even they believed in the old Jahve or in the new, who was none. The fact that the protecting ruler conceded to the spiritual chief of the Jews a certain secular power signified for the Jewish body just as much, and the small extent of this power just as little, as the so-called States of the Church in their time signified for Roman Catholics. Every member of a Jewish community had to pay annually to Jerusalem a _didrachmon_ as temple-tribute, which came in more regularly than the taxes of the state; every one was obliged at least once in his life to sacrifice personally to Jehovah on the spot which alone in the world was well-pleasing to Him. Theological science remained common property; the Babylonian and Alexandrian Rabbis took part in it not less than those of Jerusalem. The feeling, cherished with unparalleled tenacity, of belonging collectively to one nation--a feeling which had established itself in the community of the returning exiles and had thereafter contributed to create that distinctive position of the Jews in the Greek world--maintained its ground in spite of dispersion and division.

[Sidenote: Philo.]

Most worthy of remark is the continued life of Judaism itself in circles whose inward religion was detached from it. The most noted and, for us, the single clearly palpable representative of this tendency in literature, Philo, one of the foremost and richest Jews of the time of Tiberius, stands in fact towards the religion of his country in a position not greatly differing from that of Cicero towards the Roman; but he himself believed that he was not destroying but fulfilling it. For him as for every other Jew, Moses is the source of all truth, his written direction binding law, the feeling towards him reverence and devout belief. This sublimated Judaism is, however, not quite identical with the so-called faith in the gods of the Stoa. The corporeality of God vanishes for Philo, but not His personality, and he entirely fails in--what is the essence of Hellenic philosophy--the transferring of the deity into the breast of man; it remains his view that sinful man is dependent on a perfect being standing outside of, and above, him. In like manner the new Judaism submits itself to the national ritual law far more unconditionally than the new heathenism. The struggle between the old and the new faith was therefore of a different nature in the Jewish circle than in the heathen, because the stake was a greater one; reformed heathenism contended only against the old faith, reformed Judaism would in its ultimate consequence destroy the nationality, which amidst the inundation of Hellenism necessarily disappeared with the refining away of the native faith, and therefore shrank back from drawing this consequence. Hence on Greek soil and in Greek language the form, if not the substance, of the old faith was retained and defended with unexampled obstinacy, defended even by those who in substance surrendered before Hellenism. Philo himself, as we shall have to tell further on, contended and suffered for the cause of the Jews. But on that account the Hellenistic tendency in Judaism never exercised an overpowering influence over the latter, never was able to take its stand against the national Judaism, and barely availed to mitigate its fanaticism and to check its perversities and crimes. In all essential matters, especially when confronted with oppression and persecution, the differences of Judaism disappeared; and, unimportant as was the Rabbinical state, the religious communion over which it presided was a considerable and in certain circumstances formidable power.

[Sidenote: The Roman government and Judaism]

Such was the state of things which the Romans found confronting them when they entered on rule in the East. Conquest forces the hand of the conqueror not less than of the conquered. The work of centuries, the Macedonian urban institutions, could not be undone either by the Arsacids or by the Caesars; neither Seleucia on the Euphrates nor Antioch and Alexandria could be entered upon by the following governments under the benefit of the inventory. Probably in presence of the Jewish Diaspora there the founder of the imperial government took, as in so many other things, the policy of the first Lagids as his guiding rule, and furthered rather than hampered the Judaism of the East in its distinctive position; and this procedure thereupon became throughout the model for his successors. We have already mentioned that the communities of Asia Minor under Augustus made the attempt to draw upon their Jewish fellow-citizens uniformly in the levy, and no longer to allow them the observance of the Sabbath; but Agrippa decided against them and maintained the _status quo_ in favour of the Jews, or rather, perhaps, now for the first time legalised the exemption of the Jews from military service and their Sabbath privilege, that had been previously conceded according to circumstances only by individual governors or communities of the Greek provinces. Augustus further directed the governors of Asia not to apply the rigorous imperial laws respecting unions and assemblies against the Jews. But the Roman government did not fail to see that the exempt position conceded to the Jews in the East was not compatible with the absolute obligation of those belonging to the empire to fulfil the services required by the state; that the guaranteed distinctive position of the Jewish body carried the hatred of race and under certain circumstances civil war into the several towns; that the pious rule of the authorities at Jerusalem over all the Jews of the empire had a perilous range; and that in all this there lay a practical injury and a danger in principle for the state.

[Sidenote: in the West]

The internal dualism of the empire expresses itself in nothing more sharply than in the different treatment of the Jews in the respective domains of the Latin and Greek languages. In the West autonomous bodies of Jews were never allowed. There was toleration doubtless there for the Jewish religious usages as for the Syrian and the Egyptian, or rather somewhat less than for these; Augustus showed himself favourable to the Jewish colony in the suburb of Rome beyond the Tiber, and made supplementary allowance in his largesses for those who missed them on account of the Sabbath. But he personally avoided all contact with the Jewish worship as with the Egyptian; and, as he himself when in Egypt had gone out of the way of the sacred ox, so he thoroughly approved the conduct of his son Gaius, when he went to the East, in passing by Jerusalem. Under Tiberius in the year 19 the Jewish worship was even prohibited along with the Egyptian in Rome and in all Italy, and those who did not consent openly to renounce it and to throw the holy vessels into the fire were expelled from Italy--so far as they could not be employed as useful for military service in convict-companies, whereupon not a few became liable to court-martial on account of their religious scruples. If, as we shall see afterwards, this same emperor in the East almost anxiously evaded every conflict with the Rabbi, it is here plainly apparent that he, the ablest ruler whom the empire had, just as clearly perceived the dangers of the Jewish immigration as the unfairness and the impossibility of setting aside Judaism, where it existed.[162] Under the later rulers, as we shall see in the sequel, the attitude of disinclination towards the Jews of the West did not in the main undergo change, although they in other respects follow more the example of Augustus than that of Tiberius. They did not prevent the Jews from collecting the temple-tribute in the form of voluntary contributions and sending it to Jerusalem. They were not checked, if they preferred to bring a legal dispute before a Jewish arbiter rather than before a Roman tribunal. Of compulsory levy for service, such as Tiberius enjoined, there is no further mention afterwards in the West. But the Jews never obtained in heathen Rome or generally in the Latin West a publicly recognised distinctive position and publicly recognised separate courts. Above all in the West--apart from the capital, which in the nature of the case represented the East also, and already in Cicero’s time included in it a numerous body of Jews--the Jewish communities nowhere had special extent or importance in the earlier imperial period.[163]

[Sidenote: and in the East.]

It was only in the East that the government yielded from the first, or rather made no attempt to change the existing state of things and to obviate the dangers thence resulting; and accordingly, as the sacred books of the Jews were first made known to the Latin world in the Latin language by means of the Christians, the great Jewish movements of the imperial period were restricted throughout to the Greek East. Here no attempt was made gradually to stop the spring of hatred towards the Jews by assigning to them a separate position in law, but just as little--apart from the caprice and perversities of individual rulers--was the hatred and persecution of the Jews fomented on the part of the government. In reality the catastrophe of Judaism did not arise from the treatment of the Jewish Diaspora in the East. It was simply the relations, as they became fatefully developed, of the imperial government to the Jewish Rabbinical state that not merely brought about the destruction of the commonwealth of Jerusalem, but further shook and changed the position of the Jews in the empire generally. We turn to describe the events in Palestine under the Roman rule.

[Sidenote: Judaea under the republic.]

The state of things in northern Syria was organised by the generals of the republic, Pompeius and his immediate successors, on such a footing, that the larger powers that were beginning to be formed there were again reduced, and the whole land was broken up into single city-domains and petty lordships. The Jews were most severely affected by this course; not merely were they obliged to give up all the possessions which they had hitherto gained, particularly the whole coast (iv. 142) {iv. 136.}, but Gabinius had even broken up the empire formerly subsisting into five independent self-administering districts, and withdrawn from the high priest Hyrcanus his secular privileges (iv. 158) {iv. 151.}. Thus, as the protecting power was restored on the one hand, so was the pure theocracy on the other.

[Sidenote: Antipater the Idumaean.]

This, however, was soon changed. Hyrcanus, or rather the minister governing for him, the Idumaean Antipater,[164] attained once more the leading position in southern Syria doubtless through Gabinius himself, to whom he knew how to make himself indispensable in his Parthian and Egyptian undertakings (iv. 345) {iv. 329.}. After the pillage of the temple of Jerusalem by Crassus the insurrection of the Jews thereby occasioned was chiefly subdued by him (iv. 355) {iv. 339.}. It was for him a fortunate dispensation that the Jewish government was not compelled to interfere actively in the crisis between Caesar and Pompeius, for whom it, like the whole East, had declared. Nevertheless, after the brother and rival of Hyrcanus, Aristobulus as well as his son Alexander, had on account of their taking part for Caesar lost their lives at the hands of the Pompeians, the second son, Antigonus, would doubtless after Caesar’s victory have been installed by the latter as ruler in Judaea. But when Caesar, coming to Egypt after the decisive victory, found himself in a dangerous position at Alexandria, it was chiefly Antipater who delivered him from it (iv. 452) {iv. 430.}, and this carried the day; Antigonus had to give way before the more recent, but more effective, fidelity.

[Sidenote: Caesar’s arrangements.]

Caesar’s personal gratitude was not the least element in promoting the formal restoration of the Jewish state. The Jewish kingdom obtained the best position which could be granted to a client-state, complete freedom from dues to the Romans[165] and from military occupation and levy,[166] whereas certainly the duties and the expenses of frontier-defence were to be undertaken by the native government. The town of Joppa, and thereby the connection with the sea, were given back, the independence of internal administration as well as the free exercise of religion was guaranteed; the re-establishment, hitherto refused, of the fortifications of Jerusalem razed by Pompeius was allowed (707) {47 B.C.}. Thus under the name of the Hasmonaean prince, a half foreigner--for the Idumaeans stood towards the Jews proper that returned from Babylon nearly as did the Samaritans--governed the Jewish state under the protection and according to the will of Rome. The Jews with national sentiments were anything but inclined towards the new government. The old families, who led in the council of Jerusalem, held in their hearts to Aristobulus, and, after his death, to his son Antigonus. In the mountains of Galilee the fanatics fought quite as much against the Romans as against their own government; when Antipater’s son Herod took captive Ezekias, the leader of this wild band, and had caused him to be put to death, the priestly council of Jerusalem compelled the weak Hyrcanus to banish Herod under the pretext of a violation of religious precepts. The latter thereupon entered the Roman army, and rendered good service to the Caesarian governor of Syria against the insurrection of the last Pompeians. But when, after the murder of Caesar, the republicans gained the upper hand in the East, Antipater was again the first who not merely submitted to the stronger but placed the new holders of power under obligation to him by a rapid levying of the contribution imposed by them.

[Sidenote: Herod.]

Thus it happened that the leader of the republicans, when he withdrew from Syria, left Antipater in his position, and entrusted his son Herod even with a command in Syria. Then, when Antipater died, poisoned as it was said by one of his officers, Antigonus, who had found a refuge with his father-in-law, the prince Ptolemaeus of Chalcis, believed that the moment had come to set aside his weak uncle. But the sons of Antipater, Phasael and Herod, thoroughly defeated his band, and Hyrcanus agreed to grant to them the position of their father, nay, even to receive Herod in a certain measure into the reigning house by betrothing to him his niece Mariamne. Meanwhile the leaders of the republican party were beaten at Philippi. The opposition in Jerusalem hoped now to procure the overthrow of the hated Antipatrids at the hands of the victors; but Antonius, to whom fell the office of arbiter, decidedly repelled their deputations first in Ephesus, then in Antioch, and last in Tyre; caused, indeed, the last envoys to be put to death; and confirmed Phasael and Herod formally as “tetrarchs”[167] of the Jews (713) {41 B.C.}.

[Sidenote: The Parthians in Judaea.]

[Sidenote: Herod, king of Judaea.]

Soon the vicissitudes of world politics dragged the Jewish state once more into their vortex. The invasion of the Parthians in the following year (714) {40 B.C.} put an end in the first instance to the rule of the Antipatrids. The pretender Antigonus joined them, and possessed himself of Jerusalem and almost the whole territory. Hyrcanus went as a prisoner to the Parthians: Phasael, the eldest son of Antipater, likewise a captive, put himself to death in prison. With great difficulty Herod concealed his family in a rock-stronghold on the border of Judaea, and went himself a fugitive and in search of aid first to Egypt, and, when he no longer found Antonius there, to the two holders of power just at that time ruling in new harmony (714) {40 B.C.} at Rome. Readily they allowed him--as indeed it was only in the interest of Rome--to gain back for himself the Jewish kingdom; he returned to Syria, so far as the matter depended on the Romans, as recognised ruler, and even equipped with the royal title. But, just like a pretender, he had to wrest the land not so much from the Parthians as from the patriots. He fought his battles pre-eminently with the help of Samaritans and Idumaeans and hired soldiers, and attained at length, through the support of the Roman legions, to the possession of the long-defended capital. The Roman executioners delivered him likewise from his rival of many years, Antigonus; his own made havoc among the noble families of the council of Jerusalem.

[Sidenote: Herod under Antonius and Cleopatra.]

[Sidenote: Herod under Augustus.]

But the days of trouble were by no means over with his installation. The unfortunate expedition of Antonius against the Parthians remained without consequences for Herod, since the victors did not venture to advance into Syria; but he suffered severely under the ever increasing claims of the Egyptian queen, who at that time more than Antonius ruled the East; her womanly policy, primarily directed to the extension of her domestic power and above all of her revenues, was far indeed from obtaining at the hands of Antonius all that she desired, but she wrested at any rate from the king of the Jews a portion of his most valuable possessions on the Syrian coast and in the territory lying between Egypt and Syria, nay, even the rich balsam plantations and palm-groves of Jericho, and laid upon him severe financial burdens. In order to maintain the remnant of his rule, he was obliged either himself to lease the new Syrian possessions of the queen or to be guarantee for other lessees less able to pay. After all these troubles, and in expectation of still worse demands as little capable of being declined, the outbreak of the war between Antonius and Caesar was hopeful for him, and the fact that Cleopatra in her selfish perversity released him from active participation in the war, because he needed his troops to collect her Syrian revenues, was a further piece of good fortune, since this facilitated his submission to the victor. Fortune favoured him yet further on his changing sides; he was able to intercept a band of faithful gladiators of Antonius, who were marching from Asia Minor through Syria towards Egypt to lend assistance to their master. When he, before resorting to Caesar at Rhodes to obtain his pardon, caused the last male offshoot of the Maccabaean house, the eighty-years old Hyrcanus, to whom the house of Antipater was indebted for its position, to be at all events put to death, he in reality exaggerated the necessary caution. Caesar did what policy bade him do, especially as the support of Herod was of importance for the intended Egyptian expedition. He confirmed Herod, glad to be vanquished, in his dominion, and extended it, partly by giving back the possessions wrested from him by Cleopatra, partly by further gifts; the whole coast from Gaza to Strato’s Tower, the later Caesarea, the Samaritan region inserted between Judaea and Galilee, and a number of towns to the east of the Jordan thenceforth obeyed Herod. On the consolidation of the Roman monarchy the Jewish principality was withdrawn from the reach of further external crises.

[Sidenote: Government of Herod.]

From the Roman standpoint the conduct of the new dynasty appears correct, in a way to draw tears from the eyes of the observer. It took part at first for Pompeius, then for Caesar the father, then for Cassius and Brutus, then for the triumvirs, then for Antonius, lastly for Caesar the son; fidelity varies, as does the watchword. Nevertheless this conduct is not to be denied the merit of consistency and firmness. The factions which rent the ruling burgess-body, whether republic or monarchy, whether Caesar or Antonius, in reality nowise concerned the dependent provinces, especially those of the Greek East. The demoralisation which is combined with all revolutionary change of government--the degrading confusion between internal fidelity and external obedience--was brought in this case most glaringly to light; but the fulfilment of duty, such as the Roman commonwealth claimed from its subjects, had been satisfied by king Herod to an extent of which nobler and greater natures would certainly not have been capable. In presence of the Parthians he constantly, even in critical circumstances, held firmly to the protectors whom he had once chosen.

[Sidenote: In its relation to the Jews.]

From the standpoint of internal Jewish politics the government of Herod was the setting aside of the theocracy, and in so far a continuance of, and in fact an advance upon, the government of the Maccabees, as the separation of the political and the ecclesiastical government was carried out with the utmost precision in the contrast between the all-powerful king of foreign birth and the powerless high-priest often and arbitrarily changed. No doubt the royal position was sooner pardoned in the Jewish high-priest than in a man who was a foreigner and incapable of priestly consecration; and, if the Hasmonaeans represented outwardly the independence of Judaism, the Idumaean held his royal power over the Jews in fee from the lord-paramount. The reaction of this insoluble conflict on a deeply-impassioned nature confronts us in the whole life-career of the man, who causes much suffering, but has felt perhaps not less. At all events the energy, the constancy, the yielding to the inevitable, the military and political dexterity, where there was room for it, secure for the king of the Jews a certain place in the panorama of a remarkable epoch.

[Sidenote: Herod’s character and aims.]

To describe in detail the government of Herod for almost forty years--he died in the year 750 {4 B.C.}--as the accounts of it preserved at great length allow us to do, is not the task of the historian of Rome. There is probably no royal house of any age in which bloody feuds raged in an equal degree between parents and children, between husbands and wives, and between brothers and sisters; the emperor Augustus and his governors in Syria turned away with horror from the share in the work of murder which was suggested to them; not the least revolting trait in this picture of horrors is the utter want of object in most of the executions, ordained as a rule upon groundless suspicion, and the despairing remorse of the perpetrator, which constantly followed. Vigorously and intelligently as the king took care of the interest of his country, so far as he could and might, and energetically as, not merely in Palestine but throughout the empire, he befriended the Jews with his treasures and with his no small influence--for the decision of Agrippa favourable to the Jews in the great imperial affair of Asia Minor (p. 171) they were substantially indebted to him--he found love and fidelity in Idumaea perhaps and Samaria, but not among the people of Israel; here he was, and continued to be, not so much the man laden with the guilt of blood in many forms, as above all the foreigner. As it was one of the mainsprings of that domestic war, that his wife of the Hasmonaean family, the fair Mariamne, and their children were regarded and dreaded by him more as Jews than as his own, he himself gave expression to the feeling that he was as much drawn towards the Greeks as repelled by the Jews. It is significant that he had the sons, for whom in the first instance he destined the succession, brought up in Rome. While out of his inexhaustible riches he loaded the Greek cities of other lands with gifts and embellished them with temples, he built for the Jews no doubt also, but not in the Jewish sense. The buildings of the circus and theatre in Jerusalem itself, as well as the temples for the imperial worship in the Jewish towns, were regarded by the pious Israelite as a summons to blaspheme God. His conversion of the temple in Jerusalem into a magnificent building was done half against the will of the devout; much as they admired the building, his introduction into it of a golden eagle was taken more amiss than all the sentences of death ordained by him, and led to a popular insurrection, to which the eagle fell a sacrifice, and thereupon doubtless the devotees as well, who tore it down.

[Sidenote: Energy of his rule.]

Herod knew the land sufficiently not to let matters come to extremities; if it had been possible to Hellenise it, the will to that effect would not have been wanting on his part. In energy the Idumaean was not inferior to the best Hasmonaeans. The construction of the great harbour at Strato’s Tower, or as the town entirely rebuilt by Herod was thenceforth called, Caesarea, first gave to a coast poor in harbours what it needed, and throughout the whole period of the empire the town remained a chief emporium of southern Syria. What the government was able to furnish in other respects--development of natural resources, intervention in case of famine and other calamities, above all things internal and external security--was furnished by Herod. The evil of brigandage was done away, and the defence--so uncommonly difficult in these regions--of the frontier against the roving tribes of the desert was carried out with sternness and consistency. Thereby the Roman government was induced to place under him still further regions, Ituraea, Trachonitis, Auranitis, Batanaea. Thenceforth his dominion extended, as we have already mentioned (p. 146), compactly over the region beyond the Jordan as far as towards Damascus and to the Hermon mountains; so far as we can discern, after those further assignments there was in the whole domain which we have indicated no longer any free city or any rule independent of Herod. The defence of the frontier itself fell more on the Arabian king than on the king of the Jews; but, so far as it devolved on him, the series of well-provided frontier-forts brought about here a general peace, such as had not hitherto been known in those regions. We can understand how Agrippa, after inspecting the maritime and military structures of Herod, should have discerned in him an associate striving in a like spirit towards the great work of organising the empire, and should have treated him in this sense.

[Sidenote: The end of Herod and the partition of his kingdom.]

His kingdom had no lasting existence. Herod himself apportioned it in his testament among his three sons, and Augustus confirmed the arrangement in the main, only placing the important port of Gaza and the Greek towns beyond the Jordan immediately under the governor of Syria. The northern portions of the kingdom were separated from the mainland; the territory last acquired by Herod to the south of Damascus, Batanaea with the districts belonging to it, was obtained by Philip; Galilee and Peraea, that is, the Transjordanic domain, so far as it was not Greek, by Herod Antipas--both as tetrarchs; these two petty principalities continued, at first as separate, then as united under Herod “the Great’s” great-grandson Agrippa II., with slight interruptions to subsist down to the time of Trajan. We have already mentioned their government when describing eastern Syria and Arabia (p. 146 f.). Here it may only be added that these Herodians continued to rule, if not with the energy, at least in the sense and spirit of the founder of the dynasty. The towns established by them--Caesarea, the ancient Paneas, in the northern territory, and Tiberias in Galilee--had a Hellenic organisation quite after the manner of Herod; characteristic is the proscription, which the Jewish Rabbis on account of a tomb found at the laying out of Tiberias decreed over the unclean city.

[Sidenote: Judaea under Archelaus.]

[Sidenote: Judaea a Roman province.]

The main country, Judaea, along with Samaria on the north and Idumaea on the south, was destined for Archelaus by his father’s will. But this succession was not accordant with the wishes of the nation. The orthodox, that is, the Pharisees, ruled with virtual exclusiveness the mass of the people; and, if hitherto the fear of the Lord had been in some measure kept down by the fear of the unscrupulously energetic king, the mind of the great majority of the Jews was set upon re-establishing under the protectorate of Rome the pure and godly sacerdotal government, as it had once been set up by the Persian authorities. Immediately after the death of the old king the masses in Jerusalem had congregated to demand the setting aside of the high-priest nominated by Herod and the ejection of the unbelievers from the holy city, where the Passover was just to be celebrated; Archelaus had been under the necessity of beginning his government by charging into these masses; a number of dead were counted, and the observance of the festival was suspended. The Roman governor of Syria--the same Varus, whose folly soon afterwards cost the Romans Germany--on whom it primarily devolved to maintain order in the land during the interregnum, had allowed these mutinous bands in Jerusalem to send to Rome, where the occupation of the Jewish throne was just being discussed, a deputation of fifty persons to request the abolition of the monarchy; and, when Augustus gave audience to it, eight thousand Jews of the capital escorted it to the temple of Apollo. The fanatical Jews at home meanwhile continued to help themselves; the Roman garrison, which was stationed in the temple, was assailed with violence, and pious bands of brigands filled the land; Varus had to call out the legions and to restore quiet with the sword. It was a warning for the suzerain, a supplementary justification of king Herod’s violent but effective government. But Augustus, with all the weakness which he so often showed, particularly in later years, while dismissing, no doubt, the representatives of those fanatical masses and their request, yet executed in the main the testament of Herod, and gave over the rule in Jerusalem to Archelaus shorn of the kingly title, which Augustus preferred for a time not to concede to the untried young man; shorn, moreover, of the northern territories, and reduced also in military status by the taking away of the defence of the frontier. The circumstance that at the instigation of Augustus the taxes raised to a high pitch under Herod were lowered, could but little better the position of the tetrarch. The personal incapacity and worthlessness of Archelaus were hardly needed, in addition, to make him impossible; a few years later (A.D. 6) Augustus saw himself compelled to depose him. Now he did at length the will of those mutineers; the monarchy was abolished, and while on the one hand the land was taken into direct Roman administration, on the other hand, so far as an internal government was allowed by the side of this, it was given over to the senate of Jerusalem. This procedure may certainly have been determined in part by assurances given earlier by Augustus to Herod as regards the succession, in part by the more and more apparent, and in general doubtless justifiable, disinclination of the imperial government to larger client-states possessing some measure of independent self-movement. What took place shortly before or soon after in Galatia, in Cappadocia, in Mauretania, explains why in Palestine also the kingdom of Herod hardly survived himself. But, as the immediate government was organised in Palestine, it was even administratively a bad retrograde step as compared with the Herodian; and above all the circumstances here were so peculiar and so difficult, that the immediate contact between the governing Romans and the governed Jews--which certainly had been obstinately striven for by the priestly party itself and ultimately obtained--redounded to the benefit neither of the one nor of the other.

[Sidenote: Provincial organisation.]

Judaea thus became in the year A.D. 6 a Roman province of the second rank,[168] and, apart from the ephemeral restoration of the kingdom of Jerusalem under Claudius in the years 41-44, thenceforth remained a Roman province. Instead of the previous native princes holding office for life and, under reservation of their being confirmed by the Roman government, hereditary, came an official of the equestrian order, nominated and liable to recall by the emperor. The port of Caesarea rebuilt by Herod after a Hellenic model became, probably at once, the seat of Roman administration. The exemption of the land from Roman garrison as a matter of course ceased, but, as throughout in provinces of the second rank, the Roman military force consisted only of a moderate number of cavalry and infantry divisions of the inferior class; subsequently one ala and five cohorts--about 3000 men--were stationed there. These troops were perhaps taken over from the earlier government, at least in great part formed in the country itself, mostly, however, from Samaritans and Syrian Greeks.[169] The province did not obtain a legionary garrison, and even in the territories adjoining Judaea there was stationed at the most one of the four Syrian legions. To Jerusalem there came a standing Roman commandant, who took up his abode in the royal castle, with a weak standing garrison; only during the time of the Passover, when the whole land and countless strangers flocked to the temple, a stronger division of soldiers was stationed in a colonnade belonging to the temple. That on the erection of the province the obligation of tribute towards Rome set in, follows from the very circumstance that the costs of defending the land were thereby transferred to the imperial government. After the latter had suggested a reduction of the payments at the installation of Archelaus, it is far from probable that on the annexation of the country it contemplated an immediate raising of them; but doubtless, as in every newly-acquired territory, steps were taken for a revision of the previous land-register.[170]

[Sidenote: The native authorities.]

[Sidenote: The Synhedrion of Jerusalem.]

For the native authorities in Judaea as everywhere the urban communities were, as far as possible, taken as a basis. Samaria, or as the town was now called, Sebaste, the newly laid out Caesarea, and the other urban communities contained in the former kingdom of Archelaus, were self-administering, under superintendence of the Roman authority. The government also of the capital with the large territory belonging to it was organised in a similar way. Already in the pre-Roman period under the Seleucids there was formed, as we saw (p. 160), in Jerusalem a council of the elders, the Synhedrion, or as Judaised, the Sanhedrin. The presidency in it was held by the high priest, whom each ruler of the land, if he was not possibly himself high priest, appointed for the time. To the college belonged the former high priests and esteemed experts in the law. This assembly, in which the aristocratic element preponderated, acted as the supreme spiritual representative of the whole body of Jews, and, so far as this was not to be separated from it, also as the secular representative in particular of the community of Jerusalem. It is only the later Rabbinism that has by a pious fiction transformed the Synhedrion of Jerusalem into a spiritual institute of Mosaic appointment. It corresponded essentially to the council of the Greek urban constitution, but certainly bore, as respected its composition as well as its sphere of working, a more spiritual character than belonged to the Greek representations of the community. To this Synhedrion and its high priest, who was now nominated by the procurator as representative of the imperial suzerain, the Roman government left or committed that jurisdiction which in the Hellenic subject communities belonged to the urban authorities and the common councils. With indifferent short-sightedness it allowed to the transcendental Messianism of the Pharisees free course, and to the by no means transcendental land-consistory--acting until the Messiah should arrive--tolerably free sway in affairs of faith, of manners, and of law, where Roman interests were not directly affected thereby. This applied in particular to the administration of justice. It is true that, as far as Roman burgesses were concerned, ordinary jurisdiction in civil as in criminal affairs must have been reserved for the Roman tribunals even already before the annexation of the land. But civil jurisdiction over Jews remained even after that annexation chiefly with the local authority. Criminal justice over them was exercised by the latter probably in general concurrently with the Roman procurator; only sentences of death could not be executed by it otherwise than after confirmation by the imperial magistrate.

[Sidenote: The Roman provincial government.]

In the main those arrangements were the inevitable consequences of the abolition of the principality, and when the Jews had obtained this request of theirs, they in fact obtained those arrangements along with it. Certainly it was the design of the government to avoid, as far as possible, harshness and abruptness in carrying them out. Publius Sulpicius Quirinius to whom, as governor of Syria the erection of the new province was entrusted, was a magistrate of repute, and quite familiar with the affairs of the East, and the several reports confirm by what they say or by their silence the fact that the difficulties of the state of things were known and taken into account. The local coining of petty moneys, as formerly practised by the kings, now took place in the name of the Roman ruler; but on account of the Jewish abhorrence of images the head of the emperor was not even placed on the coins. Setting foot within the interior of the temple continued to be forbidden in the case of every non-Jew under penalty of death.[171] However averse was the attitude of Augustus personally towards the Oriental worships (p. 172), he did not disdain here any more than in Egypt to connect them in their home with the imperial government; magnificent presents of Augustus, of Livia, and of other members of the imperial house adorned the sanctuary of the Jews, and according to an endowment by the emperor the smoke of the sacrifice of a bullock and two lambs rose daily there to the “Supreme God.” The Roman soldiers were directed, when they were on service at Jerusalem, to leave the standards with the effigies of the emperor at Caesarea, and, when a governor under Tiberius omitted to do so, the government ultimately yielded to the urgent entreaties of the pious and left matters on the old footing. Indeed, when the Roman troops were to march through Jerusalem on an expedition against the Arabians, they obtained another route for the march in consequence of the scruples entertained by the priests against the effigies on the standards. When that same governor dedicated to the emperor at the royal castle in Jerusalem shields without imagery, and the pious took offence at it, Tiberius commanded the same to be taken away, and to be hung up in the temple of Augustus at Caesarea. The festival dress of the high priest, which was kept in Roman custody at the castle and hence had to be purified from such profanation for seven days before it was put on, was delivered up to the faithful upon their complaint; and the commandant of the castle was directed to give himself no further concern about it. Certainly it could not be asked of the multitude that it should feel the consequences of the incorporation less heavily, because it had itself brought them about. Nor is it to be maintained that the annexation of the land passed off without oppression for the inhabitants, and that they had no ground to complain; such arrangements have never been carried into effect without difficulties and disturbances of the peace. The number, moreover, of unrighteous and violent deeds perpetrated by individual governors must not have been smaller in Judaea than elsewhere. In the very beginning of the reign of Tiberius the Jews, like the Syrians, complained of the pressure of the taxes; especially the prolonged administration of Pontius Pilatus is charged with all the usual official crimes by a not unfair observer. But Tiberius, as the same Jew says, had during the twenty-three years of his reign maintained the time-hallowed holy customs, and in no part set them aside or violated them. This is the more to be recognised, seeing that the same emperor in the West interfered against the Jews more emphatically than any other (p. 172), and thus the long-suffering and caution shown by him in Judaea cannot be traced back to personal favour for Judaism.

[Sidenote: The Jewish opposition.]

In spite of all this both the opposition on principle to the Roman government and the violent efforts at self-help on the part of the faithful developed themselves even in this time of peace. The payment of tribute was assailed, not perchance merely because it was oppressive, but as being godless. “Is it allowable,” asks the Rabbi in the Gospel, “to pay the census to Caesar?” The ironical answer which he received did not by any means suffice for all; there were saints, though possibly not in great number, who thought themselves polluted if they touched a coin with the emperor’s image. This was something new--an advance in the theology of opposition; the kings Seleucus and Antiochus had also not been circumcised, and had likewise received tribute in silver pieces bearing their image. Such was the theory; the practical application of it was made, not certainly by the high council of Jerusalem, in which, under the influence of the imperial government, the more pliant notables of the land directed the vote, but by Judas the Galilean from Gamala on the lake of Gennesaret, who, as Gamaliel subsequently reminded this high council, “stood up in the days of the census, and behind him the people rose in revolt.” He spoke out what all thought, that the so-called census was bondage, and that it was a disgrace for the Jew to recognise another lord over him than the Lord of Zebaoth; but that He helped only those who helped themselves. If not many followed his call to arms, and he ended his life, after a few months, on the scaffold, the holy dead was more dangerous to the unholy victors than the living man. He and his followers were regarded by the later Jews alongside of the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes, as the fourth “School;” at that time they were called the Zealots, afterwards they called themselves Sicarii, “men of the knife.” Their teaching was simple: God alone is Lord, death indifferent, freedom all in all. This teaching remained, and the children and grandchildren of Judas became the leaders of the later insurrections.

[Sidenote: The emperor Gaius and the Jews.]

[Sidenote: Jew-hunt in Alexandria.]

If the Roman government had under the first two regents, taken on the whole, skilfully and patiently sufficed for the task of repressing, as far as possible, these explosive elements, the next change on the throne brought matters close to the catastrophe. The change was saluted with rejoicing, as in the whole empire, so specially by the Jews in Jerusalem and Alexandria; and, after the unsociable and unloved old man, the new youthful ruler Gaius was extravagantly extolled in both quarters. But speedily out of trifling occasions there was developed a formidable quarrel. A grandson of the first Herod and of the beautiful Mariamne, named after the protector and friend of his grandfather Herod Agrippa, about the most worthless and abandoned of the numerous Oriental princes’ sons living in Rome, but nevertheless or on that very account the favourite and youthful friend of the new emperor, hitherto known solely by his dissoluteness and his debts, had obtained from his protector, to whom he had been the first to convey the news of the death of Tiberius, one of the vacant Jewish petty principalities as a gift, and the title of king along with it. This prince in the year 38, on the way to his new kingdom, came to the city of Alexandria, where he a few months previously had attempted as a runaway bill-debtor to borrow among the Jewish bankers. When he showed himself there in public in his regal dress with his splendidly equipped halberdiers, this naturally stirred up the non-Jewish inhabitants of the great city--fond as it was of ridicule and of scandal--who bore anything but good will to the Jews, to a corresponding parody; nor did the matter stop there. It culminated in a furious hunting-out of the Jews. The Jewish houses which lay detached were plundered and burnt; the Jewish ships lying in the harbour were pillaged; the Jews that were met with in the non-Jewish quarters were maltreated and slain. But against the purely Jewish quarters they could effect nothing by violence. Then the leaders lighted on the idea of consecrating the synagogues, which were the object of their marked attentions, so far as these still stood, collectively as temples of the new ruler, and of setting up statues of him in all of them--in the chief synagogue a statue on a _quadriga_. That the emperor Gaius deemed himself, as seriously as his confused mind could do so, a real and corporeal god, everybody knew--the Jews and the governor as well. The latter, Avillius Flaccus, an able man, and, under Tiberius, an excellent administrator, but now hampered by the disfavour in which he stood with the new emperor, and expecting every moment recall and impeachment, did not disdain to use the opportunity for his rehabilitation.[172] He not merely gave orders by edict to put no hindrance in the way of setting up the statues in the synagogues, but he entered directly into the Jew-hunting. He ordained the abolition of the Sabbath. He declared further in his edicts that these tolerated foreigners had possessed themselves unallowably of the best part of the town; they were restricted to a single one of the five wards, and all the other Jewish houses were abandoned to the rabble, while masses of the ejected inhabitants lay without shelter on the shore. No remonstrance was even listened to; eight and thirty members of the council of the elders, which then presided over the Jews instead of the Ethnarch,[173] were scourged in the open circus before all the people. Four hundred houses lay in ruins; trade and commerce were suspended; the factories stood still. There was no help left except with the emperor. Before him appeared the two Alexandrian deputations, that of the Jews led by the formerly (p. 170) mentioned Philo, a scholar of Neojudaic leanings, and of a heart more gentle than brave, but who withal faithfully took the part of his people in this distress; that of the enemies of the Jews, led by Apion, also an Alexandrian scholar and author, the “world’s clapper” [_cymbalum mundi_], as the emperor Tiberius called him, full of big words and still bigger lies, of the most assured omniscience[174] and unlimited faith in himself, conversant, if not with men, at any rate with their worthlessness, a celebrated master of discourse as of the art of misleading, ready for action, witty, unabashed, and unconditionally loyal. The result of the discussion was settled from the outset; the emperor received the deputies while he was inspecting the works designed in his gardens, but instead of giving a hearing to the suppliants, he put to them sarcastic questions, which the enemies of the Jews in defiance of all etiquette accompanied with loud laughter, and, as he was in good humour, he confined himself to expressing his regret that these otherwise good people should be so unhappily constituted as not to be able to understand his innate divine nature--as to which he was beyond doubt in earnest. Apion thus gained his case, and, wherever it pleased the adversaries of the Jews, the synagogues were changed into temples of Gaius.

[Sidenote: The statue of the emperor in the temple of Jerusalem.]

But the matter was not confined to these dedications introduced by the street-youth of Alexandria. In the year 39 the governor of Syria, Publius Petronius, received orders from the emperor to march with his legions into Jerusalem, and to set up in the temple the statue of the emperor. The governor, an honourable official of the school of Tiberius, was alarmed; Jews from all the land, men and women, gray-haired and children, flocked to him, first to Ptolemais in Syria, then to Tiberias in Galilee, to entreat his mediation that the outrage might not take place; the fields throughout the country were not tilled, and the desperate multitudes declared that they would rather suffer death by the sword or famine than be willing to look on at this abomination. In reality the governor ventured to delay the execution of the orders and to make counter-representations, although he knew that his head was at stake. At the same time the king Agrippa, lately mentioned, went in person to Rome to procure from his friend the recall of the orders. The emperor in fact desisted from his desire, in consequence, it is said, of his good humour when under the influence of wine being adroitly turned to account by the Jewish prince. But at the same time he restricted the concession to the single temple of Jerusalem, and sent nevertheless to the governor on account of his disobedience a sentence of death, which indeed, accidentally delayed, was not carried into execution. Gaius now resolved to break the resistance of the Jews; the enjoined march of the legions shows that he had this time weighed beforehand the consequences of his order. Since those occurrences the Egyptians, ready to believe in his divinity, had his full affection just as the obstinate and simple-minded Jews had his corresponding hatred; secretive as he was and accustomed to grant favours in order afterwards to revoke them, the worst could not but appear merely postponed. He was on the point of departing for Alexandria in order there to receive in person the incense of his altars; and the statue, which he thought of erecting to himself in Jerusalem, was--it is said--quietly in preparation, when, in January 41, the dagger of Chaerea delivered, among other things, the temple of Jehovah from the monster.

[Sidenote: Jewish dispositions.]

[Sidenote: The Apocalypse of John.]

The short season of suffering left behind it no outward consequences; with the god his altars fell. But yet the traces of it remained on both sides. The history, which is here being told, is that of an increasing hatred between Jews and non-Jews, and in it the three years’ persecution of the Jews under Gaius marks a section and an advance. The hatred of Jews and the Jew-hunts were as old as the Diaspora itself; these privileged and autonomous Oriental communities within the Hellenic could not but develop them as necessarily as the marsh generates the malaria. But such a Jew-hunt as the Alexandrian of the year 38, instigated by defective Hellenism and directed at once by the supreme authority and by the low rabble, the older Greek and Roman history has not to show. The far way from the evil desire of the individual to the evil deed of the collective body was thus traversed, and it was shown what those so disposed had to will and to do, and were under circumstances also able to do. That this revelation was felt also on the Jewish side, is not to be doubted, although we are not in a position to adduce documentary evidence in support of it.[175] But a far deeper impression than that of the Jew-hunt at Alexandria was graven on the minds of the Jews by the statue of the god Gaius in the Holy of Holies. The thing had been done once already; a like proceeding of the king of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes, had been followed by the rising of the Maccabees and the victorious restoration of the free national state (iii. 64) {iii. 61.}. That Epiphanes--the Anti-Messiah who ushers in the Messiah, as the prophet Daniel had, certainly after the event, delineated him--was thenceforth to every Jew the prototype of abomination; it was no matter of indifference, that the same conception came to be with equal warrant attached to a Roman emperor, or rather to the image of the Roman ruler in general. Since that fateful edict the Jews never ceased to dread that another emperor might issue a like command; and so far certainly with reason, as according to the organisation of the Roman polity such an enactment depended solely on the momentary pleasure of the ruler for the time. This Jewish hatred of the worship of the emperor and of imperialism itself, is depicted with glowing colours in the Apocalypse of John, for which, chiefly on that account, Rome is the harlot of Babylon and the common enemy of mankind.[176] Still less matter of indifference was the parallel, which naturally suggested itself, of the consequences. Mattathias of Modein had not been more than Judas the Galilean; the insurrection of the patriots against the Syrian king was almost as hopeless as the insurrection against the monster beyond the sea. Historical parallels in practical application are dangerous elements of opposition; only too rapidly does the structure of long years of wise government come to be shaken.

[Sidenote: Claudius and the Jews.]

[Sidenote: Agrippa.]

The government of Claudius turned back on both sides into the paths of Tiberius. In Italy there was repeated, not indeed precisely the ejection of the Jews, since there could not but arise a conviction that this course was impracticable, but at any rate a prohibition of the exercise of their worship[177] in common, which, it is true, amounted nearly to the same thing and probably came as little into execution. Alongside of this edict of intolerance and in an opposite sense, by an ordinance embracing the whole empire the Jews were freed from those public obligations which were not compatible with their religious convictions; whereby, as respected service in war particularly, there was doubtless conceded only what hitherto it had not been possible to compel. The exhortation, expressed at the close of this edict, to the Jews to exercise now on their part also greater moderation, and to refrain from the insulting of persons of another faith, shows that there had not been wanting transgressions also on the Jewish side. In Egypt as in Palestine the religious arrangements were, at least on the whole, re-established as they had subsisted before Gaius, although in Alexandria the Jews hardly obtained back all that they had possessed;[178] the insurrectionary movements, which had broken out, or were on the point of breaking out, in the one case as in the other, thereupon disappeared of themselves. In Palestine Claudius even went beyond the system of Tiberius and committed the whole former territory of Herod to a native prince, that same Agrippa who accidentally had come to be friendly with Claudius and useful to him in the crises of his accession. It was certainly the design of Claudius to resume the system followed at the time of Herod and to obviate the dangers of the immediate contact between the Romans and Jews. But Agrippa, leading an easy life and even as a prince in constant financial embarrassment, good-humoured, moreover, and more disposed to be on good terms with his subjects than with the distant protector, gave offence in various ways to the government, for example, by the strengthening the walls of Jerusalem, which he was forbidden to carry further; and the towns that adhered to the Romans, Caesarea and Sebaste, as well as the troops organised in the Roman fashion, were disinclined to him. When he died early and suddenly in the year 44, it appeared hazardous to entrust the position, important in a political as in a military point of view, to his only son of seventeen years of age, and those who wielded power in the cabinet were reluctant to let out of their hands the lucrative procuratorships. The Claudian government had here, as elsewhere, lighted on the right course, but had not the energy to carry it out irrespective of accessory considerations. A Jewish prince with Jewish soldiers might exercise the government in Judaea for the Romans; the Roman magistrate and the Roman soldiers offended probably still more frequently through ignorance of Jewish views than through intentional action in opposition to them, and whatever they might undertake was on their part in the eyes of believers an offence, and the most indifferent occurrence a religious outrage. The demand for mutual understanding and agreement was on both sides just as warranted of itself as it was impossible of execution. But above all a conflict between the Jewish lord of the land and his subjects was a matter of tolerable indifference for the empire; every conflict between the Romans and the Jews in Jerusalem widened the gulf which yawned between the peoples of the West and the Hebrews living along with them; and the danger lay, not in the quarrels of Palestine, but in the incompatibility of the members of the empire of different nationalities who were now withal coupled together by fate.

[Sidenote: Preparation for the insurrection.]

Thus the ship was driving incessantly towards the whirlpool. In this ill-fated voyage all taking part lent their help--the Roman government and its administrators, the Jewish authorities and the Jewish people. The former indeed continued to show a willingness to meet as far as possible all claims, fair and unfair, of the Jews. When in the year 44 the procurator again entered Jerusalem, the nomination of the high-priest and the administration of the temple-treasure, which were combined with the kingly office and in so far also with the procuratorship, were taken from him and transferred to a brother of the deceased king Agrippa, king Herod of Chalcis, as well as, after his death in the year 48, to his successor the younger Agrippa already mentioned. The Roman chief magistrate, on the complaint of the Jews caused a Roman soldier, who, on occasion of orders to plunder a Jewish village, had torn in pieces a roll of the law, to be put to death. The whole weight of Roman imperial justice fell, according to circumstances, even upon the higher officials; when two procurators acting alongside of one another had taken part for and against in the quarrel of the Samaritans and the Galileans, and their soldiers had fought against one another, the imperial governor of Syria, Ummidius Quadratus, was sent with extraordinary full powers to Syria to punish and to execute; as a result one of the guilty persons was sent into banishment, and a Roman military tribune named Celer was publicly beheaded in Jerusalem itself. But alongside of these examples of severity stood others of a weakness partaking of guilt; in that same process the second at least as guilty procurator Antonius Felix escaped punishment, because he was the brother of the powerful menial Pallas and the husband of the sister of king Agrippa. Still more than with the official abuses of individual administrators must the government be chargeable with the fact that it did not strengthen the power of the officials and the number of the troops in a province so situated, and continued to recruit the garrison almost exclusively from the province. Insignificant as the province was, it was a wretched stupidity and an ill-applied parsimony to treat it after the traditional pattern; the seasonable display of a crushing superiority of force and unrelenting sternness, a governor of higher rank, and a legionary camp, would have saved to the province and the empire great sacrifices of money, blood, and honour.

[Sidenote: High-priestly rule.]

[Sidenote: Ananias.]

But not less at least was the fault of the Jews. The high-priestly rule, so far as it went--and the government was but too much inclined to allow it free scope in all internal affairs--was, even according to the Jewish accounts, at no time conducted with so much violence and worthlessness as in that from the death of Agrippa to the outbreak of the war. The best-known and most influential of these priest-rulers was Ananias son of Nebedaeus, the “whitewashed wall,” as Paul called him, when this spiritual judge bade his attendants smite him on the mouth, because he ventured to defend himself before the judgment-seat. It was laid to his charge that he bribed the governor, and that by a corresponding interpretation of Scripture he alienated from the lower clergy the tithe-sheaves.[179] As one of the chief instigators of the war between the Samaritans and the Galileans, he had stood before the Roman judge. Not because the reckless fanatics preponderated in the ruling circles, but because these instigators of popular tumults and organisers of trials for heresy lacked the moral and religious authority whereby the moderate men in better times had guided the multitude, and because they misunderstood and misused the indulgence of the Roman authorities in internal affairs, they were unable to mediate in a peaceful sense between the foreign rule and the nation. It was under their very rule that the Roman authorities were assailed with the wildest and most irrational demands, and popular movements arose of grim absurdity. Of such a nature was that violent petition, which demanded and obtained the blood of a Roman soldier on account of the tearing up of a roll of the law. Another time there arose a popular tumult, which cost the lives of many men, because a Roman soldier had exhibited in the temple a part of his body in unseemly nudity. Even the best of kings could not have absolutely averted such lunacy; but even the most insignificant prince would not have confronted the fanatical multitude with so little control of the helm as these priests.

[Sidenote: The Zealots.]

The actual result was the constant increase of the new Maccabees. It has been customary to put the outbreak of the war in the year 66; with equal and perhaps better warrant we might name for it the year 44. Since the death of Agrippa warfare in Judaea had never ceased, and alongside of the local feuds, which Jews fought out with Jews, there went on constantly the war of the Roman troops against the seceders in the mountains, the Zealots, as the Jews named them, or according to Roman designation, the Robbers. Both names were appropriate; here too alongside of the fanatics the decayed or decaying elements of society played their part--at any rate after the victory one of the first steps of the Zealots was to burn the bonds for debt that were kept in the temple. Every one of the abler procurators, onward from the first Cuspius Fadus, swept the land of them, and still the hydra appeared afresh in greater strength. The successor of Fadus, Tiberius Julius Alexander, himself sprung from a Jewish family, a nephew of the above-mentioned Alexandrian scholar Philo, caused two sons of Judas the Galilean, Jacob and Simon, to be crucified; this was the seed of the new Mattathias. In the streets of the towns the patriots preached aloud the war, and not a few followed to the desert; these bands set on fire the houses of the peaceful and rational people who refused to take part with them. If the soldiers seized bandits of this sort, they carried off in turn respectable people as hostages to the mountains; and very often the authorities agreed to release the former in order to liberate the latter. At the same time the “men of the knife” began in the capital their dismal trade; they murdered, doubtless also for money--as their first victim the priest Jonathan is named, as commissioning them in that case, the Roman procurator Felix--but, if possible, at the same time as patriots, Roman soldiers or countrymen of their own friendly to the Romans. How, with such dispositions, should wonders and signs have failed to appear, and persons who, deceived or deceiving, roused thereby the fanaticism of the masses? Under Cuspius Fadus the miracle-monger Theudas led his faithful adherents to the Jordan, assuring them that the waters would divide before them and swallow up the pursuing Roman horsemen, as in the times of king Pharaoh. Under Felix another worker of wonders, named from his native country the Egyptian, promised that the walls of Jerusalem would collapse like those of Jericho at the trumpet blast of Joshua; and thereupon four thousand knife-men followed him to the Mount of Olives. In the very absurdity lay the danger. The great mass of the Jewish population were small farmers, who ploughed their fields and pressed their oil in the sweat of their brow--more villagers than townsmen, of little culture and powerful faith, closely linked to the free bands in the mountains, and full of reverence for Jehovah and his priests in Jerusalem as well as full of aversion towards the unclean strangers. The war there was not a war between one power and another for the ascendency, not even properly a war of the oppressed against the oppressors for the recovery of freedom; it was not daring statesmen,[180] but fanatical peasants that began and waged it, and paid for it with their blood. It was a further stage in the history of national hatred; on both sides continued living together seemed impossible, and they encountered each other with the thought of mutual extirpation.

[Sidenote: Outbreak of the insurrection in Caesarea.]

The movement, through which the tumults were changed into war, proceeded from Caesarea. In this urban community--originally Greek, and then remodelled by Herod after the pattern of the colonies of Alexander--which had developed into the first seaport of Palestine, Greeks and Jews dwelt, equally entitled to civic privileges, without distinction of nation and confession, the latter superior in number and property. But the Hellenes, after the model of the Alexandrians, and doubtless under the immediate impression of the occurrences of the year 38, impugned the right of citizenship of the Jewish members of the community by way of complaint to the supreme authority. The minister of Nero,[181] Burrus († 62), decided in their favour. It was bad to make citizenship in a town formed on Jewish soil and by a Jewish government a privilege of the Hellenes; but it may not be forgotten how the Jews behaved just at that time towards the Romans, and how naturally they suggested to the Romans the conversion of the Roman capital and the Roman headquarters of the province into a purely Hellenic urban community. The decision led, as might be conceived, to vehement street tumults, in which Hellenic scoffing and Jewish arrogance seem to have almost balanced each other, particularly in the struggle for access to the synagogue; the Roman authorities interfered, as a matter of course, to the disadvantage of the Jews. These left the town, but were compelled by the governor to return, and then all of them were slain in a street riot (6th August 66). This the government had at any rate not commanded, and certainly had not wished; powers were unchained which they themselves were no longer able to control.

[Sidenote: Outbreak of the insurrection in Jerusalem.]

[Sidenote: Eleazar.]

If here the enemies of the Jews were the assailants, the Jews were so in Jerusalem. Certainly their defenders in the narrative of these occurrences assure us that the procurator of Palestine at the time, Gessius Florus, in order to avoid impeachment on account of his maladministration, wished to provoke an insurrection by the excessive measure of his torture; and there is no doubt that the governors of that time considerably exceeded the usual measure of worthlessness and oppression. But, if Florus in fact pursued such a plan, it miscarried. For according to these very reports the prudent and the possessors of property among the Jews, and with them king Agrippa II., familiar with the government of the temple, and just at that time present in Jerusalem--he had meanwhile exchanged the rule of Chalcis for that of Batanaea--lulled the masses so far, that the riotous assemblages and the interference against them kept within the measure that had been usual in the country for years. But the advances made by Jewish theology were more dangerous than the disorder of the streets and the robber patriots of the mountains. The earlier Judaism had in a liberal fashion opened the gates of its faith to foreigners; it is true that only those who belonged, in the strict sense, to their religion were admitted to the interior of the Temple, but as proselytes of the gate all were admitted without ceremony into the outer courts, and even the non-Jew was here allowed to pray on his part and offer sacrifices to the Lord Jehovah. Thus, as we have already mentioned (p. 189), sacrifice was offered daily there for the Roman emperor on the basis of an endowment of Augustus. These sacrifices of non-Jews were forbidden by the master of the temple at this time, Eleazar, son of the above-mentioned high priest Ananias, a passionate young man of rank, personally blameless and brave and, so far, an entire contrast to his father, but more dangerous through his virtues than the latter was through his vices. Vainly it was pointed out to him that this was as offensive for the Romans as dangerous for the country, and absolutely at variance with usage; he resolved to abide by the improvement of piety and the exclusion of the sovereign of the land from worship. Believers in Judaism had for long been divided into those who placed their trust in the Lord of Zebaoth alone and endured the Roman rule till it should please Him to realise the kingdom of heaven on earth, and the more practical men, who had resolved to establish the kingdom of heaven with their own hand and held themselves assured of the help of the Lord of Hosts in the pious work, or, by their watchwords, into the Pharisees and the Zealots. The number and the repute of the latter were constantly on the increase. An old saying was discovered that about this time a man would proceed from Judaea and gain the dominion of the world; people believed this the more readily because it was so very absurd, and the oracle contributed not a little to render the masses more fanatical.

[Sidenote: Struggle of parties.]

[Sidenote: Victory of the Zealots.]

The moderate party perceived the danger, and resolved to put down the fanatics by force; it asked for troops from the Romans in Caesarea and from king Agrippa. From the former no support came; Agrippa sent a number of horsemen. On the other hand the patriots and the knife-men flocked into the city, among them the wildest Manahim, also one of the sons of the oft-named Judas of Galilee. They were the stronger, and soon were masters in all the city. The handful of Roman soldiers, which kept garrison in the castle adjoining the temple, was quickly overpowered and put to death. The neighbouring king’s palace, with the strong towers belonging to it, where the adherents of the moderate party, a number of Romans under the tribune Metilius, and the soldiers of Agrippa were stationed, offered as little resistance. To the latter, on their desire to capitulate, free departure was allowed, but was refused to the Romans; when they at length surrendered in return for assurance of life, they were first disarmed, and then put to death with the single exception of the officer, who promised to undergo circumcision and so was pardoned as a Jew. Even the leaders of the moderates, including the father and the brother of Eleazar, became the victims of the popular rage, which was still more savagely indignant at the associates of the Romans than at the Romans themselves. Eleazar was himself alarmed at his victory; between the two leaders of the fanatics, himself and Manahim, a bloody hand-to-hand conflict took place after the victory, perhaps on account of the broken capitulation: Manahim was captured and executed. But the holy city was free, and the Roman detachment stationed in Jerusalem was annihilated; the new Maccabees had conquered, like the old.

[Sidenote: Extension of the Jewish war.]

Thus, it is alleged on the same day, the 6th August 66, the non-Jews in Caesarea had massacred the Jews, and the Jews in Jerusalem had massacred the non-Jews; and thereby was given on both sides the signal to proceed with this patriotic work acceptable to God. In the neighbouring Greek towns the Hellenes rid themselves of the resident Jews after the model of Caesarea. For example, in Damascus all the Jews were in the first instance shut up in the gymnasium, and, on the news of a misfortune to the Roman arms, were by way of precaution all of them put to death. The same or something similar took place in Ascalon, in Scytopolis, Hippos, Gadara, wherever the Hellenes were the stronger. In the territory of king Agrippa, inhabited mainly by Syrians, his energetic intervention saved the lives of the Jews of Caesarea Paneas and elsewhere. In Syria Ptolemais, Tyre, and more or less the other Greek communities followed; only the two greatest and most civilised cities, Antioch and Apamea, as well as Sidon, were exceptions. To this is probably due the fact that this movement did not spread in the direction of Asia Minor. In Egypt not merely did the matter come to a popular riot, which claimed numerous victims, but the Alexandrian legions themselves had to charge the Jews.--In necessary reaction to these Jewish “vespers” the insurrection victorious in Jerusalem immediately seized all Judaea and organised itself everywhere, with similar maltreatment of minorities, but in other respects with rapidity and energy.

[Sidenote: Vain expedition of Cestius Gallus.]

It was necessary to interfere as speedily as possible, and to prevent the further extension of the conflagration; on the first news the Roman governor of Syria, Gaius Cestius Gallus, marched with his troops against the insurgents. He brought up about 20,000 Roman soldiers and 13,000 belonging to client-states, without including the numerous Syrian militia; took Joppa, where the whole body of citizens was put to death; and already in September stood before, and in fact in, Jerusalem itself. But he could not breach the strong walls of the king’s palace and of the temple, and as little made use of the opportunity several times offered to him of getting possession of the town through the moderate party. Whether the task was insoluble or whether he was not equal to it, he soon gave up the siege, and purchased even a hasty retreat by the sacrifice of his baggage and of his rear-guard. Thus Judaea in the first instance, including Idumaea and Galilee, remained in, or came into, the hands of the exasperated Jews; the Samaritan district also was compelled to join. The mainly Hellenic coast towns, Anthedon and Gaza, were destroyed, Caesarea and the other Greek towns were retained with difficulty. If the rising did not go beyond the boundaries of Palestine, that was not the fault of the government, but was rather due to the national dislike of the Syro-Hellenes towards the Jews.

[Sidenote: The Jewish war of Vespasian.]

The government in Rome took things in earnest, as earnest they were. Instead of the procurator an imperial legate was sent to Palestine, Titus Flavius Vespasianus, a prudent man and an experienced soldier. He obtained for the conduct of the war two legions of the West, which in consequence of the Parthian war were accidentally still in Asia, and that Syrian legion which had suffered least in the unfortunate expedition of Cestius, while the Syrian army under the new governor, Gaius Licinius Mucianus--Gallus had seasonably died--by the addition of another legion was restored to the status which it had before.[182] To these burgess-troops and their auxiliaries were added the previous garrison of Palestine, and lastly the forces of the four client-kings of the Commagenians, the Hemesenes, the Jews, and the Nabataeans, together about 50,000 men, including among them 15,000 king’s soldiers.[183] In the spring of the year 67 this army was brought together at Ptolemais and advanced into Palestine. After the insurgents had been emphatically repulsed by the weak garrison of the town of Ascalon, they had not further attacked the cities which took part with the Romans; the hopelessness, which pervaded the whole movement, expressed itself in the renouncing at once of all offensive. When the Romans thereupon passed over to the aggressive, the insurgents nowhere confronted them in the open field, and in fact did not even make attempts to bring relief to the several places assailed. Certainly the cautious general of the Romans did not divide his troops, but kept at least the three legions together throughout. Nevertheless, as in most of the individual townships a number--often probably but small--of the fanatics exercised terror over the citizens, the resistance was obstinate, and the Roman conduct of the war neither brilliant nor rapid.

[Sidenote: First and second campaigns.]

Vespasian employed the whole first campaign (67) in bringing into his power the fortresses of the small district of Galilee and the coast as far as Ascalon; before the one little town of Jotapata the three legions lay encamped for forty-five days. During the winter of 67-8 a legion lay in Scytopolis, on the south border of Galilee, the two others in Caesarea. Meanwhile the different factions in Jerusalem fell upon one another and were in most vehement conflict; the good patriots, who were at the same time for civil order, and the still better patriots, who, partly in fanatical excitement, partly from delight in mob-riot, wished to bring about and turn to account a reign of terror, fought with each other in the streets of the city, and were only at one in accounting every attempt at reconciliation with the Romans a crime worthy of death. The Roman general, on many occasions summoned to take advantage of this disorder, adhered to the course of advancing only step by step. In the second year of the war he caused the Transjordanic territory in the first instance, particularly the important towns of Gadara and Gerasa, to be occupied, and then took up his position at Emmaus and Jericho, whence he took military possession of Idumaea in the south and Samaria in the north, so that Jerusalem in the summer of the year 68 was surrounded on all sides.

[Sidenote: Stoppage of the war.]

The siege was just beginning when the news of the death of Nero arrived. Thereby _de iure_ the mandate conferred on the legate became extinct, and Vespasian, not less cautious in a political than in a military point of view, in fact suspended his operations until new orders as to his attitude. Before these arrived from Galba, the good season of the year was at an end. When the spring of 69 came, Galba was overthrown, and the decision was in suspense between the emperor of the praetorian guard and the emperor of the army on the Rhine. It was only after Vitellius’s victory in June 69 that Vespasian resumed operations and occupied Hebron; but very soon all the armies of the East renounced their allegiance to the former and proclaimed the previous legate of Judaea as emperor. The positions at Emmaus and Jericho were indeed maintained in front of the Jews; but, as the German legions had denuded the Rhine to make their general emperor, so the flower of the army went from Palestine, partly with the legate of Syria, Mucianus, to Italy, partly with the new emperor and his son Titus to Syria and onward to Egypt, and it was only after the war of the succession was ended, at the close of the year 69, and the rule of Vespasian was acknowledged throughout the empire, that the latter entrusted his son with the termination of the Jewish war.

[Sidenote: Titus against Jerusalem.]

Thus the insurgents had entirely free sway in Jerusalem from the summer of 66 till the spring of 70. What the combination of religious and national fanaticism, the noble desire not to survive the downfall of their fatherland, the consciousness of past crimes and of inevitable punishment, the wild promiscuous tumult of all noblest and all basest passions in these four years of terror brought upon the nation, had its horrors intensified by the fact that the foreigners were only onlookers in the matter, and all the evil was inflicted directly by Jews upon Jews. The moderate patriots were soon overpowered by the zealots with the help of the levy of the rude and fanatical inhabitants of the Idumaean villages (end of 68), and their leaders were slain. The zealots thenceforth ruled, and all the bonds of civil, religious, and moral order were dissolved. Freedom was granted to the slaves, the high priests were appointed by lot, the ritual laws were trodden under foot and scoffed at by those very fanatics whose stronghold was the temple, the captives in the prisons were put to death, and it was forbidden on pain of death to bury the slain. The different leaders fought with their separate bands against one another: John of Gischala with his band brought up from Galilee; Simon, son of Gioras from Gerasa, the leader of a band of patriots formed in the south, and at the same time of the Idumaeans in revolt against John; Eleazar, son of Simon, one of the champions against Cestius Gallus. The first maintained himself in the porch of the temple, the second in the city, the third in the Holy of Holies; and there were daily combats in the streets of the city between Jews and Jews. Concord came only through the common enemy; when the attack began, Eleazar’s little band placed itself under the orders of John, and although John in the temple and Simon in the city continued to play the part of masters, they, while quarrelling among themselves, fought shoulder to shoulder against the Romans.

[Sidenote: Task of the assailants.]

The task of the assailants was not an easy one. It is true that the army, which had received in place of the detachments sent to Italy a considerable contingent from the Egyptian and the Syrian troops, was quite sufficient for the investment; and, in spite of the long interval which had been granted to the Jews to prepare for the siege, their provisions were inadequate, the more especially as a part of them had been destroyed in the street conflicts, and, as the siege began about the time of the Passover, numerous strangers who had come on that account to Jerusalem were also shut in. But though the mass of the population soon suffered distress, the combatant force took what they needed where they found it, and, well provided as they were, they carried on the struggle without reference to the multitudes that were famishing and soon dying of hunger. The young general could not make up his mind to a mere blockade; a siege with four legions, brought to an end in this way, would yield to him personally no glory, and the new government needed a brilliant feat of arms. The town, everywhere else defended by inaccessible rocky slopes, was assailable only on the north side; here, too, it was no easy labour to reduce the threefold rampart-wall erected without regard to cost from the rich treasures of the temple, and further within the city to wrest the citadel, the temple, and the three vast towers of Herod from a strong, fanatically inspired, and desperate garrison. John and Simon not merely resolutely repelled the assaults, but often attacked with good success the troops working at the trenches, and destroyed or burnt the besieging machines.

[Sidenote: Destruction of Jerusalem.]

But the superiority of numbers and the art of war decided for the Romans. The walls were stormed, and thereafter the citadel Antonia; then, after long resistance, first the porticoes of the temple went on fire, and further on the 10th Ab (August) the temple itself, with all the treasures accumulated in it for six centuries. Lastly, after fighting in the streets which lasted for a month, on the 8th Elul (September) the last resistance in the town itself was broken, and the holy Salem was razed. The bloody work had lasted for five months. The sword and the arrow, and still more famine, had claimed countless victims; the Jews killed every one so much as suspected of deserting, and forced women and children in the city to die of hunger; the Romans just as pitilessly put to the sword the captives or crucified them. The combatants that remained, and particularly the two leaders, were drawn forth singly from the sewers, in which they had taken refuge. At the Dead Sea, just where once king David and the Maccabees in their utmost distress had found a refuge, the remnants of the insurgents still held out for years in the rock-castles Machaerus and Massada, till at length, as the last of the free Jews, Eleazar grandson of Judas the Galilean, and his adherents put to death first their wives and children, and then themselves. The work was done. That the emperor Vespasian, an able soldier, did not disdain on account of such an inevitable success over a small long-subject people to march as victor to the Capitol, and that the seven-armed candelabrum brought home from the Holy of Holies of the temple is still to be seen at the present day on the honorary arch which the imperial senate erected to Titus in the market of the capital,[184] gives no high conception of the warlike spirit of this time. It is true that the deep aversion, which the Occidentals cherished towards the Jewish people, made up in some measure for what was wanting in martial glory, and if the Jewish name was too vile for the emperors to assign it to themselves, like those of the Germans and the Parthians, they deemed it not beneath their dignity to prepare for the populace of the capital this triumph commemorative of the victor’s pleasure in the misfortunes of others.

[Sidenote: Breaking up of the Jewish central power.]

The work of the sword was followed by a change of policy. The policy pursued by the earlier Hellenistic states, and taken over from them by the Romans--which reached in reality far beyond mere tolerance towards foreign ways and foreign faith, and recognised the Jews in their collective character as a national and religious community--had become impossible. In the Jewish insurrection the dangers had been too clearly brought to light, which this formation of a national-religious union--on the one hand rigidly concentrated, on the other spreading over the whole East and having ramifications even in the West--involved. The central worship was accordingly once for all set aside. This resolution of the government stood undoubtedly fixed, and had nothing in common with the question, which cannot be answered with certainty, whether the destruction of the temple took place by design or by accident; if, on the one hand, the suppression of the worship required only the closing of the temple and the magnificent structure might have been spared, on the other hand, had the temple been accidentally destroyed, the worship might have been continued in a temple rebuilt. No doubt it will always remain probable that it was not the chance of war that here prevailed, but the flames of the temple were rather the programme for the altered policy of the Roman government with reference to Judaism.[185] More clearly even than in the events at Jerusalem the same change is marked in the closing--which ensued at the same time on the order of Vespasian--of the central sanctuary of the Egyptian Jews, the temple of Onias, not far from Memphis, in the Heliopolitan district, which for centuries stood alongside of that of Jerusalem, somewhat as the translation by the Alexandrian Seventy stood side by side with the Old Testament; it too was divested of its votive gifts, and the worship of God in it was forbidden.

In the further carrying out of the new order of things the high priesthood and the Synhedrion of Jerusalem disappeared, and thereby the Jews of the empire lost their outward supreme head and their chief authority having jurisdiction hitherto generally in religious questions. The annual tribute--previously at least tolerated--on the part of every Jew, without distinction of dwelling-place, to the temple did not certainly fall into abeyance, but was with bitter parody transferred to the Capitoline Jupiter, and his representative on earth, the Roman emperor. From the character of the Jewish institutions the suppression of the central worship involved dissolution of the community of Jerusalem. The city was not merely destroyed and burnt down, but was left lying in ruins, like Carthage and Corinth once upon a time; its territory, public as well as private land, became imperial domain.[186] Such of the citizens of the populous town as had escaped famine or the sword came under the hammer of the slave market. Amidst the ruins of the destroyed town was pitched the camp of the legion, which, with its Spanish and Thracian auxiliaries, was thenceforth to do garrison duty in the Jewish land. The provincial troops hitherto recruited in Palestine itself were transferred elsewhere. In Emmaus, in the immediate neighbourhood of Jerusalem, a number of Roman veterans were settled, but urban rights were not conferred on this place. On the other hand, the old Sichem, the religious centre of the Samaritan community, perhaps a Greek city even from the time of Alexander the Great, was now reorganised in the forms of Hellenic polity under the name Flavia Neapolis. The capital of the land, Caesarea, hitherto a Greek urban community, obtained as “first Flavian colony” Roman organisation and Latin as the language of business. These were essays towards the Occidental municipalising of the Jewish land. Nevertheless Judaea proper, though depopulated and impoverished, remained still Jewish as before; the light in which the government looked upon the land is shown by the thoroughly anomalous permanent military occupation, which, as Judaea was not situated on the frontier of the empire, can only have been destined to keep down the inhabitants.

[Sidenote: The end of the Herodians.]

The Herodians, too, did not long survive the destruction of Jerusalem. King Agrippa II., the ruler of Caesarea Paneas and of Tiberias, had rendered faithful service to the Romans in the war against his countrymen, and had even scars, honourable at least in a military sense, to show from it; besides, his sister Berenice, a Cleopatra on a small scale, held the heart of the conqueror of Jerusalem captive with the remnant of her much sought charms. So he remained personally in possession of the dominion; but after his death, some thirty years later, this last reminiscence of the Jewish state was merged in the Roman province of Syria.

[Sidenote: Further treatment of the Jews.]

No hindrances were put in the way of the Jews exercising their religious customs either in Palestine or elsewhere. Their religious instruction itself, and the assemblies in connection with it of their law-teachers and law-experts, were at least permitted in Palestine; and there was no hindrance to these Rabbinical unions attempting to put themselves in some measure in the room of the former Synhedrion of Jerusalem, and to fix their doctrine and their laws in the groundwork of the Talmud. Although individual partakers in the Jewish insurrection who fled to Egypt and Cyrene produced troubles there, the bodies of Jews outside of Palestine, so far as we see, were left in their previous position. Against the Jew-hunt, which just about the time of the destruction of Jerusalem was called forth in Antioch by the circumstance that the Jews there had been publicly charged by one of their renegade comrades in the faith with the intention of setting the town on fire, the representative of the governor of Syria interfered with energy, and did not allow what was proposed--that they should compel the Jews to sacrifice to the gods of the land and to refrain from keeping the Sabbath. Titus himself, when he came to Antioch, most distinctly dismissed the leaders of the movement there with their request for the ejection of the Jews, or at least the cancelling of their privileges. People shrank from declaring war on the Jewish faith as such, and from driving the far-branching Diaspora to extremities; it was enough that Judaism was in its political representation deleted from the commonwealth.

[Sidenote: The consequences of the catastrophe.]

The alteration in the policy pursued since Alexander’s time towards Judaism amounted in the main to the withdrawing from this religious society unity of leadership and external compactness, and to the wresting out of the hands of its leaders a power which extended not merely over the native land of the Jews, but over the bodies of Jews generally within and beyond the Roman empire, and certainly in the East was prejudicial to the unity of imperial government. The Lagids as well as the Seleucids, and not less the Roman emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, had put up with this; but the immediate rule of the Occidentals over Judaea had sharpened the contrast between the imperial power and this power of the priests to such a degree, that the catastrophe set in with inevitable necessity and brought its consequences. From a political standpoint we may censure, doubtless, the remorselessness of the conduct of the war--which, moreover, is pretty much common to this war with all similar ones in Roman history--but hardly the religious-political dissolution of the nation ordained in consequence of it. If the axe was laid at the root of institutions which had led, and could not but with a certain necessity lead, to the formation of a party like that of the zealots, there was but done what was right and necessary, however severely and unjustly in the special case the individual might be affected by it. Vespasian, who gave the decision, was a judicious and moderate ruler. The question concerned was one not of faith but of power; the Jewish church-state, as head of the Diaspora, was not compatible with the absoluteness of the secular great-state. From the general rule of toleration the government did not even in this case depart; it waged war not against Judaism but against the high priest and the Synhedrion.

[Sidenote: The Christians.]

Nor did the destruction of the temple wholly fail in this its aim. There were not a few Jews and still more proselytes, particularly in the Diaspora, who adhered more to the Jewish moral law and to Jewish Monotheism than to the strictly national form of faith; the whole important sect of the Christians had inwardly broken off from Judaism and stood partly in open opposition to the Jewish ritual. For these the fall of Jerusalem was by no means the end of things, and within these extensive and influential circles the government obtained in some measure what it aimed at by breaking up the central seat of the Jewish worship. The separation of the Christian faith common to the Gentiles from the national Jewish, the victory of the adherents of Paul over those of Peter, was essentially promoted by the abolition of the Jewish central cultus.

[Sidenote: Palestinian Jews.]

But among the Jews of Palestine, where the language spoken was not Hebrew indeed, but Aramaic, and among the portion of the Diaspora which clung firmly to Jerusalem, the breach between Judaism and the rest of the world was deepened by the destruction of the temple. The national-religious exclusiveness, which the government wished to obviate, was in this narrow circle rather strengthened by the violent attempt to break it down, and driven, in the first instance, to further desperate struggles.

[Sidenote: The Jewish rising under Trajan.]

Not quite fifty years after the destruction of Jerusalem, in the year 116,[187] the Jews of the eastern Mediterranean rose against the imperial government. The rising, although undertaken by the Diaspora, was of a purely national character in its chief seats, Cyrene, Cyprus, Egypt, directed to the expulsion of the Romans as of the Hellenes, and, apparently, to the establishment of a separate Jewish state. It ramified even into Asiatic territory, and seized Mesopotamia and Palestine itself. When the insurgents were victorious they conducted the war with the same exasperation as the Sicarii in Jerusalem; they killed those whom they seized--the historian Appian, a native of Alexandria, narrates how he, running from them for his life, with great difficulty made his escape to Pelusium--and often they put the captives to death under excruciating torture, or compelled them--just as Titus formerly compelled the Jews captured in Jerusalem--to fall as gladiators in the arena in order to delight the eyes of the victors. In Cyrene 220,000, in Cyprus even 240,000 men are said to have been thus put to death by them. On the other hand, in Alexandria, which does not appear itself to have fallen into the hands of the Jews,[188] the besieged Hellenes slew whatever Jews were then in the city. The immediate cause of the rising is not clear. The blood of the zealots, who had taken refuge at Alexandria and Cyrene, and had there sealed their loyalty to the faith by dying under the axe of the Roman executioner, may not have flowed in vain; the Parthian war, during which the insurrection began, so far promoted it, as the troops stationed in Egypt had probably been called to the theatre of war. To all appearance it was an outbreak of the religious exasperation of the Jews, which had been glowing in secret like a volcano since the destruction of the temple and broke out after an incalculable manner into flames, of such a kind as the East has at all times produced and produces; if the insurgents really proclaimed a Jew as king, this rising certainly had, like that in their native country, its central seat in the great mass of the common people. That this Jewish rising partly coincided with the formerly-mentioned (p. 68) attempt at liberation of the peoples shortly before subdued by the emperor Trajan, while the latter was in the far East at the mouth of the Euphrates, gave to it even a political significance; if the successes of this ruler melted away under his hands at the close of his career, the Jewish insurrection, particularly in Palestine and Mesopotamia, contributed its part to that result. In order to put down the insurrection the troops had everywhere to take the field; against the “king” of the Cyrenaean Jews, Andreas or Lukuas, and the insurgents in Egypt, Trajan sent Quintus Marcius Turbo with an army and fleet; against the insurgents in Mesopotamia, as was already stated, Lusius Quietus--two of his most experienced generals. The insurgents were nowhere able to offer resistance to the regular troops, although the struggle was prolonged in Africa as in Palestine to the first times of Hadrian, and similar punishments were inflicted on this Diaspora as previously on the Jews of Palestine. That Trajan annihilated the Jews in Alexandria, as Appian says, is hardly an incorrect, although perhaps a too blunt expression for what took place; for Cyprus it is attested that thenceforth no Jew might even set foot upon the island, and death there awaited even the shipwrecked Israelites. If our traditional information was as copious in regard to this catastrophe as in regard to that of Jerusalem, it would probably appear as its continuation and completion, and in some sense also as its explanation; this rising shows the relation of the Diaspora to the home-country, and the state within a state, into which Judaism had developed.

[Sidenote: The Jewish rising under Hadrian.]

[Sidenote: Aelia Capitolina.]

Even with this second overthrow the revolt of Judaism against the imperial power was not at an end. We cannot say that the latter gave further provocation to it; ordinary acts of administration, which were accepted without opposition throughout the empire, affected the Hebrews just where the full resisting power of the national faith had its seat, and thereby called forth, probably to the surprise of the governors themselves, an insurrection which was in fact a war. If the emperor Hadrian, when his tour through the empire brought him to Palestine, resolved in the year 130 to re-erect the destroyed holy city of the Jews as a Roman colony, he certainly did not do them the honour of fearing them, and had no thought of propagating religious-political views; but he ordained that this legionary camp should--as shortly before or soon afterwards was the case on the Rhine, on the Danube, in Africa--be connected with an urban community recruiting itself primarily from the veterans, which received its name partly from its founder, partly from the god to whom at that time the Jews paid tribute instead of Jehovah. Similar was the state of the case as to the prohibition of circumcision; it was issued, as will be observed at a later point, probably without any design of thereby making war on Judaism as such. As may be conceived, the Jews did not inquire as to the motives for that founding of the city and for this prohibition, but felt both as an attack on their faith and their nationality, and answered it by an insurrection which, neglected at first by the Romans, thereupon had not its match for intensity and duration in the history of the Roman imperial period. The whole body of the Jews at home and abroad was agitated by the movement and supported more or less openly the insurgents on the Jordan;[189] even Jerusalem fell into their hands,[190] and the governor of Syria and indeed the emperor Hadrian appeared on the scene of conflict. The war was led, significantly enough, by the priest Eleazar[191] and the bandit-chief Simon, surnamed Bar-Kokheba, _i.e._ son of the stars, as the bringer of heavenly help, perhaps as Messiah. The financial power and the organisation of the insurgents are testified by the silver and copper coins struck through several years in the name of these two. After a sufficient number of troops was brought together, the experienced general Sextus Julius Severus gained the upper hand, but only by a gradual and slow advance; quite as in the war under Vespasian no pitched battle took place, but one place after another cost time and blood, till at length after a three years’ warfare[192] the last castle of the insurgents, the strong Bether, not far from Jerusalem, was stormed by the Romans. The numbers handed down to us in good accounts of 50 fortresses taken, 985 villages occupied, 580,000 that fell, are not incredible, since the war was waged with inexorable cruelty, and the male population was probably everywhere put to death.

[Sidenote: Judaea after Hadrian.]

In consequence of this rising the very name of the vanquished people was set aside; the province was thenceforth termed, not as formerly Judaea, but by the old name of Herodotus Syria of the Philistines, or Syria Palaestina. The land remained desolate; the new city of Hadrian continued to exist, but did not prosper. The Jews were prohibited under penalty of death from even setting foot in Jerusalem; the garrison was doubled; the limited territory between Egypt and Syria, to which only a small strip of the Transjordanic domain on the Dead Sea belonged, and which nowhere touched the frontier of the empire, was thenceforth furnished with two legions. In spite of all these strong measures the province remained disturbed, primarily doubtless in consequence of the bandit-habits long interwoven with the national cause. Pius issued orders to march against the Jews, and even under Severus there is mention of a war against Jews and Samaritans. But no movements on a great scale among the Jews recurred after the Hadrianic war.

[Sidenote: Position of the Jews in the second and third centuries.]

It must be acknowledged that these repeated outbreaks of the animosity fermenting in the minds of the Jews against the whole of their non-Jewish fellow-citizens did not change the general policy of the government. Like Vespasian, the succeeding emperors maintained, as respects the Jews in the main, the general standpoint of political and religious toleration; and not only so, but the exceptional laws issued for the Jews were, and continued to be, chiefly directed to release them from such general civil duties as were not compatible with their habits and their faith, and they are therefore designated directly as privilegia.[193]

Since the time of Claudius, whose suppression of Jewish worship in Italy (p. 199) is at least the last measure of the sort which we know of, residence and the free exercise of religion in the whole empire appear to have been in law conceded to the Jew. It would have been no wonder if those insurrections in the African and Syrian provinces had led to the expulsion generally of the Jews settled there; but restrictions of this sort were enacted, as we saw, only locally, _e.g._ for Cyprus. The Greek provinces always remained the chief seat of the Jews; even in the capital in some measure bilingual, whose numerous body of Jews had a series of synagogues, these formed a portion of the Greek population of Rome. Their epitaphs in Rome are exclusively Greek; in the Christian church at Rome developed from this Jewish body the baptismal confession was uttered in Greek down to a late period, and throughout the first three centuries the literature was exclusively Greek. But restrictive measures against the Jews appear not to have been adopted even in the Latin provinces; through and with Hellenism the Jewish system penetrated into the West, and there too communities of Jews were found, although they were still in number and importance even now, when the blows directed against the Diaspora had severely injured the Jew-communities of the East, far inferior to the latter.

[Sidenote: Corporative unions.]

Political privileges did not follow of themselves from the toleration of worship. The Jews were not hindered in the construction of their synagogues and proseuchae any more than in the appointment of a president for the same (ἀρχισυναγωγός), as well as of a college of elders (ἄρχοντες), with a chief elder (γερουσιάρχης) at its head. Magisterial functions were not meant to be connected with these positions; but, considering the inseparableness of the Jewish church-organisation and the Jewish administration of law, the presidents probably everywhere exercised, like the bishops in the Middle Ages, a jurisdiction, although merely _de facto_. The bodies of Jews in the several towns were not recognised generally as corporations, certainly not, for example, those of Rome; yet there subsisted at many places on the ground of local privileges such corporative unions with ethnarchs or, as they were now mostly called, patriarchs at their head. Indeed, in Palestine we find at the beginning of the third century once more a president of the whole Jewish body, who, in virtue of hereditary sacerdotal right, bears sway over his fellow-believers almost like a ruler, and has power even over life and limb, and whom the government at least tolerates.[194] Beyond question this patriarch was for the Jews the old high priest, and thus, under the eyes and under the oppression of the foreign rule, the obstinate people of God had once more reconstituted themselves, and in so far overthrown Vespasian’s work.

[Sidenote: Public services.]

As respects the bringing of the Jews under obligations of public service, their exemption from serving in war as incompatible with their religious principles had long since been and continued to be recognised. The special poll-tax to which they were subject, the old temple-payment, might be regarded as a compensation for this exemption, though it had not been imposed in this sense. For other services, as _e.g._ for the undertaking of wardships and municipal offices, they were at least from the time of Severus regarded in general as capable and under obligation, but those which ran counter to their “superstition” were remitted to them;[195] in connection with which we have to take into account that exclusion from municipal offices became more and more converted from a slight into a privilege. Even in the case of state offices in later times a similar course was probably pursued.

[Sidenote: Forbidding of circumcision.]

The only serious interference of the state-power with Jewish customs concerned the ceremony of circumcision; the measures directed against this, however, were probably not taken from a religious-political standpoint, but were connected with the forbidding of castration, and arose doubtless in part from misunderstanding of the Jewish custom. The evil habit of mutilation, becoming more and more prevalent, was first brought by Domitian within the sphere of penal offences; when Hadrian, making the precept more stringent, placed castration under the law of murder, circumcision appears also to have been apprehended as castration,[196] which certainly could not but be felt and was felt (p. 224) by the Jews as an attack upon their existence, although this was perhaps not its intention. Soon afterwards, probably in consequence of the insurrection thereby occasioned, Pius allowed the circumcision of children of Jewish descent, while otherwise even that of the non-free Jew and of the proselyte was to involve, afterwards as before, the penalty of castration for all participating in it. This was also of political importance, in so far as thereby the formal passing over to Judaism became a penal offence; and probably the prohibition was, not indeed issued but, retained with this in view.[197] It must have contributed its part to the abrupt demarcation of the Jews from the non-Jews.

[Sidenote: Altered position of the Jews in the imperial period.]

If we look back on the fortunes of Judaism in the epoch from Augustus to Diocletian, we recognise a thorough transformation of its character and of its position. It enters upon this epoch as a national and religious power firmly concentrated round its narrow native land--a power which even confronts the imperial government in and beyond Judaea with arms in hand, and in the field of faith evolves a mighty propagandist energy. We can understand that the Roman government would not tolerate the adoration of Jehovah and the faith of Moses on another footing than that on which the cultus of Mithra and the faith of Zoroaster were tolerated. The reaction against this exclusive and self-centred Judaism came in the crushing blows directed by Vespasian and Hadrian against the Jewish land, and by Trajan against the Jews of the Diaspora, the effect of which reached far beyond the immediate destruction of the existing society and the reduction of the repute and power of the Jews as a body. In fact, the later Christianity and the later Judaism were the consequences of this reaction of the West against the East. The great propagandist movement, which carried the deeper view of religion from the East into the West, was liberated in this way, as was already said (p. 220 f.), from the narrow limits of Jewish nationality; if it by no means gave up the attachment to Moses and the prophets, it necessarily became released at any rate from the government of the Pharisees, which had gone to pieces. The Christian ideals of the future became universal, since there was no longer a Jerusalem upon earth. But as the enlarged and deepened faith, which with its nature changed also its name, arose out of these disasters, so not less the narrowed and hardened orthodoxy, which found a rallying point, if no longer in Jerusalem, at any rate in hatred towards those who had destroyed it, and still more in hatred towards the more free and higher intellectual movement which evolved Christianity out of Judaism. The external power of the Jews was broken, and risings, such as took place in the middle of the imperial period, are not subsequently met with; the Roman emperors were done with the state within the state, and, as the properly dangerous element--the propagandist diffusion--passed over to Christianity, the confessors of the old faith, who shut themselves off from the New Covenant, were set aside, so far as the further general development was concerned.

[Sidenote: Altered character of Judaism.]

But if the legions could destroy Jerusalem, they could not raze Judaism itself; and what on the one side was a remedy, exercised on the other the effect of a poison. Judaism not only remained, but it became an altered thing. There is a deep gulf between the Judaism of the older time, which seeks to spread its faith, which has its temple-court filled with the Gentiles, and which has its priests offering daily sacrifices for the emperor Augustus, and the rigid Rabbinism, which knew nothing and wished to know nothing of the world beyond Abraham’s bosom and the Mosaic law. Strangers the Jews always were, and had wished to be so; but the feeling of estrangement now culminated within them as well as against them after a fearful fashion, and rudely were its hateful and pernicious consequences drawn on both sides. From the contemptuous sarcasm of Horace against the intruding Jew from the Roman Ghetto there is a wide step to the solemn enmity which Tacitus cherishes against this scum of the human race, to which everything pure is impure and everything impure pure; in the interval lie those insurrections of the despised people, and the necessity of conquering it and of expending continuously money and men for its repression. The prohibitions of maltreating the Jew, which are constantly recurring in the imperial ordinances, show that those words of the cultured were translated, as might be expected, by their inferiors into deeds. The Jews, on their part, did not mend the matter. They turned away from Hellenic literature, which was now regarded as polluting, and even rebelled against the use of the Greek translation of the Bible; the ever-increasing purification of faith turned not merely against the Greeks and the Romans, but quite as much against the “half-Jews” of Samaria and against the Christian heretics; the reverence toward the letter of the Holy Scriptures rose to a giddy height of absurdity, and above all an--if possible--still holier tradition established itself, in the fetters of which all life and thought were benumbed. The gulf between that treatise on the Sublime which ventures to place Homer’s Poseidon shaking land and sea and Jehovah, who creates the shining sun, side by side, and the beginnings of the Talmud which belong to this epoch, marks the contrast between the Judaism of the first and that of the third century. The living together of Jews and non-Jews showed itself more and more to be just as inevitable, as under the given conditions it was intolerable; the contrast in faith, law, and manners became sharpened, and mutual arrogance and mutual hatred operated on both sides with morally disorganising effect. Not merely was their conciliation not promoted in these centuries, but its realisation was always thrown further into the distance, the more its necessity was apparent. This exasperation, this arrogance, this contempt, as they became established at that time, were indeed only the inevitable growth of a perhaps not less inevitable sowing; but the heritage of these times is still at the present day a burden on mankind.