THE DISPERSION
THE struggle for freedom already narrated and its ruthless suppression
were not calculated to diminish the Jew’s unpopularity at Rome. Under
the successors of Titus we have fresh persecutions to chronicle.
The Jews were heavily taxed, and heathen proselytes to Judaism were
punished with loss of property, with exile, or with death--penalties
from which not even kinship with the Emperor could save the culprit.
♦94 A.D.♦ At last the Jews, driven from the city by an edict of
Domitian, were forced to live in the valley of Egeria which was
grudgingly let out to them. This valley, once green with a sacred
grove famed in legend as the place where “King Numa kept nightly
tryst with his divine mistress,” was now notorious as a desolation of
malarious mud deposited by the overflow of the Tiber. In this miserable
locality the Jews were allowed to build their _Proseucha_, or house for
prayer--a rallying-point for a congregation of poor wretches “whose
basket and wisp of hay are all their furniture.”[28] Thus Juvenal in
one luminous line draws a picture as vivid as it is repulsive of the
condition of Israel at Rome towards the end of the first century of our
era. It may be added that the same edict which drove the Jews from Rome
also expelled the philosophers, among them Epictetus.
A streak of light amid general gloom is shed by the reign of Domitian’s
successor. Nerva was one of the few Emperors who knew how to reconcile
absolute power with personal freedom, and the Jews shared with the
rest of his subjects those blessings of justice and liberty that
induced Tacitus to celebrate his short reign as the beginning of an
era in which “one was permitted to think what he chose and to say what
he thought.”[29] ♦Sept. 96–Jan. 98.♦ The Jews were allowed to worship
their God in peace, and the fiscal tyranny under which they laboured
was lightened. Nerva’s toleration is commemorated by a coin bearing on
the reverse the Jewish symbol of a palm-tree and the inscription _Fisci
Judaici calumnia sublata_.
However, kindness had as little effect upon the Jews as cruelty. Their
religious and national antipathy to the alien ruler blinded them to the
benefits of Roman administration. The memory of their defeat rankled,
and the desire for emancipation was intensified by hunger for revenge.
The prosperity of the present was valued only inasmuch as it enabled
them to avenge their sufferings in the past. Their subjection was
regarded merely as a trial and as a sign of the approaching advent of
the Deliverer destined to rebuild the Temple and to raise the children
of Israel to the sovereignty of the world--the Messiah whom the Lord
had promised to His people through the prophets of old. The forty years
that had elapsed since the capture of Jerusalem by Titus were for the
Jews of the Empire at large years of comparative rest and recovery. All
the strength gathered during that period was now put forth in a last
desperate dash for freedom.
The Babylonian Jews gave the signal for the holy war by opposing the
Emperor Trajan’s plans of conquest in Mesopotamia. ♦115 A.D.♦ Thence
the insurrection rapidly spread to Palestine, Egypt, Cyrene, and
Cyprus. In every one of these countries the infuriated rabble fell
upon their neighbours, whom the suddenness and unexpectedness of the
attack rendered an easy prey to the rage of the assailants. If one
tenth of the tales of horror related by Dion Cassius be true, it is
sufficient to explain the hatred inspired by the Jews in after times,
and to extenuate, if not to justify, the terrible retribution which
followed. Two hundred and twenty thousand Greeks and Romans were,
according to Dion, butchered in Cyrene. Lybia was utterly devastated.
Two hundred and forty thousand Greeks were slaughtered in Cyprus.
Great numbers of Greek and Roman heathens and Christians perished in
Egypt, and many of the victims were sawed asunder after the fashion set
by David, and afterwards imitated by the Mohammedan conqueror of the
Balkan Peninsula. It is even added that the butchers, not satiated by
the mere sight of the mangled bodies, devoured the flesh, licked up the
blood, girded themselves with the entrails, and wrapped themselves in
the skins of their victims--abominations which are only credible to one
familiar with the treatment mutually meted out by the inhabitants of
the Near East at the present day.[30]
♦117 A.D.♦
The insurrection was quelled, and temporary calm restored, by Trajan’s
successor, Hadrian, who appears to have yielded to the Jews’ demand
for the rebuilding of the Temple. The Emperor’s assent was received
with wild enthusiasm. The Jews believed that the day of national
rehabilitation had come:
“No more the death sound of the trumpet’s cry--
No more they perish at the foe’s rash hands;
But trophies shall float in the world o’er evil.
Dear Jewish land! fair town, inspirer of songs,
No more shall unclean foot of Greeks within thy bounds
Go forth.”[31]
Thus sang an unknown Jewish poet of Alexandria, venting his spleen
against the Greeks in Greek verse. But the dreamers were rudely
awakened. The Emperor was not slow to perceive that the restoration
of the Temple would mean a perpetuation of the Jewish problem. He,
therefore, qualified his original concession by terms which were not
acceptable to the Jews. Their bitter disenchantment and their hatred
of Hadrian were concealed for a while. ♦130 A.D.♦ The Emperor visited
Palestine and endeavoured to conciliate the Jews by bringing them
into closer contact with the Pagans. But he unfortunately adopted
towards that end the very means calculated to defeat it. He proposed
to rebuild Jerusalem on a plan which the Jews regarded as a deliberate
desecration. He did not understand that what the nation wanted was not
fusion with the foreigners but rigid separation from them. Again the
Jews concealed their feelings; and while the deluded Emperor wrote to
the Senate at home praising the peaceful disposition and loyalty of
this much-maligned people, they were preparing for a fresh revolt. Arms
were manufactured and hidden in underground passages, secret means of
communication were established, and Hadrian had scarcely turned his
back on Jerusalem when the Jews once more “lifted themselves up to
establish a vision.”
♦132 A.D.♦
The rebellion was headed by Bar-Cochba, in whom the enthusiastic mob
recognised the prophesied Messiah and round whose standard they rallied
in force sufficient to defy the Imperial legions for two years. The
Jewish Christians, who refused to recognise the new Messiah and to
take part in the holy war, were remorselessly persecuted, and the
rebellion blazed from one end of the country to the other. However,
Hadrian’s army, under the able command of Julius Severus and of the
Emperor himself, prevailed in the end. ♦135 A.D.♦ Bar-Cochba was
defeated, and the last sparks of the insurrection were extinguished
beneath mountains of corpses. It is reckoned (though these figures
are scarcely trustworthy) that no fewer than five hundred and eighty
thousand Jews succumbed to the sword during the war, in addition to
an unknown multitude starved or burnt to death. Palestine was turned
into a wilderness. All the fortresses were demolished, and nearly one
thousand towns and villages lay in ashes. The destruction of the Jewish
State, commenced by Titus, was accomplished by Hadrian. The spot upon
which the proud Temple had once stood was now defiled by the plough,
and all the holy sites were devoted to idols. The Samaritans shared the
ruin of their secular enemies. Mount Gerizim also was polluted by a
shrine to Jupiter, while on Mount Golgotha, where a century before the
awful crime had been committed, a fane was dedicated to the Goddess of
Lust. A pagan colony of Phoenician and Syrian soldiers, who had served
their time, occupied part of Jerusalem, the very name of which was soon
forgotten in that of Aelia Capitolina. Judaism was interdicted under
heavy penalties, and the Jews were forbidden to enter the city of their
fathers. The Babylonian captivity had been to the children of Israel
only a fatherly rod; but this last calamity proved their utter ruin.
Henceforth they are doomed to wander among the sons of men, a sign and
a scorn to the nations of the earth.
The slaughter ceased as soon as there ceased to be any rebels to slay.
A period of compulsion and persecution, as the Jewish writers term
it, ensued; but the fear of further trouble having disappeared once
and for ever, the Romans forgot their anger. Though Israel had been
extinguished as a state it was suffered to live as a sect. The throne
had perished; but the altar remained. At first danger induced the Jews
to compromise and to dissemble. A council of Rabbis, secretly held at
Lydda, decided that death by torture might be avoided by the breach of
all the commandments, except the three vital prohibitions of idolatry,
adultery, and murder. But the reign of terror and hypocrisy did not
last long. ♦138 A.D.♦ Under Antoninus Pius most of Hadrian’s decrees
were revoked, and a new “red-letter day” was added to the Jewish
Calendar. Though still forbidden to enter Jerusalem, the Jews were
allowed to return to Palestine. Both in Italy and in the provinces of
the Empire they enjoyed all the privileges that had been conferred on
their fathers by the best of Antoninus’s predecessors. While admitted
to the dignities, and sometimes to the emoluments, of municipal life
on terms of equality with their fellow-subjects, they were suffered to
maintain their social and religious independence under the jurisdiction
of a patriarch whose seat was at Tiberias, and who exercised his
authority and collected an annual tribute through his representatives
in each colony.
♦218–222 A.D.♦
The follies of some Emperors proved as beneficial to the Jews as the
wisdom of others. Heliogabalus carried his superstitious veneration
for the Mosaic Law to the length of circumcision and abstinence from
pork. ♦222–235 A.D.♦ The Syrian Emperor Alexander Severus, nicknamed
by the Greeks Archisynagogos, or Head of the Synagogue, expressed his
eclectic friendliness to Judaism by placing in his private apartment a
picture of Abraham next to those of Orpheus and Christ, and by causing
the Jewish moral maxim, “Do not unto others what thou wouldst not that
others did unto you,” to be engraven on the Imperial palace and on the
public buildings. During this reign the Jewish Patriarch possessed
an almost royal authority, and Hadrian’s decrees, which forbade the
Jews to enter Jerusalem and to exercise the functions of judges, were
repealed.
Under the circumstances, Israel throve and multiplied apace. Synagogues
sprang up in every important city in the Empire, and the Jews fasted
and feasted without fear and often without moderation. Tolerance begot
tolerance. Religious zeal, unopposed, lost much of its bitterness,
and the Jews gradually reconciled themselves to their new position.
Their hatred of the Pagan was almost forgotten in their hatred of the
Christian; and, while they helped in the occasional persecution of the
latter, they aped the manners of the former. The ladies of the Jewish
Patriarch’s family esteemed it an honour to be allowed to dress their
hair according to the Roman fashion and to learn Greek. The Jewish
laws forbidding Hellenic art and restricting the intercourse with the
Gentiles ceased to be enforced. But nothing shows the extent and the
depth of the repugnance which the Gentile inspired in the Jew more
clearly than the fact that the abrogation of the law of the Synagogue,
which prohibited the use of the oil of the heathens, was regarded as
so daring an innovation that the Babylonian Jews at first refused to
believe the report. Bread made by the heathens continued to be tabooed.
The faith in the coming of the Messiah, indeed, was still as firmly
held as ever. But, in the absence of persecution, from a definite
expectation it faded into a pleasantly vague hope. While cherishing
their dream for the future, the Jews were sensible enough not to
neglect the realities of the present. The subjugation of the earth by
force of arms might come in God’s good time; meanwhile they resolved
to achieve its conquest by force of wit; and it was then that they
developed that commercial dexterity and laid the foundations of that
financial supremacy which have earned them the envy of the Gentiles,
and which, in after ages, were destined to cost them so much suffering.
Their skill and their knowledge, their industry and their frugality,
ensured to them a speedy success. By the end of the third century
their European colonies had spread from Illyria in the East to Spain
in the West, to Gaul and the provinces of the Rhine in the North; and
it appears that, though trade, including trade in slaves, was their
principal occupation, their prosperity in many of these settlements was
also derived to some small extent from agriculture and the handicrafts.
The civil and military services were also indebted to their talents,
and, in a word, these Semitic exiles, though their peculiar customs
were mercilessly ridiculed on the stage, could have none but a
sentimental regret for the loss of Palestine. Their position in the
Roman Empire at this period was a prototype of the position which they
have since held in the world at large: “Everywhere and nowhere at home,
and everywhere and nowhere powerful.”[32]
But the calm was not to last, and signs of the long terrible tempest,
which was to toss the ship of Israel in after years, were already
visible on the horizon.