Caligula’s successor Claudius favoured the Jews of Palestine for the sake of their King Agrippa, to whose diplomacy he owed in part his crown. But their brethren in Rome suffered another expulsion for “continually disturbing the peace under the instigation of Christ.”[14] The confusion of the Christians with the Jews by the Roman writer is neither uncommon nor unintelligible. But, if the Christians were persecuted as a Jewish sect—secret and, therefore, suspected—the persecution of the Jews themselves was frequently due to their peculiar “superstition.” That, in common with other products of the East, had found its way to Rome, where it acquired great vogue and exercised a strange fascination, especially among women and persons of the lower orders. Many Gentiles visited the synagogues, and some of those who went to scoff remained to worship. Horace, writing in the time of Augustus, makes frequent mention of Judaism,[15] implying that it was spreading and that it formed the topic of conversation in fashionable circles; Josephus mentions a case of the conversion of a noble Roman lady in the reign of Tiberius;[16] Persius, under Caligula and Claudius, sneers at the muttered prayers and gloomy Sabbaths of the Jews and of Roman proselytes to Judaism;[17] while Seneca, under Nero, declares that “to such an extent has the cult of that most accursed of races prevailed that it is already accepted all over the world: the vanquished have given laws to the victors.”[18] Juvenal, writing in the time of Titus and Domitian, bears similar testimony to the prevalence of Judaism among the Romans, many of whom, especially the poor, observed the Jewish Sabbath and dietary laws, practised circumcision, and indulged in Hebrew rites generally.[19] To the Roman satirists these aberrations from good sense and good taste were a rich fountain of ridicule; but serious patriots regarded them with misgiving, as detrimental to public morality. Hence we usually find the expulsions of the Jews and the suppression of their cult accompanied by similar steps taken against Chaldean soothsayers, Egyptian sorcerers, Syrian priests, and other purveyors of rites pernicious to the virtue of Roman men and women.
Under Nero the hostility towards the Jews was temporarily diverted against the Christians, and, while the latter were ruthlessly made to pay with their lives for the Emperor’s criminal aestheticism, the former enjoyed an immunity from persecution, partly secured by feminine influence at Court. But, while the Jews in the West were purchasing a precarious peace and a miserable triumph over the Christians, their brethren in the East were preparing for one of those periodical struggles for independence which move at once the horror and the admiration of the student of Jewish history. The Jews could not bear the sight of the foreign despot in their country. His presence in Jerusalem was a daily insult to Jehovah. The reverses which they had hitherto sustained in their single-combat with the masters of the world had not damped their desire for freedom. Disaster, far from crushing, seemed to invigorate their courage. And for the sake of the Idea they were ready to jeopardise the security and material comfort which they generally enjoyed under the equitable and tolerant rule of the Romans. In the eyes of the zealots the sensible attitude of the higher classes, which acquiesced in the existing state of affairs,—an attitude shared by famous Rabbis such as Jochanan son of Zakkai who re-founded Judaism when the Temple fell—was nothing less than treachery to the national cause. It was felt that, if no attempt were made to check the “seductive arts of Rome,” the whole race would gradually sink into spiritual apathy. Bands of irreconcilables were, as in the time of the Seleucids, scattered about the country and set the example of insubordination by frequent attacks on the Romans and their partisans. These patriots were bound by a vow to spare no one who bended the knee to the hated foreigner, and they fulfilled it with all the scrupulous cruelty which characterises the vows of enthusiasts. The pursuit of personal profit, as not unfrequently happens, was combined with the pursuit of patriotism, and there soon appeared a secret revolutionary association whose emissaries insinuated themselves into the very precincts of the Temple and there struck down those who had incurred their wrath. Sporadic assassination was gradually organised into a regular conspiracy, and the murderers of yesterday were now ennobled by the appellation of rebels. The voices of prudence and moderation were drowned in the clamour of patriotism; the peace party was terrorised into a zeal for liberty which it was far from feeling, and the standard of rebellion was unfurled.
♦66 A.D.♦
In the meantime Alexandria witnessed another explosion of the Graeco-Jewish feud. The Greeks determined to petition Nero for the withdrawal of the rights of citizenship restored to the Jews by Claudius. A public meeting was held in order to select the ambassadors who were to carry the petition to Rome. Some Jews were discovered in the amphitheatre where the meeting was held, and three of them were dragged by the mob through the streets. Their co-religionists, fired with indignation, rushed to the amphitheatre, threatening to commit it and the assembled Greeks to the flames. The Governor attempted to pacify the crowd; but, being himself a renegade Jew, he had little influence over his former brethren, who cast his apostasy in his teeth. Enraged thereat, he let his legions loose upon the Jewish quarter. This was soon converted into an inferno of multiform brutality, wherein fifty thousand Jews are said to have miserably perished.
To return to Palestine. The revolt against the Roman rule, begun in 66 A.D., ended in the famous fall of Jerusalem four years later. ♦70 A.D. Sept. 7.♦ The desperate obstinacy of the defence, and the terrible barbarity which had disgraced the rising, provoked the conquerors to pitiless retaliation. The holy city, which had once been “the joy of the whole earth” and God’s own habitation, was no more. Zion lay deserted. Her sons were slain, and her daughters sold into slavery and shame. And the Prophet’s words seemed to have come true: “Her gates shall lament and mourn; and she, being desolate, shall sit upon the ground.”[20] Those Jews who had not been put to death or driven forth to seek a refuge among their brethren, already scattered over the East and West, were preserved to accompany Titus to Rome as prisoners of war, to supply food for the wild beasts of the arena, victims for the gladiators’ sword in the amphitheatre, and amusement for the sporting public of the capital of the world. Most awful calamity of all, the Temple of Zion—the sanctuary in which the pride and the hope of the whole race centred—was doomed to the flames, and its contents were carried off to grace the pagan victor’s triumph. Among these treasures, hallowed by the veneration of fifteen centuries, were the shittim wood table and the seven-branched candlestick of pure gold, both wrought out of the liberal offerings which the children of Israel had brought to Moses for the service of the tabernacle, at the bidding of God in the desert. They were the works of wise-hearted men of old, selected for the task by the Lord Himself, and instructed thereto by His spirit. For nearly four centuries these spoils of Zion served to adorn the Roman Temple of Peace, until an avenger arose and, having dealt with Rome as Rome had dealt with Jerusalem, transferred them to Carthage.
This national catastrophe, commemorated as it was for all time on the imperishable marbles of the triumphal arch of Titus, left an indelible impression on the mind of Israel. It aroused the strongest feelings of the Hebrew nature, and fixed a chasm between Jew and Gentile which even the lapse of long centuries proved unable to bridge. The conqueror’s name was handed down the ages as a synonym for everything that is monstrous and horrible, and his language was tabooed even in epitaphs, the tombs in the Jewish catacombs at Rome bearing few Latin inscriptions, though Greek ones abound.
Here we may pause to enquire into the causes of this persistent warfare.
CHAPTER III
JUDAISM AND PAGANISM
Over and above the two great causes of the unpopularity of the Jew, already adduced, namely, man’s intolerance of dissent, and the antipathy between the European and the Asiatic, there was another and more obvious barrier to a good understanding between the two elements—one sin which the Gentile could not pardon in the Jew: the Jew’s infatuated arrogance—that contempt for all men born outside the pale of the Synagogue, which national humiliation, instead of effacing, had deepened and embittered. It was this provincial spirit that had prevented the message of Moses from spreading abroad, as the message of Jesus and the message of Mohammed spread in after times. It was the same spirit that now forbade the Jew to feel at home in the presence of the Gentile. Judaism has always lacked the magnetic attraction of Christianity and Islam, not because the rule of life which it prescribes is less pure, or the prospect of peace which it holds out less alluring to the heart that yearns for rest, but because, unlike Christianity and Islam, it deliberately repels instead of inviting outsiders. The doors of Moses’s heaven are jealously closed to the stranger; and those who have entered into it have at no time been more numerous than those who have come out of it. When Jehovah ceased to be the God of a clan, he became the God of a nation, but he could not, and would not, become the God of mankind. In spite of periodical attempts made by individual prophets and Rabbis to soar above the barriers of narrow nationalism, and to infuse their own noble spirit into the teaching of their predecessors and into the minds of their contemporaries, in spite, also, of the broadening of the conception of the divine, due to contact with the sublime religion of Babylon, Jehovah, to the ordinary Jew, remained an essentially tribal god. His interests continued to be bound up with the interests of the chosen people. An elaborate fence of ceremonial and custom separated this people from all other peoples. On leaving their native soil the Jews carried away with them all the spiritual pride and all the pious prejudices which distinguished their ancestors. A wider knowledge of the world and its inhabitants failed to broaden their sympathies. Intermarriage with the Gentiles was prohibited as strictly as ever, in obedience to the old commandment: “Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.”[21] And so it came to pass that, while they appeared to the Gentile a strange and unsocial species of men, to them the Gentile continued to be an unclean animal.
Had it not been for its stern and exclusive spirit, the Hebrew cult might have excited the derision or the scornful curiosity of the Pagans, but it would have hardly been made the object of systematic attack. The Jews would have continued their eccentric worship of “the sky and the clouds”[22] unmolested, though unrespected, and their Temple, with all its uncanny “emptiness,”[23] would have remained standing; for Paganism was nothing if not tolerant. The religion of classical antiquity was a matter of convention rather than of conviction. The earnest and the unhappy sought solace in philosophy; the masses in superstition. Philosophy did not degenerate into theology, but left theology to the poets who, unfettered by doctrine, created or transformed the popular deities and legends, purging or perverting them according to the promptings of their own imagination, or the requirements of their art. The priests in pagan society counted for less than the poets. The word “heresy” in pagan Greece meant simply “free choice,” and later “a philosophical school.” The terms “orthodox” and “heterodox” had hardly as yet acquired their invidious meaning. Religious rancour, that baneful mother of manifold misery to mankind, was not yet born. There is no parallel in antiquity to that unremitting and systematic war of creeds by which, in later ages, men tried to crush those who disagreed with them in matters of metaphysical conjecture. Tolerance and speculative freedom were never better understood than in pagan Greece and Rome. The Pagan was content to navigate his own ship by his own compass—whether of head or of heart—without insisting that every one else should adopt the same compass, or be drowned. The total absence of dogma, which forms at once the charm and the foible of polytheism, while precluding persecution, encouraged a free exchange of religious traditions, not only between sister nations, as the Greek and the Italian, but even between entirely foreign and even hostile races. Thus, while the Latin writers hastened, more or less successfully, to identify the deities of Italy with those of Hellas, Greek travellers in the East, from Herodotus onwards, habitually sought and found, or imagined that they found, common attributes between the divinities of Olympus and those of Memphis and Sidon. Frequent intercourse facilitated the work of assimilation, and not only specific attributes but whole gods and goddesses found their way from one pagan country to another, where they were welcomed. The doors of the Pantheon stood hospitably open to all comers.