Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

In this religious brotherhood of nations there was one disturbing unit: one race alone stubbornly and offensively declined to join the concert. The Jews held that their own religion was wholly true; the religions of others were wholly false. They arrogantly boasted that they alone were God’s people. They believed themselves to be in league with the Creator of the Universe, sharing His secrets and monopolising His favours; for had not the Lord entered into a solemn and everlasting covenant with Abraham? It was they whom the Lord had selected to be a holy and special people unto Himself, above all peoples that are upon the face of the earth: “Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servants whom I have chosen.” It was for them that the laws of Nature had been suspended; that the sea was made dry land; that the heavens rained manna, and the rocks gave forth water; that mounts had quaked; that the sun and moon had stood still, and the walls of cities fallen down flat at the sound of the trumpet. It was for them that prophets and inspired men had revealed the oracles and the will of God.

If the Pagan was ready to forgive Jewish eccentricity, no man could tolerate Jewish intolerance; and the resentment which the Jew’s aloofness aroused in the breast even of the educated Gentile is palpable in the pages of many ancient authors. Only three Greek writers make a favourable mention of the Jews, the most eminent among them being Strabo the geographer. He, curiously enough, speaks with admiration of the spiritual worship of Jehovah as contrasted with the monstrous idolatry of Egypt and the anthropomorphic idolatry of Greece. Less curious, but no less rare, is the writer’s appreciation of the moral excellence of the Mosaic Law and his reverence for the Temple of Jerusalem. Strabo’s liberal attitude, however, was not shared by the Romans. They are emphatic and unanimous in their condemnation of Judaism—Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Pliny, and, above all, Tacitus. The great historian seems to give utterance to a common sentiment in denouncing the rites of the Jews as “novel and contrary to the ideas of other mortals.” He accuses the followers of Moses “of holding profane all things that to us are sacred; and, on the other hand, of indulging in things which to us are forbidden.”[24] The Hebrew horror of the worship of images and of the deification of ancestors and Emperors, as exemplified by the fierce storm which Caligula’s mad order to have his own statue set up in the Temple raised, gave great offence to the Romans; while the Jewish marriage laws, which permitted a brother to wed his deceased brother’s wife and an uncle his own niece, could not but be considered by the Romans as a sanction of incest. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that the severe moralist should brand Mosaic institutions as “evil and disgusting, owing their prevalence to their very depravity.” Likewise, the national movement which, as already mentioned, under the splendid leadership of the Maccabees resulted in the liberation of the Hebrew mind from the tyranny of Hellenism to Tacitus is nothing more than a wicked rebellion against the Macedonian Kings’ laudable efforts to improve the morals of their subjects by the introduction of Greek civilisation. It cannot be denied that the victory of the national party was brought about by “expulsions of citizens, destructions of cities, massacres of brothers, wives and parents,” and other atrocities in which the leaders freely indulged; but it certainly is less than the whole truth to assert that the movement had for its selfish object the restoration to authority of a royal family which, when restored, fomented superstition with a view to “using the influence of the priesthood as a prop of its own power.”[25] Even the good points in the character of the Jews, “their unswerving loyalty to their own kith and kin and their prompt benevolence,” which the truthful Tacitus acknowledges, are in his eyes vitiated by “their hostility and hatred towards all aliens,”[26] and to him, as to so many of his compatriots and contemporaries, the Jews are “a most vile race,” and the Christian sect of them, at all events, “the enemies of mankind.”[27]

This common estimate of the Jew was, of course, very largely based on an ignorance of Jewish life and religion that would be ridiculous but for its terrible consequences. As early as 169 B.C. we hear of the blood accusation which is still brought against the Jews by their enemies. When Antiochus Epiphanes desecrated the Temple of Jerusalem, among other fables that he and his partisans promulgated, it was rumoured that there was found in the sanctuary a Greek kept for a sacrificial purpose by the priests who were said to be in the habit of killing a Greek every year and of feeding on his intestines. On the other hand, the Jews never did anything to dispel the ignorance which rendered such grotesque myths credible. If the advocate of the Jew is inclined to charge the Gentile with intolerance, the advocate of the latter is amply justified in retorting the charge. A race which avoided the places of public amusement as scenes of immorality and idolatry could not but be considered morose and unsocial; a race which, especially after the destruction of the Temple, banished mirth and music even from its wedding feasts, would naturally be shunned as sullen and suspected as fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; a race which would “neither eat nor sleep nor intermarry with strangers” might expect to be represented as “most prone to lust” and as holding “nothing unlawful amongst themselves.” The outward signs of Jewish aloofness were evident to the most careless gaze; the inward, spiritual beauty, and the moral worth of Judaism were not so easily recognised. Thus, prejudiced views, born of Pagan ignorance and nourished by Hebrew intolerance, created a volume of animosity which, as has already been seen, cost its object many sorrows. But worse things were yet to come.

CHAPTER IV
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: