♦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and Hadrian’s decrees, which forbade the Jews to enter Jerusalem and to exercise the functions of judges, were repealed.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.
CHAPTER V
CHRISTIANITY AND THE JEWS
In dream I saw two Jews that met by chance,
One old, stern-eyed, deep-browed, yet garlanded
With living light of love around his head,
The other young, with sweet seraphic glance.