The Zealots who had perished in the struggle for independence or in the massacres that followed on their defeat, and the rabbis who laboured in obscurity and silence, constituted but a comparatively small part of the Jewish population, and we may well ask what became of the innumerable slaves who flooded the empire after the fall of Jerusalem. They did not all succumb to the arduous toils of the Coliseum. Under Hadrian there was a fresh influx of Jewish slaves; Dion Cassius, who speaks of five hundred and eighty thousand men killed in the course of the war, says nothing of women or children. We cannot doubt that they were sold, according to the common custom. Renan says that at the yearly fair of the Terebinth, near Hebron, Jews could be bought at the same price as horses. Once bought, they ran no further risk of death from hunger or destitution, for a slave, even if bought at the price of a horse, represented money’s worth, which it was not in his master’s interest to lose. Among their co-religionists, slaves like themselves, or freedmen, these unhappy beings found the pathetic brotherhood of the poor, ingenious in expedients. All the little nameless trades offered resources to this humiliated race, unscrupulous, skilful in exploiting the vices of the ruling classes, armed with good reasons for not loving the human race. Mingled with slaves of other races, they communicated to them the fanaticism of their wrath and their hopes of revenge. This revenge was afterwards relegated to a distant future; but at that time, smarting under the memory of recent disaster, they dreamt of it as complete and in the immediate future. Let the world come to an end, since nothing could reform it; let it go down to the bottomless pit, with all its defilements, and the agonies of the outcasts of life, and oppressions without number, and inexpiable ills! The hour of deliverance is near, and the accursed shall go to everlasting fire, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. The fall of the Jewish nation redounded to the advantage of Christian propaganda. From that time forward we hear less and less of the Jews and more and more of the Christians.
It is an inevitable consequence of military government that after every conquest the conquered impose their ideas on the conquerors. When Rome had subjugated Greece, she herself submitted to the dominion of the Hellenistic spirit, which imposed on the Romans its own forms of art, its literary culture, its mythology, and its philosophy. Rome, mistress of Asia, was invaded by Asiatic luxury, the East opened upon the West the floodgates of its superstitions, sensual, gloomy, frenzied, or ascetic; nothing was talked of save mysteries, funeral feasts, horoscopes, magic, purifications, Isis and Mithras, the passion of Attys, gods dead and risen again. Egypt had deified the Pharaohs, Rome deified the Cæsars. Finally, Judea, the last province conquered by the Romans, was the last to impose its religious thought upon the world. The obscure traditions of a despised people were destined to take the place of the glorious memories of Greece and Rome. A monarchy required a monarchial religion. The republic had vanished from the earth, it could not be left in the heavens. The images of the gods still stood in their temples, but since the time of Augustus the only god of the empire had been the emperor. Since the conscience of the conquerors of the world had not revolted from the apotheosis of tyrants, the conquered were fully entitled to seek among their own ranks for a worthier object. One nation alone had refused its incense to the emperors. That nation was destined to provide a God for the coming centuries. In the arrogant words of a Jew of our own times, this nation said to the world, “Till thou art able to understand me, behold a man of my race, make of him thy god.” Humanity had found its social ideal in servitude; it was just that the gibbet of slaves should become the symbol of the religion of the human race.
Thus in the great Christian synthesis, the worship of the God-man, which sums up the whole of Greek anthropomorphism, took its place by the side of Jewish monotheism. With the principle of universal order, the source and reason of things, was associated, in the unity of the Divine, the moral law in its loftiest form, the sacrifice of self and redemption through suffering. But while other religions, when introduced into the empire, had allowed the traditions and monuments of Græco-Roman civilisation to remain, the monistic religion of the Semitic race was destined to exclude all other religious forms and wipe out the traces of them. Like the wind of the desert that destroys everything in its path, the solitary God of Sinai was to sweep away all the works of the past. Hence, some centuries later, Rutilius Numatianus, the last of pagan poets, exclaimed, in the midst of the ruins of civilisation and the empire, “Would to the gods that Judea had never been conquered! The plague, extirpated there, hath spread abroad, and a vanquished nation oppresses its conquerors.” Had this poet had a little of the living faith of those he despised, had religion been anything to him beyond a literary form, he would have recognised that this conquest of the world by Jewish thought was but a just vengeance for the hideous wars of Titus and Hadrian, and a striking proof of the justice of the gods. The events of human history are neither effects of capricious chance nor phases of necessary evolution, but moral consequences of a great law of equilibrium and expiation which is the nemesis of history.[e]
The Tower of David, Jerusalem
CHAPTER XV. HEBREW CIVILISATION
If a nation can be in any sense summed up, the National Idea of the Hebrews as a unit has been stated by Hegel in contrast with the Idea of other peoples. He says: While among the Phœnician people the Spiritual was still limited by Nature, in the case of the Jews we find it entirely purified—the pure product of thought. Self-conception appears in the field of consciousness, and the Spiritual develops itself in sharp contrast to Nature and to union with it. It is true that we observed at an earlier stage the pure conception “Brahma,” but only as the universal being of Nature; and with this limitation, that Brahma is not himself an object of consciousness. Among the Persians we saw this abstract being become an object for consciousness, but it was that of sensuous intuition—as Light. But the idea of Light has at this stage advanced to that of “Jehovah,”—the purely One. This forms the point of separation between the East and the West; Spirit descends into the depths of its own being, and recognises the abstract fundamental principle as the Spiritual. Nature, which in the East is the primary and fundamental existence, is now depressed to the condition of a mere creature; and Spirit now occupies the first place. God is known as the creator of all men, as he is of all nature, and as absolute causality generally. But this great principle, as further conditioned, is exclusive Unity.