The Provinces of the Roman Empire 32

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 32

Nor did the destruction of the temple wholly fail in this its aim.

There were not a few Jews and still more proselytes, particularly in

the Diaspora, who adhered more to the Jewish moral law and to Jewish

Monotheism than to the strictly national form of faith; the whole

important sect of the Christians had inwardly broken off from Judaism

and stood partly in open opposition to the Jewish ritual. For these

the fall of Jerusalem was by no means the end of things, and within

these extensive and influential circles the government obtained in some

measure what it aimed at by breaking up the central seat of the Jewish

worship. The separation of the Christian faith common to the Gentiles

from the national Jewish, the victory of the adherents of Paul over

those of Peter, was essentially promoted by the abolition of the Jewish

central cultus.

 

[Sidenote: Palestinian Jews.]

 

But among the Jews of Palestine, where the language spoken was not

Hebrew indeed, but Aramaic, and among the portion of the Diaspora

which clung firmly to Jerusalem, the breach between Judaism and the

rest of the world was deepened by the destruction of the temple. The

national-religious exclusiveness, which the government wished to

obviate, was in this narrow circle rather strengthened by the violent

attempt to break it down, and driven, in the first instance, to further

desperate struggles.

 

[Sidenote: The Jewish rising under Trajan.]

 

Not quite fifty years after the destruction of Jerusalem, in the

year 116,[187] the Jews of the eastern Mediterranean rose against

the imperial government. The rising, although undertaken by the

Diaspora, was of a purely national character in its chief seats,

Cyrene, Cyprus, Egypt, directed to the expulsion of the Romans as of

the Hellenes, and, apparently, to the establishment of a separate

Jewish state. It ramified even into Asiatic territory, and seized

Mesopotamia and Palestine itself. When the insurgents were victorious

they conducted the war with the same exasperation as the Sicarii in

Jerusalem; they killed those whom they seized--the historian Appian,

a native of Alexandria, narrates how he, running from them for

his life, with great difficulty made his escape to Pelusium--and

often they put the captives to death under excruciating torture, or

compelled them--just as Titus formerly compelled the Jews captured

in Jerusalem--to fall as gladiators in the arena in order to delight

the eyes of the victors. In Cyrene 220,000, in Cyprus even 240,000

men are said to have been thus put to death by them. On the other

hand, in Alexandria, which does not appear itself to have fallen

into the hands of the Jews,[188] the besieged Hellenes slew whatever

Jews were then in the city. The immediate cause of the rising is not

clear. The blood of the zealots, who had taken refuge at Alexandria

and Cyrene, and had there sealed their loyalty to the faith by dying

under the axe of the Roman executioner, may not have flowed in vain;

the Parthian war, during which the insurrection began, so far promoted

it, as the troops stationed in Egypt had probably been called to the

theatre of war. To all appearance it was an outbreak of the religious

exasperation of the Jews, which had been glowing in secret like a

volcano since the destruction of the temple and broke out after an

incalculable manner into flames, of such a kind as the East has at

all times produced and produces; if the insurgents really proclaimed

a Jew as king, this rising certainly had, like that in their native

country, its central seat in the great mass of the common people.

That this Jewish rising partly coincided with the formerly-mentioned

(p. 68) attempt at liberation of the peoples shortly before subdued

by the emperor Trajan, while the latter was in the far East at the

mouth of the Euphrates, gave to it even a political significance; if

the successes of this ruler melted away under his hands at the close

of his career, the Jewish insurrection, particularly in Palestine and

Mesopotamia, contributed its part to that result. In order to put down

the insurrection the troops had everywhere to take the field; against

the “king” of the Cyrenaean Jews, Andreas or Lukuas, and the insurgents

in Egypt, Trajan sent Quintus Marcius Turbo with an army and fleet;

against the insurgents in Mesopotamia, as was already stated, Lusius

Quietus--two of his most experienced generals. The insurgents were

nowhere able to offer resistance to the regular troops, although the

struggle was prolonged in Africa as in Palestine to the first times of

Hadrian, and similar punishments were inflicted on this Diaspora as

previously on the Jews of Palestine. That Trajan annihilated the Jews

in Alexandria, as Appian says, is hardly an incorrect, although perhaps

a too blunt __EXPRESSION__ for what took place; for Cyprus it is attested

that thenceforth no Jew might even set foot upon the island, and death

there awaited even the shipwrecked Israelites. If our traditional

information was as copious in regard to this catastrophe as in regard

to that of Jerusalem, it would probably appear as its continuation and

completion, and in some sense also as its explanation; this rising

shows the relation of the Diaspora to the home-country, and the state

within a state, into which Judaism had developed.

 

[Sidenote: The Jewish rising under Hadrian.]

 

[Sidenote: Aelia Capitolina.]

 

Even with this second overthrow the revolt of Judaism against the

imperial power was not at an end. We cannot say that the latter gave

further provocation to it; ordinary acts of administration, which were

accepted without opposition throughout the empire, affected the Hebrews

just where the full resisting power of the national faith had its seat,

and thereby called forth, probably to the surprise of the governors

themselves, an insurrection which was in fact a war. If the emperor

Hadrian, when his tour through the empire brought him to Palestine,

resolved in the year 130 to re-erect the destroyed holy city of the

Jews as a Roman colony, he certainly did not do them the honour of

fearing them, and had no thought of propagating religious-political

views; but he ordained that this legionary camp should--as shortly

before or soon afterwards was the case on the Rhine, on the Danube,

in Africa--be connected with an urban community recruiting itself

primarily from the veterans, which received its name partly from

its founder, partly from the god to whom at that time the Jews paid

tribute instead of Jehovah. Similar was the state of the case as to

the prohibition of circumcision; it was issued, as will be observed at

a later point, probably without any design of thereby making war on

Judaism as such. As may be conceived, the Jews did not inquire as to

the motives for that founding of the city and for this prohibition,

but felt both as an attack on their faith and their nationality, and

answered it by an insurrection which, neglected at first by the Romans,

thereupon had not its match for intensity and duration in the history

of the Roman imperial period. The whole body of the Jews at home and

abroad was agitated by the movement and supported more or less openly

the insurgents on the Jordan;[189] even Jerusalem fell into their

hands,[190] and the governor of Syria and indeed the emperor Hadrian

appeared on the scene of conflict. The war was led, significantly

enough, by the priest Eleazar[191] and the bandit-chief Simon, surnamed

Bar-Kokheba, _i.e._ son of the stars, as the bringer of heavenly help,

perhaps as Messiah. The financial power and the organisation of the

insurgents are testified by the silver and copper coins struck through

several years in the name of these two. After a sufficient number of

troops was brought together, the experienced general Sextus Julius

Severus gained the upper hand, but only by a gradual and slow advance;

quite as in the war under Vespasian no pitched battle took place, but

one place after another cost time and blood, till at length after a

three years’ warfare[192] the last castle of the insurgents, the strong

Bether, not far from Jerusalem, was stormed by the Romans. The numbers

handed down to us in good accounts of 50 fortresses taken, 985 villages

occupied, 580,000 that fell, are not incredible, since the war was

waged with inexorable cruelty, and the male population was probably

everywhere put to death.

 

[Sidenote: Judaea after Hadrian.]

 

In consequence of this rising the very name of the vanquished people

was set aside; the province was thenceforth termed, not as formerly

Judaea, but by the old name of Herodotus Syria of the Philistines, or

Syria Palaestina. The land remained desolate; the new city of Hadrian

continued to exist, but did not prosper. The Jews were prohibited under

penalty of death from even setting foot in Jerusalem; the garrison was

doubled; the limited territory between Egypt and Syria, to which only

a small strip of the Transjordanic domain on the Dead Sea belonged,

and which nowhere touched the frontier of the empire, was thenceforth

furnished with two legions. In spite of all these strong measures the

province remained disturbed, primarily doubtless in consequence of the

bandit-habits long interwoven with the national cause. Pius issued

orders to march against the Jews, and even under Severus there is

mention of a war against Jews and Samaritans. But no movements on a

great scale among the Jews recurred after the Hadrianic war.

 

[Sidenote: Position of the Jews in the second and third centuries.]

 

It must be acknowledged that these repeated outbreaks of the animosity

fermenting in the minds of the Jews against the whole of their

non-Jewish fellow-citizens did not change the general policy of the

government. Like Vespasian, the succeeding emperors maintained, as

respects the Jews in the main, the general standpoint of political and

religious toleration; and not only so, but the exceptional laws issued

for the Jews were, and continued to be, chiefly directed to release

them from such general civil duties as were not compatible with their

habits and their faith, and they are therefore designated directly as

privilegia.[193]

 

Since the time of Claudius, whose suppression of Jewish worship in

Italy (p. 199) is at least the last measure of the sort which we know

of, residence and the free exercise of religion in the whole empire

appear to have been in law conceded to the Jew. It would have been

no wonder if those insurrections in the African and Syrian provinces

had led to the expulsion generally of the Jews settled there; but

restrictions of this sort were enacted, as we saw, only locally, _e.g._

for Cyprus. The Greek provinces always remained the chief seat of the

Jews; even in the capital in some measure bilingual, whose numerous

body of Jews had a series of synagogues, these formed a portion of the

Greek population of Rome. Their epitaphs in Rome are exclusively Greek;

in the Christian church at Rome developed from this Jewish body the

baptismal confession was uttered in Greek down to a late period, and

throughout the first three centuries the literature was exclusively

Greek. But restrictive measures against the Jews appear not to have

been adopted even in the Latin provinces; through and with Hellenism

the Jewish system penetrated into the West, and there too communities

of Jews were found, although they were still in number and importance

even now, when the blows directed against the Diaspora had severely

injured the Jew-communities of the East, far inferior to the latter.

 

[Sidenote: Corporative unions.]

 

Political privileges did not follow of themselves from the toleration

of worship. The Jews were not hindered in the construction of

their synagogues and proseuchae any more than in the appointment

of a president for the same (ἀρχισυναγωγός), as well as of a

college of elders (ἄρχοντες), with a chief elder (γερουσιάρχης)

at its head. Magisterial functions were not meant to be connected

with these positions; but, considering the inseparableness of the

Jewish church-organisation and the Jewish administration of law,

the presidents probably everywhere exercised, like the bishops in

the Middle Ages, a jurisdiction, although merely _de facto_. The

bodies of Jews in the several towns were not recognised generally as

corporations, certainly not, for example, those of Rome; yet there

subsisted at many places on the ground of local privileges such

corporative unions with ethnarchs or, as they were now mostly called,

patriarchs at their head. Indeed, in Palestine we find at the beginning

of the third century once more a president of the whole Jewish body,

who, in virtue of hereditary sacerdotal right, bears sway over his fellow-believers almost like a ruler, and has power even over life and limb, and whom the government at least tolerates.