The Provinces of the Roman Empire 33

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 33

Beyond question

this patriarch was for the Jews the old high priest, and thus, under

the eyes and under the oppression of the foreign rule, the obstinate

people of God had once more reconstituted themselves, and in so far

overthrown Vespasian’s work.

 

[Sidenote: Public services.]

 

As respects the bringing of the Jews under obligations of public

service, their exemption from serving in war as incompatible with

their religious principles had long since been and continued to be

recognised. The special poll-tax to which they were subject, the old

temple-payment, might be regarded as a compensation for this exemption,

though it had not been imposed in this sense. For other services,

as _e.g._ for the undertaking of wardships and municipal offices,

they were at least from the time of Severus regarded in general as

capable and under obligation, but those which ran counter to their

“superstition” were remitted to them;[195] in connection with which we

have to take into account that exclusion from municipal offices became

more and more converted from a slight into a privilege. Even in the

case of state offices in later times a similar course was probably

pursued.

 

[Sidenote: Forbidding of circumcision.]

 

The only serious interference of the state-power with Jewish customs

concerned the ceremony of circumcision; the measures directed against

this, however, were probably not taken from a religious-political

standpoint, but were connected with the forbidding of castration, and

arose doubtless in part from misunderstanding of the Jewish custom.

The evil habit of mutilation, becoming more and more prevalent, was

first brought by Domitian within the sphere of penal offences; when

Hadrian, making the precept more stringent, placed castration under the

law of murder, circumcision appears also to have been apprehended as

castration,[196] which certainly could not but be felt and was felt (p.

224) by the Jews as an attack upon their existence, although this was

perhaps not its intention. Soon afterwards, probably in consequence of

the insurrection thereby occasioned, Pius allowed the circumcision of

children of Jewish descent, while otherwise even that of the non-free

Jew and of the proselyte was to involve, afterwards as before, the

penalty of castration for all participating in it. This was also of

political importance, in so far as thereby the formal passing over

to Judaism became a penal offence; and probably the prohibition was,

not indeed issued but, retained with this in view.[197] It must have

contributed its part to the abrupt demarcation of the Jews from the

non-Jews.

 

[Sidenote: Altered position of the Jews in the imperial period.]

 

If we look back on the fortunes of Judaism in the epoch from Augustus

to Diocletian, we recognise a thorough transformation of its character

and of its position. It enters upon this epoch as a national and

religious power firmly concentrated round its narrow native land--a

power which even confronts the imperial government in and beyond

Judaea with arms in hand, and in the field of faith evolves a mighty

propagandist energy. We can understand that the Roman government

would not tolerate the adoration of Jehovah and the faith of Moses on

another footing than that on which the cultus of Mithra and the faith

of Zoroaster were tolerated. The reaction against this exclusive and

self-centred Judaism came in the crushing blows directed by Vespasian

and Hadrian against the Jewish land, and by Trajan against the Jews

of the Diaspora, the effect of which reached far beyond the immediate

destruction of the existing society and the reduction of the repute

and power of the Jews as a body. In fact, the later Christianity and

the later Judaism were the consequences of this reaction of the West

against the East. The great propagandist movement, which carried the

deeper view of religion from the East into the West, was liberated

in this way, as was already said (p. 220 f.), from the narrow limits

of Jewish nationality; if it by no means gave up the attachment to

Moses and the prophets, it necessarily became released at any rate

from the government of the Pharisees, which had gone to pieces. The

Christian ideals of the future became universal, since there was no

longer a Jerusalem upon earth. But as the enlarged and deepened faith,

which with its nature changed also its name, arose out of these

disasters, so not less the narrowed and hardened orthodoxy, which

found a rallying point, if no longer in Jerusalem, at any rate in

hatred towards those who had destroyed it, and still more in hatred

towards the more free and higher intellectual movement which evolved

Christianity out of Judaism. The external power of the Jews was broken,

and risings, such as took place in the middle of the imperial period,

are not subsequently met with; the Roman emperors were done with the

state within the state, and, as the properly dangerous element--the

propagandist diffusion--passed over to Christianity, the confessors of

the old faith, who shut themselves off from the New Covenant, were set

aside, so far as the further general development was concerned.

 

[Sidenote: Altered character of Judaism.]

 

But if the legions could destroy Jerusalem, they could not raze Judaism

itself; and what on the one side was a remedy, exercised on the other

the effect of a poison. Judaism not only remained, but it became an

altered thing. There is a deep gulf between the Judaism of the older

time, which seeks to spread its faith, which has its temple-court

filled with the Gentiles, and which has its priests offering daily

sacrifices for the emperor Augustus, and the rigid Rabbinism, which

knew nothing and wished to know nothing of the world beyond Abraham’s

bosom and the Mosaic law. Strangers the Jews always were, and had

wished to be so; but the feeling of estrangement now culminated within

them as well as against them after a fearful fashion, and rudely were

its hateful and pernicious consequences drawn on both sides. From the

contemptuous sarcasm of Horace against the intruding Jew from the

Roman Ghetto there is a wide step to the solemn enmity which Tacitus

cherishes against this scum of the human race, to which everything

pure is impure and everything impure pure; in the interval lie those

insurrections of the despised people, and the necessity of conquering

it and of expending continuously money and men for its repression. The

prohibitions of maltreating the Jew, which are constantly recurring in

the imperial ordinances, show that those words of the cultured were

translated, as might be expected, by their inferiors into deeds. The

Jews, on their part, did not mend the matter. They turned away from

Hellenic literature, which was now regarded as polluting, and even

rebelled against the use of the Greek translation of the Bible; the

ever-increasing purification of faith turned not merely against the

Greeks and the Romans, but quite as much against the “half-Jews” of

Samaria and against the Christian heretics; the reverence toward the

letter of the Holy scriptures rose to a giddy height of absurdity, and

above all an--if possible--still holier tradition established itself,

in the fetters of which all life and thought were benumbed. The gulf

between that treatise on the Sublime which ventures to place Homer’s

Poseidon shaking land and sea and Jehovah, who creates the shining sun,

side by side, and the beginnings of the Talmud which belong to this

epoch, marks the contrast between the Judaism of the first and that

of the third century. The living together of Jews and non-Jews showed

itself more and more to be just as inevitable, as under the given

conditions it was intolerable; the contrast in faith, law, and manners

became sharpened, and mutual arrogance and mutual hatred operated on

both sides with morally disorganising effect. Not merely was their

conciliation not promoted in these centuries, but its realisation was

always thrown further into the distance, the more its necessity was

apparent. This exasperation, this arrogance, this contempt, as they

became established at that time, were indeed only the inevitable growth

of a perhaps not less inevitable sowing; but the heritage of these

times is still at the present day a burden on mankind.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER XII.

 

EGYPT.

 

 

[Sidenote: The annexation of Egypt.]

 

The two kingdoms of Egypt and Syria, which had so long striven and

vied with each other in every respect, fell nearly about the same time

without resistance into the power of the Romans. If these made no use

of the alleged or real testament of Alexander II. († 673) {81 B.C.}

and did not then annex the land, the last rulers of the Lagid house

were confessedly in the position of clients of Rome; the senate decided

in disputes as to the throne, and after the Roman governor of Syria,

Aulus Gabinius, had with his troops brought back the king Ptolemaeus

Auletes to Egypt (699; comp. iv. 160) {55. iv. 153.}, the Roman legions

did not again leave the land. Like the other client-kings, the rulers

of Egypt took part in the civil wars on the summons of the government

recognised by them or rather imposing itself on them; and, if it must

remain undecided what part Antonius in the fanciful eastern empire of

his dreams had destined for the native land of the wife whom he loved

too well (p. 25), at any rate the government of Antonius in Alexandria,

as well as the last struggle in the last civil war before the gates of

that city, belongs as little to the special history of Egypt as the

battle of Actium to that of Epirus. But doubtless this catastrophe, and

the death connected with it of the last prince of the Lagid house, gave

occasion for Augustus not to fill up again the vacant throne, but to

take the kingdom of Egypt under his own administration. This annexation

of the last portion of the coast of the Mediterranean to the sphere

of direct Roman administration, and the settlement, coincident with

it in point of time and of organic connection, of the new monarchy,

mark--as regards the constitution and administration of the huge empire

respectively--the turning-point, the end of the old and the beginning

of a new epoch.

 

[Sidenote: Egypt exclusively an imperial possession.]

 

The incorporation of Egypt into the Roman empire was accomplished

after an abnormal fashion, in so far as the principle--elsewhere

dominating the state--of dyarchy, _i.e._ of the joint rule of the two

supreme imperial powers, the princeps and the senate, found--apart from

some subordinate districts--no application in Egypt alone;[198] but,

on the contrary, in this land the senate as such, as well as every

individual of its members, were cut off from all participation in the

government, and indeed senators and persons of senatorial rank were

even prohibited from setting foot in this province.[199] We must not

conceive of this position as if Egypt were connected with the rest of

the empire only by a personal union; the princeps is, according to

the meaning and spirit of the Augustan organisation, an integral and

permanently acting element of the Roman polity just like the senate,

and his rule over Egypt is quite as much a part of the imperial rule as

is the rule of the proconsul of Africa.[200] We may rather illustrate

the exact constitutional position by saying that the British Empire

would find itself in the same plight if the ministry and Parliament

should be taken into account only for the motherland, whereas the

colonies should have to obey the absolute government of the Empress of

India. What motives determined the new monarch at the very outset of

his sole rule to adopt this deeply influential and at no time assailed

arrangement, and how it affected the general political relations, are

matters belonging to the general history of the empire; here we have to

set forth how the internal relations of Egypt shaped themselves under the imperial rule.