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

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:

Thus sang an unknown Jewish poet of Alexandria, venting his spleen against the Greeks in Greek verse. But the dreamers were rudely awakened. The Emperor was not slow to perceive that the restoration of the Temple would mean a perpetuation of the Jewish problem. He, therefore, qualified his original concession by terms which were not acceptable to the Jews. Their bitter disenchantment and their hatred of Hadrian were concealed for a while. ♦130 A.D.♦ The Emperor visited Palestine and endeavoured to conciliate the Jews by bringing them into closer contact with the Pagans. But he unfortunately adopted towards that end the very means calculated to defeat it. He proposed to rebuild Jerusalem on a plan which the Jews regarded as a deliberate desecration. He did not understand that what the nation wanted was not fusion with the foreigners but rigid separation from them. Again the Jews concealed their feelings; and while the deluded Emperor wrote to the Senate at home praising the peaceful disposition and loyalty of this much-maligned people, they were preparing for a fresh revolt. Arms were manufactured and hidden in underground passages, secret means of communication were established, and Hadrian had scarcely turned his back on Jerusalem when the Jews once more “lifted themselves up to establish a vision.”

The rebellion was headed by Bar-Cochba, in whom the enthusiastic mob recognised the prophesied Messiah and round whose standard they rallied in force sufficient to defy the Imperial legions for two years. The Jewish Christians, who refused to recognise the new Messiah and to take part in the holy war, were remorselessly persecuted, and the rebellion blazed from one end of the country to the other. However, Hadrian’s army, under the able command of Julius Severus and of the Emperor himself, prevailed in the end. ♦135 A.D.♦ Bar-Cochba was defeated, and the last sparks of the insurrection were extinguished beneath mountains of corpses. It is reckoned (though these figures are scarcely trustworthy) that no fewer than five hundred and eighty thousand Jews succumbed to the sword during the war, in addition to an unknown multitude starved or burnt to death. Palestine was turned into a wilderness. All the fortresses were demolished, and nearly one thousand towns and villages lay in ashes. The destruction of the Jewish State, commenced by Titus, was accomplished by Hadrian. The spot upon which the proud Temple had once stood was now defiled by the plough, and all the holy sites were devoted to idols. The Samaritans shared the ruin of their secular enemies. Mount Gerizim also was polluted by a shrine to Jupiter, while on Mount Golgotha, where a century before the awful crime had been committed, a fane was dedicated to the Goddess of Lust. A pagan colony of Phoenician and Syrian soldiers, who had served their time, occupied part of Jerusalem, the very name of which was soon forgotten in that of Aelia Capitolina. Judaism was interdicted under heavy penalties, and the Jews were forbidden to enter the city of their fathers. The Babylonian captivity had been to the children of Israel only a fatherly rod; but this last calamity proved their utter ruin. Henceforth they are doomed to wander among the sons of men, a sign and a scorn to the nations of the earth.

The slaughter ceased as soon as there ceased to be any rebels to slay. A period of compulsion and persecution, as the Jewish writers term it, ensued; but the fear of further trouble having disappeared once and for ever, the Romans forgot their anger. Though Israel had been extinguished as a state it was suffered to live as a sect. The throne had perished; but the altar remained. At first danger induced the Jews to compromise and to dissemble. A council of Rabbis, secretly held at Lydda, decided that death by torture might be avoided by the breach of all the commandments, except the three vital prohibitions of idolatry, adultery, and murder. But the reign of terror and hypocrisy did not last long. ♦138 A.D.♦ Under Antoninus Pius most of Hadrian’s decrees were revoked, and a new “red-letter day” was added to the Jewish Calendar. Though still forbidden to enter Jerusalem, the Jews were allowed to return to Palestine. Both in Italy and in the provinces of the Empire they enjoyed all the privileges that had been conferred on their fathers by the best of Antoninus’s predecessors. While admitted to the dignities, and sometimes to the emoluments, of municipal life on terms of equality with their fellow-subjects, they were suffered to maintain their social and religious independence under the jurisdiction of a patriarch whose seat was at Tiberias, and who exercised his authority and collected an annual tribute through his representatives in each colony.

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.