The Jews and Rome

 

The edict of Cyrus in 538 BC allowed the exiles to return to their homeland, to rebuild Jerusalem and the temple and live according to the statutes of Nehemiah and Ezra. This permission did not entail political independence, it did not even entail statehood and there were renewed deportations under Artaxerxes Ochus (359 – 338 BC). “The small community of exiles, driven out by foreign rule, and brought back again by a change in the hands wielding that rule, began their new establishment by abruptly repelling the remnants of their kinsmen left behind to work the land for the invaders, and so laid the foundation for the irreconcilable feud between Jews and Samaritans. The ideal of national exclusiveness and priestly control holding the mind in chains, the so called Mosaic theocracy, had developed long before the Roman period, under the government of the Seleucids, and took on the form of a clerical corporation with the high-priest at its head, which, acquiescing in foreign rule and renouncing the formation of a state, guarded the distinctiveness of its adherents, and dominated them under the aegis of the protective power. This retention of the national character in religious forms, while ignoring the state, was the distinctive mark of later Judaism” (Mommsen). In 142 BC the Hasmonean regime negotiated a permanent treaty with the Seleucids in Antioch and established the first autonomous Jewish state after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC. But the rationale of the Zionists under Nehemiah and Ezra had been that there should be no monarchy, not of the house of David nor by the Maccabees. This created a long festering rift between the factions. The Pharisees maintained that autonomous statehood is only desirable under a theocratic rule. Naturally the man on the throne, as long as there was a throne to sit on, would beg to differ.

The Pharisees of the period can be best described as a fundamentalist movement with strong support in the peasantry. Their opponents in the establishment, the Sadducees, represented a more urban, even cosmopolitan class of Hellenized merchants and aristocrats. The conflict came to a head when Jannaeus Alexander (103 – 76 BC) became King of Judea. In 93 BC, at the feast of Tabernacles, King Jannaeus officiated as his own high priest and publicly made a mockery of the ceremony.

This was very much in the spirit of the age. In Rome, two augurs inspecting entrails suddenly doubled with laughter before the entire assembly when one asked the other how he could keep a straight face. In Jerusalem, however, the Pharisees failed to see the humor and started a riot on the temple precinct. The king called in his guards and in the ensuing massacre, it is alleged, some 6,000 people were killed. The Pharisees appealed to a foreign power, to Syria, for aid, and the Syrians seemed only too glad to oblige, but King Jannaeus repelled the Syrian army and nailed 800 Pharisees to the cross (Josephus, Antiquities XIII, 5: 9, 13: 5). Yet in 75 BC the pendulum swung the other way. After King Alexander’s death, his wife, Salome, acceded to the throne, drawing on support from the Pharisees. The new Queen recalled the exiles and for the first time the legend on the coinage used the term “Sanhedrin” for the council of Jerusalem, elevating its status to a national institution and a Supreme Court of appeal for the previously autonomous jurisdictions in the Jewish Diaspora. “Although Salome held the title, the Pharisees wielded the real power in the country, and they administered it with the harshness, insolence, and recklessness of a fanatical religious party which suddenly obtains unlimited power. All who were suspected of leanings towards the Sadducees were removed by intrigue or violence from the Sanhedrin. Previous ordinances differing from Pharisaical views were abrogated, and others breathing the new spirit substituted. So sweeping and thorough was the change, that the Sadducees never recovered their former status, and those in office were obligated to conform to Pharisaic practice at any time.” (Josephus, Antiquities XIII, 1: 4; 16: 2). After the queen’s death this did lead to open civil war, and in 63 BC, a delegation of 200 Pharisees again appealed to a foreign power, the Senate in Rome, to intervene and reinstate their expelled candidate as the high priest.

In Rome the Senate had just commissioned Pompeius Magnus (106 – 48 BC) to resolve security issues for the arteries of trade on the Mediterranean Sea and to reorganize the territories and zones of influence in the East, in Greece, Anatolia and Syria. The Pharisees’ appeal couldn’t have come at a better time and opened diplomatic access to Palestine. Pompeius sent ambassadors, Gabienus and Scaurus, to arbitrate between the Jewish factions. Their high-handed approach failed and Pompeius saw no other option but to lay siege to Jerusalem. After finally brokering a deal between the parties, he departed without touching the treasure in the temple, yet took a guided tour into the holiest of holiest, to see for himself what all the fuss was about. (Orosius 6: 6; Dio 37: 15; Plutarch Pompeius 41: 42; Florus 1: 39; Josephus, Antiquities XIV, 3: 3,4). He left with a shrug.

This was the first of a succession of Roman interventions. So when In 29 BC Herod the Great executed the last surviving Hasmonean, his own wife (Josephus, Antiquities XV, 7; Wars I, 22), Judea was already a Roman clientele state. Herod started an extensive building program and constructed the new harbor and city of Caesarea as a birthday present to Emperor Augustus. A new Samaria rose from the ruins and was called “Sebaste,” the Greek name for Augustus. Herod erected theatres and hippodromes, even in Jerusalem (Josephus, Antiquities XV, 8: 1, XVI, 5: 1; Wars I, 21: 1, 5), which did not exactly endear him to the religious establishment. To pacify the grumbling, he began in 22 BC the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (Josephus, Antiquities XV, 11: 1). In Rome, the emperor repaid his client’s generosity by granting the spiritual chiefs of the Jews sufficient autonomy to raise taxes beyond the borders of Palestine and even beyond the borders of the Empire. Every Jew in the Diaspora was obliged to pay annually a “didrachmon” as tribute to the temple in Judea, which came in more regularly than the taxes to the Roman state. A unique and ill-advised privilege! It caused an outcry in Greece and the citizenry of the Greek townships in Anatolia and North Africa.

The surviving sources and the Gospels concentrate on the Jewish territories in Palestine as the main theatre of events, yet this is would be misleading. The Jews in Palestine amounted only to a fraction of the Jewish communities in Babylonia, Syria, Anatolia, Egypt, and Libya. (Cicero, Pro Flacco, 28: 68; Strabo, frag. 6, Josephus, Antiquities, XIV, 7: 2; Wars II, 16: 4, VII, 3: 3; Philo, In Flaccum, 7; Seneca, frag. 41-43; Augustine, City of God 6: 10; Acts 2: 9-11). To some extent these communities were creations of Alexander the Great and his successors. (Josephus Contra Apion, II: 4, Antiquities XII: 1; Appian Syr. 50). Everywhere in the East, the Jews held political charters on an equal footing with Greek communities, granting them their own courts and civil jurisdiction. All that was required from them was the use of the Greek language. This process of cultural assimilation had extended well into Palestine and was already well under way when Judas Maccabeus had risen against the regime in Syria. If for nothing else, this is born out by the Greek names of the high priests before the Maccabees, and by most of the names in the Hasmonean dynasty, such as “Onias,” “Jason,” “Menelaus,” and “Alcimus” (Josephus Antiquities XII, 5: 1, 9: 7). Jerusalem was already a Hellenistic city, complete with arena and playhouse, even before the intervention of Syria in 168 BC. Alexandria, too, was as much a city of the Jews, as of the Greeks; in fact it was the city with the largest Jewish population in the empire.

The census figure for the number of Jews living in Egypt under Emperor Augustus amounted to one million. The affluent Judaism of the Diaspora was anything but exclusive. The gospels speak of rabbis who traveled land and sea to make a proselyte. Ptolemy II, Philadelphus (309 – 246 BC) ordered the sacred scriptures of the Jews to be translated into Greek. It became the only version familiar to the gospels. The knowledge of Biblical Hebrew was just as uncommon in the Jewish communities, as is the knowledge of Biblical Greek among Christians today. Gentile “friends of the faith” could expect to be admitted to the synagogue without being circumcised. Yet “owing to the barrier which the religious observances formed around them, the Jews never became fully absorbed in the surrounding populations” (Richard Gottheil).

Only gradually it dawned on Emperor Augustus that the Sanhedrin’s privilege had created an internal dualism in the Roman administration, since it permitted the Sanhedrin to raise taxes and exercise civil jurisdiction over all the Jews everywhere in the Empire and beyond. When the Sanhedrin allegedly authorized Paul to arrest and prosecute Jewish offenders in Damascus, he would have acted within the Sanhedrin’s rights. Therefore the Roman regime was very careful not to allow the autonomous bodies of Jews in the East ever to become a model for similar developments in the Western part of the Empire. There was toleration for their faith and Emperor Augustus bestowed favors on a Jewish colony in the Roman suburbs. He even supplemented his largess for those who on account of the Sabbath had missed the payout (Philo, De Legatione). Personally, however, the emperor avoided all contact with Jewish worship and attempted to rewrite the charters of rights and privileges in the Ionian cities of Greece.

Confronted with the alternative, either to withdraw from their faith or to assume full responsibility as active participants in the municipal administration, the Jewish quarters (or ‘collegia’) in Ionia and Greece put up stiff resistance, causing unrest and riots. Augustus colleague in office, Agrippa, therefore confirmed the status quo. Any attempt to obstruct Jewish observances became a subject to fines (Josephus Antiquity XIV, 10: 23). What previously merely had been a concession by local authorities (Josephus, Antiquities XII, 3: 2; XVI, 2: 3-5) – the exemption from military service and observing the Sabbath – was now written into imperial law (Josephus, Antiquities XIV: 6:2-7; Philo, De Legatione 40). The Romans went even one step further. “Augustus directed the governors of Asia not to apply against the Jews the rigorous imperial laws against unions and assemblies” (Mommsen). This was a sensitive issue, considering that a confident emperor, such as Trajan (98 – 117 AD), expressed concerns over inner security, when a provincial governor asked for permission to set up a much needed professional fire brigade in Nicomedia, a quiet town, not exactly known for political upheavals (Pliny the Younger, Letters X: 24). The Roman government was acutely aware that the legislative concessions and especially the tax privileges for Jews carried the seed of race hate and civil war into the local townships, even encouraged foreign powers from abroad to stir up trouble and lend support to rebellious factions.

On the other hand, although Jews may have been privileged "peregrini," legally they remained foreigners and were deprived of all the rights and honors to which a citizen in the cities of Greece and in the Roman state was entitled.

The geographer Strabo (63 – 3 BC), in his census of the four classes of inhabitants in Libya, reflected this in a distinction between Jews and citizens (Josephus, Antiquities XIV, 7: 2). Which meant that in the Greek townships the Jews were required to pay a municipal poll tax imposed upon foreign residents. Only the privilege of full citizenship could assure full equality. For a Jew loyal to his faith, this made it difficult if not impossible to maintain the privilege of fiscal and judicial autonomy and of exemption from military service. Besides, the corporate charter of a city in those days required observance of the local cult, effectively excluding the Jews.

The Jewish philosopher and apologist Philo of Alexandria (BC 20 – 50 AD) explained that the Jews consider as their "real homeland" the country they inhabit (Philo, In Flaccum, 7), and we hear that in exceptional cases the rights of citizenship were indeed accorded to individual Jews, but the only way to avoid all chicaneries with the local authorities was to acquire Roman citizenship. It carried advantages even in a Greek township. In Ephesus, Sardis and Anatolia, a considerable number of Jews possessed Roman citizenship (Josephus Antiquity, XIV, 10: 13, 14, 16-19). In Jerusalem, in 66 AD, we hear of Jews who were Roman knights (Josephus, Wars II, 14: 9). Even in the capital, since the time of Cicero, there was an electorate of Jewish citizens (Philo, De Legatione 23; Cicero, Pro Flacco, 28; Acts 6: 9). Acts is depicting Paul as a citizen of Tarsus (Acts 21: 39) with a claim to the privilege of Roman citizenship (Acts 16: 37-39). Somebody here was desperate to provide his protagonist with the right credentials – rabbinic education and Gentile legal status. Yet Paul could have had only one of the two, especially since according to his own testimony he was “born a Roman citizen” (Acts 22: 28): a Jew who had Roman citizenship did not possess the "jus honorum," unless he abjured his national customs. The same thing was true of every Gentile who embraced the Jewish faith. All the same, for the Gentile taxpayer Judaism was an attractive proposition and induced a great number of non-Jewish Orientals to attach themselves to this privileged category of denizens in the eastern townships.

Women in particular felt drawn to the Jewish religion. Emperor Nero’s wife, Poppaea Sabina (30 – 65 AD), a woman with an impeccable Roman pedigree, was known for her zealous patronage of Jews. Even royal houses, such as King Izates from Adiabene and his entire family, converted to Judaism (Josephus Antiquities XX, 7: 1,3). However, the Jews’ undisguised contempt for the Hellenic cults, pageants, and gymnastic displays, and their uncompromising religious propaganda, didn’t make them the most popular people on Earth, especially not with the Greek population. The pious Jew would neither dine at the table of a Gentile nor receive him at his own table. He would not go to the theater, the arena or the gymnasium, nor even read a secular book, "unless it be at twilight." Mixed marriages remained something unheard of. In Parium and Tralles therefore, the law prohibited the exercise of Jewish religion (Josephus Antiquities XIV, 10: 8).

During the Jewish War, Jews in Syria suffered from daily assaults and the city council of Antioch demanded their deportation. In Rome the future pope Calixtus did time in the Sardinian mines for embezzlement and stirring up an anti-Semitic riot (Hippolytus, Philosophumena, 9: 12). Even in this early period, the Christian clergy was generally hostile to the Jews, but in the intellectual elite of the first and second century, Gentiles and Jews used to treat each other with respect.

Nicolaus of Damascus, himself a Gentile and noted peripatetic philosopher, carried diplomatic missions to Augustus and Agrippa on behalf of his Jewish client, Herod the Great. Philo of Alexandria attempted to be the intermediary between Judaism and Platonism. Pseudo Longinus’ brilliant essay On the Sublime might be the work by a Jew. Jews held senior positions in the Empire’s administration. From 46 to 48 AD, Tiberius Alexander was the procurator or prefect of Judea, before he became General Vespasian’s chief of staff in Syria. He was responsible for preparing the campaign against Judea that eventually would lead to the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. Until then the temple in Jerusalem had functioned as the spiritual center of Judaism everywhere in the world, similar to the Vatican or Mecca. Every Jew was expected, at least once in his life, to visit Jehovah on his own real estate in Jerusalem and pay his respects. Josephus, Philo, and even Seneca, presented the entire world as rushing toward Jewish observances (Josephus, Contra Apion II, 39; Seneca, Epistulae Morales; Philo, De Vita Moysis, 2), while distinguishing the Jews by race from the Jews by adoption "gentis eiusdem vel simila sectantes" (Suetonius, Tiberius 36; Dio Cassius, XXXVII, 17). Yet before it could come to this, the events in the East were bringing the trend to a halt.

After 34 years of rule and after ten marriages, Herod the Great finally breathed his last. “The Jews, being delivered from Herod’s tyrannical rule, petitioned Augustus to put them under the jurisdiction of the legate of Syria. He, however, not willing to set aside Herod's will, gave to Archelaus the half of his father's kingdom, with the title of ethnarch, the royal title” (Josephus, Antiquities XVII, 8: 2, 9: 2). Archelaus’ territory included Judea, Samaria, and Idumaea with the cities of Jerusalem, Caesarea, Sebaste, and Joppa (Josephus, Antiquities XVII, 11: 2, 4-5). As it turned out, the son was a chip from the old block and in 6 AD Archelaus’ subjects, "not being able to bear his barbarous and tyrannical regime," turned to Rome and sued for redress. Augustus banished the prince to Vienne, in France (Josephus, Antiquities XVII, 9, 13: 1-2). Without a suitable replacement, the emperor was left with no choice. He placed the Jewish territories under the jurisdiction of the legate of Syria (Josephus, Antiquities XVII, XVIII, 1: 1).

The Temple now fell under the domain of the gentile pontifex maximus in Rome, an office overseeing all legally acknowledged cults in the empire. An imperial stipend provided funds for daily sacrifices on the emperor’s behalf. Jesus’ alleged standoff on the Temple’s precinct would have been an affront to Roman authority as well as it was supposed to challenge the Sanhedrin. Such incident would have given sufficient cause to warrant the death penalty. In 4 AD a certain Judah of Galilee (sic!) became the leader of a rebellion. Josephus describes him as a scholar and assassin. Judah declared that paying taxes to Rome was in violation of Jewish religious law. Israel, he said, should have no king but God. After Judah was apprehended and executed, his followers formed a new terrorist organization, the Sicarii, forerunners of the modern suicide bombers (Acts 5: 37; Josephus, Wars 2: 117-8, Antiquities 18: 1-8). This did nothing to improve relations with the Romans, and the fall of the temple in 71 AD had serious repercussions for the Jewry in the Diaspora. In 83 AD, Emperor Domitian (81 – 96 AD) ruled against the circumcision of everyone, who was not born Jewish. Proselytizing, from one day to the next, became illegal (Dio, Epitome LXVIII p.361). Domitian’s successor, Emperor Nerva (96 – 98 AD), upheld the ruling (Dio, Epitome IXVIII, 1). Although the partial adoption of Jewish customs continued to be tolerated, a complete conversion was now out of the question.

In 110 AD, the regime in Parthia forced the prince of Armenia, into exile. According to the treaty with Rome, Armenia was a Roman clientele state, and although Parthia’s government was entitled to bring forward its own candidate, it needed formal approval from Rome. In 114 AD, after careful preparation, Emperor Trajan invaded Armenia, fully annexing it to the Empire, and then moved in on Parthia proper. In a sweeping campaign the Parthian state completely disintegrated and in Feb. 20, 116 AD, the Emperor informed the Senate in Rome of the fall of the Parthian capital. Trajan was still residing in Babylon, when news spread of a general uprising of all the Jews in Libya, Cyprus, Egypt and Iraq. The rebellion apparently was orchestrated from inside of Iraq. It was the largest of all Jewish rebellions ever, but for some reason Judea in Palestine didn’t take part in it. The Libyan ringleaders seem to have envisioned a Jewish empire; “a certain Andreas or Luke” was crowned as king, the Sicarii and the Zealots made a last showing. It became a war of mutual genocide.

In Libya, the Jews were accused of “cannibalism” (sic!) and of murdering 220,000 people. In Cyprus, the Jews from Salamis massacred the entire population of the city and many people in the country, 240,000 altogether (Dio Cassius, Epitome IXVIII, 32). The Greek quarters in Alexandria managed to put up resistance, yet further up the Nile, things didn’t look good. The historian Appian (95 – 165 AD) gives a vivid description of how he escaped, hiding over night in the reeds on the Nile’s riverbank. Emperor Trajan acted with his accustomed energy. He placed his reserves and the navy under the command of his best general, Quintus Marcius Turbo. In retribution, a holocaust eradicated the Jewish population of Cyprus, and the island by pain of death became off limits for every Jew, even for the unfortunate traveler washed ashore from shipwreck. In Egypt it came to two pitched battles with the rebel forces, and for the time being the Jewry in Alexandria was practically annihilated (Appian, Histories XXIV: 7). The events were still unfolding, when Emperor Hadrian (117 – 138 AD) succeeded to the purple in 117 AD. Hadrian decided to pull out of Iraq in exchange for guarantees about Armenia. In 131 AD, after an inspection tour to Syria, the emperor commissioned construction work in Jerusalem, intending to raise the city and the temple from the ashes, although under a different name – Aelia Capitolina. The idea was to consecrate the new shrine to Jupiter Optimus. Although exiled to Pella since 71 AD, the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem still existed and embarked on a fatal course of action. Rabbi Akiva ben Yossef (50 – 135 AD) forged an alliance with a notorious highwayman, known to us as Simon Bar Kokhba. Jewish blacksmiths began holding back weaponry from their orders by the Roman armory. The insurrection came as a complete surprise. A sovereign Jewish state was declared and Bar Kokhba minted coins with the legend “Prince of Israel” on the obverse.

Hadrian sent in his generals. The Jews avoided major engagements and resorted to protracted guerilla warfare. After a slow campaign of torched earth in which some fifty fortresses and 985 villages were destroyed, Bar Kokhba’s headquarters at Bethar fell to the Romans. This ended the war. For a brief period, until Emperor Hadrian’s death, Jewish religion lost its status as “religio licta,” a legal cult (Dio, Epitome IXIX, 10-14). A Roman citizen submitting himself or his slave to circumcision, even the surgeon performing the procedure, was prosecuted, facing confiscation of property and either death or deportation (Paulus, V, 3, 22: 4). The crime of Judaizing was held to be identical with that of impiety or atheism (Dio Cassius, Epitome lXVII, 14). To this day the synagogues have laid a curse on Hadrian’s name. It took fifteen years before Emperor Antony Pius (138  – 161 AD) would again authorize the Jews to circumcise and exercise their religion (Dio, Epitome LXVII p.319), but the circumcision of a non-Jew, even of a slave continued to be punished with the same penalty as castration (Modestin; Digesta, XlVIII: 8).

For the Christian of the period this could mean only one thing. It was time to sever whatever connection there was between him and Judaism. In fact this may actually mark the real birth date of Christianity as an independent religion. Bishop Marcion of Sinope wrote: "Jesus has emancipated us from the legalistic requirements of Judaism." The emerging canon became an anti-Semitic manifesto cover to cover.

The New Testament is repeating in countless variations that the Jews (and not the Romans) had killed Jesus (Acts 4: 10; 1 Thess. 2: 14-16), that theirs is not salvation (Mk. 13: 9; 16: 16; Jn. 8: 43-47; Acts 13: 45-51 1 Jn. 2: 22-23), and strongly hinting: kill the Jews (Mt. 23: 37, 38; 27: 25; Titus 1: 10-14; Acts 18: 6): "Ye are of your father the devil. Stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? And they have slain them which showed before of the coming of the Just One; of whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers" (Acts 7: 51-53). The Apostle Paul rejected the law of the Jews as an obstacle to salvation altogether (Rom. 4: 15, 7: 5, 10: 9, 11: 6 and 1 Cor. 5: 7-8) and was the first to issue the infamous blood-libel (1 Thess. 2: 15-17). In the mouth of Jesus himself  – supposedly a Jew and a rabbi – words were put, which announced that "upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth. The children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Mt. 8: 12, 23: 35). Yet things seemed to take a turn for the better, when in 212 AD Emperor Caracalla's Constitutio Antoniniana conferred Roman citizenship on every free man in the Empire.

Originally conceived as a measure to simplify taxation and cut down on the overheads of the imperial revenue, a new identity, somewhat corresponding to a citizenship of the empire (Ulpian, L, 3; Digesta, L, 2:3) began replacing the old system of regional charters. The empire was on the way to become a Roman nation state (Digesta, I. 5). By a stroke of his pen, Caracalla had removed the obstacles for Jews to become eligible for the "jus honorum," and the full exercise of civil rights, of "connubium, commercium, testamenti factio," even of holding guardianship over non-Jews (Modestin, L, 15:6, Digesta XXVII, 1). Jews could now exercise all the rights of a citizen, without being forced to observances contravening their religion.

The respite was brief. The Christians were coming.

Even a man as urban and humane as the theologian Origen (185 – 253/5 AD) was capable of accusing the Jews to "have committed a crime of the most heinous kind, in conspiring against the savior." This was the voice of a moderate. Pope Sylvester (314 – 335 AD) issued a decree that "every Sabbath on account of the burial of Jesus is to be regarded in execration of the Jews." Emperor Constantine, in Nicene, enunciated as "an unworthy thing that in the celebration of this most holy feast we should follow the practice of the Jews. Let us then have nothing in common with the detestable Jewish crowd" (Constantine's Nicene Letter, 325 AD). This removed all inhibitions. The Christian ayatollah St. Chrysostom (347 – 407 AD) went on bitching about the synagogues as "a den of thieves and a haunt of wild animals. This is why Christ said ask for my enemies, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them and slay them before me" (Orationes VIII, Adversus Judaeos). In Africa, St. Augustine, as usual, could not bear to stay behind when it came to endorsing an atrocity: "Judas is the image of the Jewish people. They bear the guilt for the death of the savior, for through their fathers they have killed the Christ." 

In 395 AD, the local bishop of Callinicum (modern Raqqa) in Syria was seen to take the lead in an act of vandalism against the local synagogue. Emperor Theodosius, despite his flaws a good-natured person, was outraged and demanded an inquest. Yet the prelate of Milan, the Saint and anti-Semite Bishop Ambrose of Milan sent him a memo worthy of a Nazi ideologue. Ambrose, the jurist, the prelate and chief administrator knew exactly what he was doing, that he was setting a legal precedent for canonical law and the relations of the Catholic Church and the Christian State with the Jews. He set the tone for millennia to come:

"Jews reject that they themselves are bound by Roman law and yet seek redress by invoking this law? Since the Church shut out the Synagogue, why is it that again the Synagogue should exclude the servant of Christ from the bosom of faith? Who is to avenge the Synagogue? Christ, whom they slew, whom they denied? Will God the Father avenge those who do not receive Him since they do not receive the Son?” (Ambrose of Milan, Letters XL).

This was only the beginning. In Alexandria Bishop St. Cyril in 415 AD – another "doctor of the church" and in his spare time accessory to murder – felt himself fully justified, legally and morally, when he ordered the Jews to be expelled from Alexandria; still some 40,000 people. The army was called in to raid the Jewish quarters. The soldiers raped the women and looted homes and synagogues. The survivors went into permanent exile. Those who sought refuge in Constantinople were ordered to convert in 617 AD. Many preferred exile and went to Spain, which seemed a safe haven. Little did they know!

© – 3/25/2009 – by michael sympson, 4,850 words, all rights reserved