The Historians' History of the World 02 [Israel, India, Persia, Phoenicia, Minor Nations of Western Asia]

When it might have been imagined that severe repressive measures had delivered Judea from this pest, it reappeared in a yet more formidable shape. At the festivals, when a great concourse of people from all parts were gathered together at Jerusalem, bandits known as sicarii, that is “men of the knife,” mingled with the throng and stabbed their victims, without any being able to see whence the blow came, for the assassins were the first to cry murder. “The first whom they assassinated on this wise,” says Josephus, “was Jonathan the high priest, and not a day passed on which they did not kill several in the same manner. The panic that prevailed throughout the city was worse than the evil itself. Men looked for death at any moment, as in time of war. They saw none approach without trembling, they did not dare to trust their friends. These precautions and suspicions did not put a stop to the murders, so great was the daring of these villains and their skill in hiding themselves.” Josephus does not ascribe anything of a religious character to these assassinations. But according to the author of the Philosophumena (Origenf or St. Hippolytus) the sicarii were identical with the Zealots, and were connected with the sect of the Essenes. “When they hear any of the uncircumcised speak of God and of His law, they seek to come upon him by stealth in a solitary place and threaten to kill him unless he will be circumcised: if he refuses to obey, he is slain. This is wherefore they are called Zealots, and by some sicarii.” Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews accuses Felix, the procurator, of having procured the assassination of the high priest Jonathan by the sicarii, an accusation which he does not repeat in the Wars of the Jews. Felix was a brother of Pallas, the freedman and favourite of Claudius. Tacitus speaks of him in even harsher terms than Josephus. “Claudius made Judea into a province which he abandoned to Roman knights or to freedmen; among these Felix distinguished himself by every sort of cruelty and license, he exercised the authority of a despot in the base spirit of a slave.” The Jews caused him to be accused before Nero, who had succeeded Claudius, but he was saved by the influence of his brother Pallas.

At Cæsarea there was a constant rivalry between the Jewish and the Greek or Syrian part of the population. The Jews were exempt from military service; the Greeks and Syrians, from whose ranks the legions were recruited, were jealous of this inequality. Hence arose taunts on the one side and recriminations on the other, sanguinary quarrels and riots. Finally the two parties sent agents to plead their cause before Nero, who decided against the Jews and deprived them of civil rights. Josephus says that this decree was the cause of the rebellion of the Jews; but it was only the last drop that makes the cup overflow. The rebellion had long been inevitable. It was not induced, like that of Judas Maccabæus, by religious persecution; the Romans allowed the Jews the free exercise of their religion, as they allowed it to all other nations. But the Jews were the chief people in the empire who did not belong to the Indo-European race. There is an incompatibility of temper between that race and the Semitic; we perceive the fact only too clearly in Algeria. The demand for union with the empire, raised after the death of Herod, had proceeded from the Jews themselves. A procurator, even if not beyond reproach, could not possibly be worse than their native kings. Festus, who succeeded Felix, seems to have governed with firmness and prudence. Like his predecessors, he dealt severely with robbers, sicarii, and messiahs. But nothing could allay the fever that had laid hold upon Judea and worked madness in the brain; for there are epidemics in the moral as in the physical order. We cannot lay all the blame on the Romans; their rule secured the peace of the world, a boon which was doubtless worth the sacrifice of the restless and precarious autonomy of a few peoples. But we mourn for Greece, and we may be permitted to mourn for Judea. Nor must we cast a stone at this small and fiery nation, with its obstinate will to live. Depopulated Greece had died of weariness and exhaustion. Judea, overflowing with inhabitants, was about to die in a frenzy of patriotism; it is the worthier death.