Persecution of the Jews. In the meantime Christianity held the reins of power in the surviving eastern half of the Roman Empire. Its Church Fathers began to regard it as a part of their function to preach against Judaism. The people at large followed by burning synagogues or turning them into churches. But the Emperor Theodosius I. protected the Jews. Later, Bishop Cyril cruelly drove them out of Alexandria where they had had such an illustrious career since the days of Alexander the Great. No redress was made to them for loss of home and property. His disciples, following this barbarous precedent, seized the cultured Hypatia, a teacher of Platonic philosophy, whose rare learning had made her home a gathering place for students and scholars,--and the fanatic crowd rent her limb from limb. But it was a bigoted and savage age. In mentioning the cruelly fanatic bishops, let us not forget the kind ones--Bishop Hilary of Poictiers in Gaul, at whose funeral the sympathetic Jews expressed their sorrow in the recital of Hebrew Psalms. With Theodosius II, emperor of the eastern division of the Roman Empire, who came to this Byzantine throne in 408, began the systematic restraint of Judaism--the harsh discrimination against Jews before the law. They were prohibited from building new synagogues, from exercising jurisdiction between Christian and Jew, and from owning Christian slaves. The bishops and clergy began fomenting attacks in different localities, forcing baptism on some by threat. Ultimately the Patriarchate of Judea, the office of Nasi, was abolished in 425, after the Hillel family had enjoyed this dignity for three and a half centuries. Israel suffered, too, at the hands of Christian ascetics who went to grotesque extremes and imposed absurd privations upon themselves to express religious zeal. Some condemned themselves to stand on pillars--hence called "pillar saints"; some to live as hermits in the desert. But with them all Jewish persecution was deemed a kind of piety, the logic being that Jewish beliefs were opposed to the truth and the Jews were the enemies of God. The most famous of these pillar saints was Simeon, surnamed Stylites, meaning pillar. As long as the Roman Empire of the West lasted, Jews were excluded from most public offices. The monies hitherto voluntarily contributed to maintain the Patriarchate were, now that this Palestinian official was deposed, demanded perforce to continue as a Jewish tax to aid a hostile State. Thus did Christian Rome follow the precedent of pagan Rome. This was the kind of treatment that they were now to meet in all Christian lands, marking the beginning of the Jewish _Middle Ages_.