A division of the Persian army under the general Sharbarza descended from the heights of Lebanon in order to wrest Palestine from the Byzantine scepter. On hearing of the weakness of the Christian arms and of the advance of the Persian troops, the Jews of Palestine felt a fierce desire for battle. It seemed to them that the hour had come for revenge upon their twofold enemy, Roman and Christian, for the humiliations which they had borne for centuries. Tiberias was the hotbed of this warlike movement, and it was started by a man named Benjamin, who possessed a prodigious fortune, which he employed in enlisting and arming Jewish troops. A call was issued to all the Jews of Palestine to assemble and join the Persian army, and it met with a ready response. The sturdy Jewish inhabitants of Tiberias, of Nazareth, and of the mountain cities of Galilee, flocked to the Persian standard. Filled with rage, they spared neither the Christians nor their churches in Tiberias, and probably put an end to the bishopric. With Sharbarza's army they marched on Jerusalem, in order to wrest the Holy City from the Christians. The Jews of southern Palestine joined their countrymen, and with the help of the Jews and a band of Saracens, the Persian general took Jerusalem by storm (July, 614). Ninety thousand Christians are said to have perished in Jerusalem; but the story that the Jews bought the Christian prisoners from the Persians, and killed them in cold blood is a pure fiction. In their rage, however, the Jews relentlessly destroyed the Christian sanctuaries. All the churches and monasteries were burned, and the Jews undoubtedly had a greater share in this deed than the Persians. Had not Jerusalem--the original possession of the Jews--been torn from them by violence and treachery? Did they not feel that the Holy City was as foully desecrated by the adoration of the cross and of the bones of the martyrs as by the idolatries of Antiochus Epiphanes and Hadrian? The Jews seem to have deluded themselves with the hope that the Persians would grant them Jerusalem and the surrounding territory whereon to establish a commonwealth.