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. ♦218–222 A.D.♦ 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.