For fourteen years Palestine remained in the hands of the Persians and the Jews. Several Christians in despair embraced Judaism, among them a monk of Mount Sinai, who changed his name into Abraham, married a Jewess, and, renegade-like, distinguished himself by joining in the persecution of the faith which he had betrayed. But the Jews, who had fondly hoped that their Persian allies would make the country over to them, were doomed to disappointment. Discontent culminated in a rupture with their friends and the banishment of many Jews to Persia. The rest then resolved to revenge themselves by a second act of treachery. They entered into negotiations with the Emperor Heraclius, and, on his promising to forgive and forget their past misdeeds, aided him to recover the province. ♦628♦ The Persian invaders were driven back, and the Greeks reigned once more supreme over Western Asia. The Jews acclaimed the victor and his army with servile adulation, and entertained both with a liberality springing from cold calculation. But their enthusiasm was too transparent, and their atrocities too recent to delude Heraclius. At Jerusalem the monks earnestly implored the Emperor to punish the traitors, and with one stroke to remove for ever the danger of a repetition of their crime. Heraclius objected to the breach of faith which the holy men so vehemently recommended; but his scruples were overruled by their offers to take the sin upon themselves, by their casuistical demonstrations that the extermination of the enemies of Heaven was a meritorious deed beside which common honesty counted for nothing, and by the promise to fast and pray on his behalf. The Jews were persecuted; many of them were slaughtered, and others fled to the hills or to Egypt, where they were welcomed by their brethren. Thus double treachery ended in double disaster. The sufferings of the Jews in the Byzantine Empire were revived by Leo the Isaurian, who seems to have tried to recover the confidence of the clergy, forfeited by his iconoclastic proclivities, by a zealous persecution of those eternal enemies of Orthodoxy. In 723 he issued a decree threatening with terrible penalties all Jews who refused to be baptized. Some submitted to the ordeal in order to save their lives; others preferred to seek safety in voluntary exile, or glory in self-inflicted martyrdom; many burning themselves to death in their synagogues.