The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 02 : $b Israel, India, Persia, Phoenicia, Minor Nations of Western Asia
History
The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 02 : $b Israel, India, Persia, Phoenicia, Minor Nations of Western Asia
World history
The Zealots who had perished in the struggle for independence or in the
massacres that followed on their defeat, and the rabbis who laboured
in obscurity and silence, constituted but a comparatively small part
of the Jewish population, and we may well ask what became of the
innumerable slaves who flooded the empire after the fall of Jerusalem.
They did not all succumb to the arduous toils of the Coliseum. Under
Hadrian there was a fresh influx of Jewish slaves; Dion Cassius, who
speaks of five hundred and eighty thousand men killed in the course
of the war, says nothing of women or children. We cannot doubt that
they were sold, according to the common custom. Renan says that at the
yearly fair of the Terebinth, near Hebron, Jews could be bought at the
same price as horses. Once bought, they ran no further risk of death
from hunger or destitution, for a slave, even if bought at the price of
a horse, represented money’s worth, which it was not in his master’s
interest to lose. Among their co-religionists, slaves like themselves,
or freedmen, these unhappy beings found the pathetic brotherhood of the
poor, ingenious in expedients. All the little nameless trades offered
resources to this humiliated race, unscrupulous, skilful in exploiting
the vices of the ruling classes, armed with good reasons for not loving
the human race. Mingled with slaves of other races, they communicated
to them the fanaticism of their wrath and their hopes of revenge. This
revenge was afterwards relegated to a distant future; but at that
time, smarting under the memory of recent disaster, they dreamt of
it as complete and in the immediate future. Let the world come to an
end, since nothing could reform it; let it go down to the bottomless
pit, with all its defilements, and the agonies of the outcasts of
life, and oppressions without number, and inexpiable ills! The hour of
deliverance is near, and the accursed shall go to everlasting fire,
there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. The fall of the Jewish
nation redounded to the advantage of Christian propaganda. From that
time forward we hear less and less of the Jews and more and more of the
Christians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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