The alteration in the policy pursued since Alexander’s time towards Judaism amounted in the main to the withdrawing from this religious society unity of leadership and external compactness, and to the wresting out of the hands of its leaders a power which extended not merely over the native land of the Jews, but over the bodies of Jews generally within and beyond the Roman empire, and certainly in the East was prejudicial to the unity of imperial government. The Lagids as well as the Seleucids, and not less the Roman emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, had put up with this; but the immediate rule of the Occidentals over Judaea had sharpened the contrast between the imperial power and this power of the priests to such a degree, that the catastrophe set in with inevitable necessity and brought its consequences. From a political standpoint we may censure, doubtless, the remorselessness of the conduct of the war--which, moreover, is pretty much common to this war with all similar ones in Roman history--but hardly the religious-political dissolution of the nation ordained in consequence of it. If the axe was laid at the root of institutions which had led, and could not but with a certain necessity lead, to the formation of a party like that of the zealots, there was but done what was right and necessary, however severely and unjustly in the special case the individual might be affected by it. Vespasian, who gave the decision, was a judicious and moderate ruler. The question concerned was one not of faith but of power; the Jewish church-state, as head of the Diaspora, was not compatible with the absoluteness of the secular great-state. From the general rule of toleration the government did not even in this case depart; it waged war not against Judaism but against the high priest and the Synhedrion. [Sidenote: The Christians.] Nor did the destruction of the temple wholly fail in this its aim. There were not a few Jews and still more proselytes, particularly in the Diaspora, who adhered more to the Jewish moral law and to Jewish Monotheism than to the strictly national form of faith; the whole important sect of the Christians had inwardly broken off from Judaism and stood partly in open opposition to the Jewish ritual. For these the fall of Jerusalem was by no means the end of things, and within these extensive and influential circles the government obtained in some measure what it aimed at by breaking up the central seat of the Jewish worship. The separation of the Christian faith common to the Gentiles from the national Jewish, the victory of the adherents of Paul over those of Peter, was essentially promoted by the abolition of the Jewish central cultus. [Sidenote: Palestinian Jews.]