But among the Jews of Palestine, where the language spoken was not Hebrew indeed, but Aramaic, and among the portion of the Diaspora which clung firmly to Jerusalem, the breach between Judaism and the rest of the world was deepened by the destruction of the temple. The national-religious exclusiveness, which the government wished to obviate, was in this narrow circle rather strengthened by the violent attempt to break it down, and driven, in the first instance, to further desperate struggles. [Sidenote: The Jewish rising under Trajan.] Not quite fifty years after the destruction of Jerusalem, in the year 116,[187] the Jews of the eastern Mediterranean rose against the imperial government. The rising, although undertaken by the Diaspora, was of a purely national character in its chief seats, Cyrene, Cyprus, Egypt, directed to the expulsion of the Romans as of the Hellenes, and, apparently, to the establishment of a separate Jewish state. It ramified even into Asiatic territory, and seized Mesopotamia and Palestine itself. When the insurgents were victorious they conducted the war with the same exasperation as the Sicarii in Jerusalem; they killed those whom they seized--the historian Appian, a native of Alexandria, narrates how he, running from them for his life, with great difficulty made his escape to Pelusium--and often they put the captives to death under excruciating torture, or compelled them--just as Titus formerly compelled the Jews captured in Jerusalem--to fall as gladiators in the arena in order to delight the eyes of the victors. In Cyrene 220,000, in Cyprus even 240,000 men are said to have been thus put to death by them. On the other hand, in Alexandria, which does not appear itself to have fallen into the hands of the Jews,[188] the besieged Hellenes slew whatever Jews were then in the city. The immediate cause of the rising is not clear. The blood of the zealots, who had taken refuge at Alexandria and Cyrene, and had there sealed their loyalty to the faith by dying under the axe of the Roman executioner, may not have flowed in vain; the Parthian war, during which the insurrection began, so far promoted it, as the troops stationed in Egypt had probably been called to the theatre of war. To all appearance it was an outbreak of the religious exasperation of the Jews, which had been glowing in secret like a volcano since the destruction of the temple and broke out after an incalculable manner into flames, of such a kind as the East has at all times produced and produces; if the insurgents really proclaimed a Jew as king, this rising certainly had, like that in their native country, its central seat in the great mass of the common people. That this Jewish rising partly coincided with the formerly-mentioned (p. 68) attempt at liberation of the peoples shortly before subdued by the emperor Trajan, while the latter was in the far East at the mouth of the Euphrates, gave to it even a political significance; if