Judaism declines in the Holy Land

Among other things, in the wake of the Christianization of the Roman Empire that commenced in the fourth century AD, government officials banned Jewish pilgrimage to the Holy Land.  Here’s another passage from one of my manuscripts:

Such treatment merely accelerated a process of de-Judaization that had been going on in Palestine since the Great Revolt of 66-70 A.D. Gradually, despite the efforts of the rabbis to preserve Jewish landholdings in Palestine and indeed to encourage foreign Jews to return to the Holy Land, small farmers had found themselves unable to retain their lands. The process was painful and humiliat­ing. And it was all the worse because it represented the seemingly final and decisive loss of Jewish land to foreign oppressors. (The Roman government eventually began to offer incentives to its retir­ing soldiers to settle in Palestine. These inducements led to a surge in the Chris­tian population there, but, this time around, these were not Jewish but gentile Christians.) Taxes on Palestinian Jews grew and grew, often as punishment for their rebelliousness and their “obstinacy.” The pagan Romans had resented the difficulty that Judea had given them and were angered by their own heavy losses in putting down what they regarded as wholly unjustifed rebellions against their competent and fair-minded administration of the province. It’s scarcely surprising, therefore, that they decided to make the Jews pay. Sometimes this even involved literal payment. From the time of the Great Revolt in the first century, for instance, Jews were taxed more heavily than others in the empire in order to pay for the larger Roman garrisons and bureaucracies that were dispatched to Palestine to keep them under control. Their small holdings were gobbled up by ever larger and larger estates, and, now propertyless, the Jews turned to commerce and trade. (In the third century, Roman taxes were relatively light on city dwellers—in Palestine, since the Jews had been expelled from the cities, these were mostly Gentiles—but they were oppressively heavy on agriculturalists, who, in Palestine, were mostly Jews.) Then, detached from the land, unable to make ends meet, they emigrated. And as its population decreased, the influence of Palestinian Judaism over world Jewry declined correspondingly. Sometimes, even under the pagan Romans, there was open persecution of the Jews on religious grounds, although it was undoubtedly given impetus by anger over the two rebellions.

Rabbi Nathan says: “They who love and keep my command­ments”—those are the Jews who live in the Land of Israel and give their lives for the sake of the commandments. Why were you killed? For having circumcised my son. Why were you burned? For having studied the Torah. Why were you crucified? For having eaten unleavened bread. Why were you flagellated? For having blessed the lulay.[1]

[1] Mehhilta on Jethro, cited by Shmuel Safrai, in Ben-Sasson, A History of the Jewish Peo­ple, 334.