Zionism/Home Rule in Palestine under the Persians and Greeks
§2. Home Rule in Palestine under the Persians and Greeks
The Persian Empire, towards the end of the sixth century B. C., was mighty and enlightened, and therefore tolerant. The return from Babylon was never more than partial: the Persian Jews were prosperous and contented, and many of them highly placed. Cyrus in 536 called upon God's people—'his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the Lord ... And ever remaineth in any place where he sojourneth, let the men of his place help him with silver, and with gold'.[1] In response to the call, 42,000 Jews under Zerubbabel and Jeshua the High Priest returned from captivity. In the reign of Darius a second batch under Haggai, the prophet, returned in 519, when the second Temple was built; a third of some 1,500, in the reign of Artaxerxes in 458, under Ezra; and a fourth in 445, under Nehemiah. A continuation of Nehemiah's narrative can be traced in the Elephantine papyri down to 419 and perhaps later. These remarkable documents show the relations between the Jews who had returned to Zion and those of the Diaspora, who had remained in the lands of their birth and their civil allegiance.
The colonists, who had rebuilt the Temple and deemed it necessary to fortify Jerusalem, found themselves in a minority. They had to deal with the local intrigues of the Samaritan opposition; and the difficulties they had to contend with are set forth by Haggai and Zechariah. who comforted the settlers when they were discouraged. Nehemiah was a Persian official, and his interest had been aroused by the sad reports concerning the Jews who had returned to Jerusalem, how they were 'in great affliction and reproach: the wall of Jerusalem also is broken down'.[2] He persuaded Artaxerxes to send him 'unto Judah, unto the city of my fathers' sepulchres, that I may build it'.[3] He succeeded in rebuilding Jerusalem, despite the intrigues and even the armed force of the local Persian officials, and especially of the Samaritans. Like Ezra, his predecessor, he had to complain of the spiritual indifference of his co-religionists; and he instituted reforms. The Samaritan opposition was routed, and, notwithstanding the persistence of a certain amount of intermarriage,[4] never again recovered its influence in Jerusalem, though the erection of a temple at Elephantine seems to point to some sort of compromise between Jew and Samaritan in Egypt.
Alexander the Great, in his conquests, spared Jerusalem and much favoured the Jews; and, when he founded Alexandria in 332, many Jews settled there. These Egyptian Jews developed a high culture of their own and gradually became contented with Ptolemaic and Roman rule. But the Palestinians were stauncher; and when, in 175 B. C., Antiochus Epiphanes endeavoured to precipitate their hellenization, the Maccabean rebellion enabled the Jews to recover their independence and become independent for a couple of centuries. To this period the latter part of Zechariah refers. The Diaspora, who had emigrated, will be brought back again out of Egypt and Assyria into the land of Gilead and Lebanon.[5]
Yet, even in its most prosperous time, Palestine was peopled by only a minority of the Jews. Most of them spread into Galilee, Syria, Egypt, and beyond the seas, so that in the second century B. C. the Jewish Sibyl says of the Diaspora, 'Every land is full of thee and every sea', and Strabo, Philo, Seneca, and the author of the Acts of the Apostles prove that the Jewish race was disseminated in their time over the whole of the civilized world. Philo says that in Egypt alone there were a million Jews, an eighth of the population.
The Maccabeans preserved the independence of Palestine, in spite of the growing imperialism of Rome, until Pompey took Jerusalem in B. C. 63. After this date the local rulers of the Idumaean dynasty (established by Herod in 37 B. C.) were always in the position of 'client-kings' under the Roman government. Judaea itself became under Augustus a 'second-class' Roman province. Internal dissensions produced the insurrection which ended with the destruction of the Temple in 70 A. D.). Under Hadrian, A. D. 130, the Jews again rebelled. Jerusalem was destroyed and rebuilt by the Emperor as a Roman colony under the name Aelia Capitolina. No Jews were allowed to reside in it. Thus all hopes of Jewish independence were for the time destroyed.