Ninety thousand Christians perished in Jerusalem alone. The Jews expected fair play from the Persians as a reward, but were treated worse by them than by the Christians. In 628, the Emperor Heraclius had retaken Palestine from the Persians and when marching through Tiberius, he was entertained by a wealthy Jew named Benjamin, the same man who invited the Jews to join the Persians against the Byzantines; the emperor asked him what had induced him to betray so great an animosity against the Christians, to which he replied that they were the enemies of his religion. Yet they claim the prophecy of Isaiah in the fifty-third chapter, to have been fulfilled in them. ‘He was oppressed, and he was afflicted yet he opened not his mouth.’ They even persecuted Mohammed in the incipient stages of his career. They prejudiced the chief Arabs against him, helped his enemies to discredit him and endeavored to alienate his followers.”
The article continues to give in detail the persecution to which the Jews subjected their own people who were progressive. It reminds one of the warning given to Rabbi Isaac M. Wise by Rabbi Lilienthal, when the former was urging the reform of Judaism: “If you want to be Christ you must expect to be crucified.” (“Isaac Meyer Wise,” p. 92)
Readers of Gibbons’ “Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire” will recall that in Volume 1, Chapter 16, he wrote severe words about the cruelty of the Jews. It will be agreed that only records of the most staggering cruelty could have driven the calm historian to the use of such terms. Readers will also observe, in the passage herewith quoted, that the desire for “the empire of the earth” which actuated the Jews of that period is the same as that discovered in the Protocols:
“From the reign of Nero to that of Antonius Pius, the Jew discovered a fierce impatience of the dominion of Rome, which repeatedly broke out in the most furious massacres and insurrections. Humanity is shocked at the recital of the horrid cruelties which they committed in the cities of