157 292
157
captivity
master’s religion, but the
Jews were unwilling to
propagate on those terms,
so an exception had to be
made. Non-Jewish slaves
were not granted the same
concessions, so they loathed
the Jews, which was nothing
new; ever since Alexander the
Great conquered the East,
non-Jews who lived there had
always resented the Jews and
the special treatment that
they demanded, appealing
each time to prerogatives that
they had won under Persian
rule. It was one thing if they
all fell, Greeks and Jews alike,
under foreign—Persian—
dominion, but another thing
altogether if the Jews came
under Greek sway but for
centuries refused to accept it.
Since both the Greeks and the
Jews had fallen under Roman
dominion, the Jews regarded
Rome as a Babylon, paying
it homage in practice more
zealously than did the Greeks.
The female slaves, incidentally,
were glad to turn Jewish:
they knew that Jews, unlike
Greeks or Romans, would
never abandon a child. There
were even some male slaves
who converted, calculating
that the Jewish communities
would contribute to their
manumission, and there
were indeed some cases of
Jewish converts freed in this
manner. The only thing that
may have given them pause
was circumcision, a painful
procedure for an adult, and
not without danger. The
women, though, were not
threatened with clitoral
resection, since the Roman
Jews did not demand it, so
there were droves of Syrian,
Greek, Arab, Abyssinian,
Egyptian, German, Gallic,
Hispanic, Thracian, Illyrian,