Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

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,

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