And the Jews could also hit back hard as we see during the Kitos war -- where supposedly 240,000 gentiles were killed in Cyprus
I knew about Masada, but I didn’t know about the “Kitos War”. I’ll go check it out. Thanks.
The persecution of Jews didn’t start with the Romans; the Greeks’ dislike began during the Persian Empire, perhaps in part because the Jews considered Cyrus the Great a liberator and the Greeks not so much. Like the Romans, the Greeks scoffed about the lack of idols in the Temple, and regarded circumcision as mutilation.
The Romans couldn’t get Jews to serve in the army; their reluctance to serve was an obvious consequence of their food laws and the Shomer Shabbat, which prohibits even cooking food on the sabbath. In exchange for the Roman occupation and the continual tension with the Parthians, and not having to serve in the occupying power’s army, the Jews were given the favor of paying a special tax.
After the Romans’ destruction of the Temple, the empire imposed the Fiscus Judaicus, a special tax mimicking the former tithing that Jews paid to support the Temple (now destroyed), that was levied on all Jews throughout the Empire (not merely Jews who had survived the revolt) to support the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, the center of the most important official Roman cult. Sez here that temple burned down three times in a little over a century and a half, with the fourth iteration being built by, of course, Titus.
The Kitos War was one of the rebellions that festered out of the Roman atrocities. The immediate incitement came from the emperor Hadrian, the lover of catamites. He was especially appalled by circumcision and insulted by the Jews’ “failure” to adopt foreign cults. He decided to level what was left of Jerusalem and build a new city, dedicated to himself.
The Roman response to the uprisings was to massacre or enslave the population of Judea, and ban the practice of Judaism and circumcision throughout the empire. The bans lasted until that monstrous faggot Hadrian died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aelia_Capitolina