This essay appears in the 2019 edition

of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (pages 27-114).

ROME CONTRA JUDAEA; JUDAEA CONTRA ROME

by Evropa Soberana

This is precisely why the Jews are the most

disastrous people in world history: they have left such a falsified
humanity in their wake that even today Christians can think of
themselves as anti-Jewish without understanding that they are the
ultimate conclusion of Judaism. —Nietzsche
1945 was the year of the total inversion of Aryan values
into Christian values. —Joseph Walsh

Foreword
The purpose of this book is to give an idea of what happened
to the Ancient World; of how Europe fell into the Middle Ages and,
especially, to what extent what happened in Rome 1,600 years ago is
exactly what is happening in our days throughout the West: but
magnified a thousand times by globalization, technology and, above
all, the deputation of psycho-sociological and propagandistic
knowledge by the System.
What is dealt with in this book is the story of a tragedy, of an
apocalypse. It is the end not only of the Roman Empire and all its
achievements but also of the survival of the Egyptian, Persian and
Greek teachings in Europe in a bloodthirsty process: a premonition
of the future destruction of Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic
heritages, always accompanied by their respective genocides.
This process had a markedly ethnic character: it was the
rebellion of Christianised slaves (from Asia Minor and North Africa)
against Indo-European paganism, which represented the ancestral
customs and traditions of the Roman and Hellenic aristocracies—
decadent, minoritarian and softened in comparison with an
overwhelmingly numerous, brutalised people who cordially detested
the distant pride of their lords.
In the third chapter, ‘Christianity and the fall of the Roman
Empire’, we will see the processes that marked the first development
of Christianity: that strange synthesis between Jewish and Greco-
decadent mentality that, from the East, devoured the classical world
to the bone; undermining Roman institutions and the Roman
mentality to the point of propitiating its total collapse.
However, we will begin by focusing on the Eastern Roman
provinces, especially Judea, which was snatched by Rome to the heirs
of Alexander the Great. How were the relations between Greeks and
Jews? What role did the Romans play in Asia Minor and in the
management of the Jewish problem? What are the true roots of Israel
and the current instability in the Near East? It will be worthwhile to
expand on the subject to familiarise oneself with the foundations of
what is today the greatest geopolitical conflict on the planet: the State
of Israel. We will also see the impossibility, in the long term, of the
coexistence between two radically different cultures, in this case, the
Greco-Roman and the Jewish.
For now, the Romans will meet a people who take the
tradition with the same seriousness as them, but replacing that
Olympic, artistic, athletic and aristocratic touch with a spark of
fanaticism and dogmatism, and changing the Roman patriotism for a
kind of pact sealed behind the backs of the rest of humanity. A
people, above all, with a fiercely rooted sense of identity—in fact,
much more than any other people—and who also considered
themselves to be no less than the ‘chosen people’.

Chapter 1
Geopolitical, anthropological and ethnic context
The Near East or the Levant—what today are Turkey,
Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Egypt—has been a
very important geostrategic zone of confrontations between the
Europe of the forests, the snows, the rivers, the mists, and the deep
East of the dry, jealous, sterile and inhospitable spirit of the desert. In
this area there have been, from time immemorial, ebbs and flows
from both Europe and Asia and Africa, and crystallised in the
appearance of the Neolithic and the first civilizations of the world.
Paraphrasing Nietzsche, we would say, ‘If you stare at the
desert for a long time, the desert will also stare at you’. If there is a
natural selection environment radically different from that of the
glaciations, it is undoubtedly the desert: monotonous and infinite
environment like the laments of the songs now preached from the
minarets of the mosques. Immersed in this type of landscape for a
long time, it is easy for a man to have visions and see illusions and

2
distorted reflections; to hear voices that, according to oriental
folklore, come from evil spirits and, finally, to lose one’s way and sink
into despair and madness, and let your mind take a journey into
darkness, from which it will never return.
The deserts are the places where the total absence of the
fecundating power of heaven—represented by rain and lightning, and
by typically European gods such as Zeus or Jupiter—has propitiated
the triumph of the Earth, and therefore the death of Nature and the
levelling, the devastation, the equalisation of the horizons and the lack
of permanence of the same floor that is stepped on. It is totally
imprudent to think that all these elements do not leave a deep mark
on the idiosyncrasy and collective imagination of a people.
The subject that we treat is revealed as a confrontation that, in
the last instance, is reduced to an evolutionary insurrection of the
East not to disappear in an unequal competition with the European
human varieties.
In 56 BCE, in a speech entitled De Provinciis Consularibus given
in the Senate of Rome, Cicero himself describes the Jews, along with
the Syrians as a ‘race born to be a slave’. Syrians and Jews were ethnic
communities in which the Armenid1 race was strongly represented,
and which are encompassed as Semitic cultures. The Semitic waves
constituted, for millennia, a source of pain, malaise, violence and
tragedy for Europe, from the Carthaginians to the Ottomans. The
present book will deal particularly with the Jews, without forgetting
other groups that, like the Arabs, Persians and Syrians, made common
cause with them on many occasions, including during the rise of
Christianity.
Although today the elites try to unload Europe with an unreal
multiculturalism, the daily and historical reality is that the coexistence
between different races has only two results: third-worldisation
and/or balkanization: ethnic conflicts and territorial ruptures. What
we are going to see in this book has nothing of multi-cult and nothing
of ‘peaceful coexistence’, since for centuries and centuries the
coexistence between Greeks and Jews was marked by great waves of
bloody violence. It did not work. Far, therefore, from the politically
correct fantasy of the ‘coexistence of cultures’, we will investigate the
beginning of a series of ethnic cleansings throughout the Eastern

1 The term “Armenid” will be explained in the essay on the

author’s racial classification.

3
Mediterranean, which would culminate in the low Roman Empire
with eradication, in North Africa and in the Near East, of the Greek
and Roman communities and of most of the classical legacy at the
hands of the East.

Rome
It is incredible the number of adulterations and trash poured
on the history of Rome and the biography of her emperors, but not
so much if we think that the Roman Empire faced directly what
would later be two very powerful forces: Judaism and Christianity.
Rome represented for centuries—as the Macedonians had
represented before her—the armed and conquering incarnation of the
European will and the vehicle of Indo-European blood in the Near
East (in the cradle of the Semitic world; of Judaism, the Neolithic and
matriarchy).
In The Anabasis of Alexander Arrian tells us how, being
Alexander the Great in Babylon, he received embassies from
countless kingdoms of the known world. One of those embassies
came from Rome, which at that time was a humble republic headed
by a council of elderly patricians, called senators. Alexander saw the
customs of the Roman ambassadors and, without hesitation,
predicted that if those people continued to be faithful to that sober
and upright lifestyle, Rome would become a very powerful city.
Before dying, Alexander left in his will that an immense fleet was to
be built, someday in the future, to face the Carthaginian threat which
began to take shape on the horizon. Rome, as heir of the Alexandrian
mission, also inherited the geopolitical task of wiping out the
Carthaginians: a people of Phoenician origin (current Syria, Lebanon
and Israel) that had settled in what is now Tunisia. Rome destroyed
Carthage in the year 146 BCE, but strong sequels and bad memories
remained from that confrontation of the West versus the East, and it
would never be the same again.
What struck Alexander about the Roman ambassadors? What
made him distinguish them at once from the rest of the ambassadors?
That the Romans were an extremely traditional and militarised people,
whose life danced to the rhythm of a severe religious ritualism and a
disciplined austerity. The Roman religion and Roman customs were
present in absolutely every moment of the citizen’s life.
The world, before the eyes of a Roman, was a magical and
holy place where the ancient gods, the Numens, the Manes, the Lares,
the Penates, the geniuses and infinity of folk spirits, campaigned at

4
ease influencing the lives of the mortals even in their most daily ups
and downs (the Civitas Dei of St Augustine, despite attacking the
Roman religion, provides valuable information about its complexity).
When the child was born, there was a phrase to invoke a
Numen. When the child cried in the crib, another was invoked. It was
also prayed for when the child learned to walk, when he came
running, when he ran away; when, being a man, he received his
baptism of arms—for his wedding, before entering combat, when he
fell wounded, by triumphing over the enemy, by returning home
victorious, by getting sick, by giving birth to his first child; before
eating, before drinking, when sowing the fields… One Numen was
responsible for growing the golden harvests, another Numen (in this
case a Numen of Jupiter) precipitated the rain of the sky, another was
busy making the grass ripple with the wind; another, in time
immemorial, turned the beard of a male family lineage red. All the
qualities, all things and all the events, according to the Roman
mentality, showed the trace of the creative intervention of the blessed
forces of the world; the spirits of the rivers and of the trees, of the
forests, of the mountains, of the houses, of the fields…

The Roman spirit, represented by Vesta (above) with two torches,

equivalent to the Hellenic Hestia, was a virginal goddess associated with
the hearth and fire, which symbolised the centre of the house, around
which the family was grouped.

The families venerated the paterfamilias and the ancestor of the

clan, while every male prided himself on having virtus: a divine quality

5
associated with military prowess, training and combative spirit, and
that only young men could possess. Only the flesh of animals
sacrificed to the gods was eaten in rituals of uncompromising liturgy;
and in religious ceremonies, the simple stammering of a priest was
more than enough to invalidate a consecration or have to begin it
again. Her priestesses, the Vestals, were virgin girls who, in the
interior of their circular temple, watched to see that the sacred fire
never went out. There was a law according to which, if a person
condemned to death crossed the street with a Vestal, he was
acquitted. When some of them failed in their duties they were
flogged, and if any transgressed the vow of virginity, they were buried
alive. That is just an example of the immense religious seriousness
that reigned in the origins of Rome, far removed from the famous
‘decadence of the empire’.
Despite the subsequent influence that Greece had on them,
the seriousness with which the Romans took ritualism and folklore
was so extreme, and their patriotism so incredible, that we may
seriously think that fidelity (what they called the pietas: the fulfilment
of duty to the gods in everyday tasks) they professed to the customs
and ancestral traditions, was the secret of their immense success as a
people. The Romans developed advanced technology and, because of
the discipline of their soldiers, the ability of their commanders and a
superior way of ‘doing things’ conquered the entire Mediterranean,
shielding southern Europe. If we have to give more examples of
peoples in which fidelity to traditions was taken with the extreme
gravitas with which it was taken in Rome, only three would be found:
two of them are Vedic India and Han China.
The other is the Jewish people.

Judea
The Jews, in many ways, were the exact antithesis of the
Romans, but they had something in common with them: ritual rigidity
and loyalty to customs. In the Jewish case, the character was tinged
with certain fanaticism, dogmatism and intransigence. The Romans
considered such religiosity sinister: the Biblical religious background,
which is the matrix of Judaism—also of Christianity and Islam—,
comes from an ancient Syrian-Phoenician-Canaanite-Semitic tradition,
which among other things sanctioned human sacrifice, including the
first-born children. The Carthaginians, associated with the presence of
haplogroups J and who had been crushed by Rome in the course of

6
the Punic wars, had also been heirs of the Phoenician tradition of
child sacrifice.2

The first temple in Jerusalem, also called the temple of Solomon or Zion,
built on the esplanade of Mount Moriah around the year 960 BCE. It
was razed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and rebuilt seventy years later
by those Jews who, led by Zerubbabel, Ezra and Nehemiah, returned
from the deportation of the so-called Babylonian captivity. It is a rather
modest structure and, of course, following the fundamentalist Semitic
tradition, lacked images or representations of the human figure: literally,
Judaism was a religion without idols.

Jewry, which had a long record of nomadism, slavery,

persecutions and expulsions from Egypt and the Mesopotamian
civilisations, had maintained, despite its great swings through a
thousand deserts and a thousand foreign cities, its essentially
undisturbed idiosyncrasy. From the remotest antiquity, the Jews
proved to be an unassimilable and highly conflictive people, endowed
with an unprecedented ability to climb the social positions of other
civilisations, undermine their institutions and destroy their traditions
and customs from a parasitic and advantaged position; enrich
themselves in the process, take whatever was useful, become
increasingly sophisticated and, finally, survive the fall of the
civilisation they devoured, taking a baggage of experience and
symbols stolen to the next civilisation destined to suffer the repetition
of the cycle.
In all the countries that welcomed them, the Jews were
accused of appropriating the riches of others without working (usury),
of exercising vampirism over the economy, of being sycophants with
the nobility and openly hostile to the people, of indebting the States
and to mortally hate, in secret, all the non-Jewish humanity. Those

2 Note of the editor: See, e.g., the section ‘The historical Israel’ in
the epilogue of my book Day of Wrath.

7
who held power among the Jews were the rabbis: priests who had
spent their lives learning the Torah and exercised firm psychological
control over their people by threatening the wrath of Yahweh and
manipulating the individual’s fears and feelings such as guilt or sin.
The Greek historian Strabo would end up describing the Jewish
priests as ‘superstitious and with the temperament of tyrants’.
But to be a ‘barbarian’ and ‘third-world’ people, despised and
considered destined for slavery, the Jews had a very high literacy rate
and, because of their experience, they handled themselves extremely
well in urban environments, since from all over the world they were
the people that had lived the longest in civilised conditions. There
were also among them, without any doubt, extremely smart and astute
men, good doctors, accountants, fortune tellers, merchants and
scribes; and their radical monotheism, almost sophisticated in its total
rupture with everything else, differentiated them from any another
people.

Roman anti-Semitism: a spiritual conflict

What happened after the arrival of Roman troops in Judea
was a spiritual confrontation unprecedented in the history of
mankind. Four million Jews were now going to share borders with the
other 65 million subjects of the Roman Empire.
It is impossible to write on this subject without mentioning
the profoundly anti-Jewish quotes written by great Roman authors of
the time. In them, a true conflict is perceived between two systems of
values exactly opposite each other. The clash between Roman rigidity
and the dogmatism of the desert caused in Rome a genuine
movement of rejection of Judaism. Although anti-Semitism goes back
to the very origins of Jewry, the Romans, heirs of the Greeks and of a
superior military discipline, were undoubtedly, until then, the ones
who showed the greatest hostility towards the Jews.
Cicero (106-43 BCE), as we shall see later, condemns Jewry
considering that their mentality of skulduggery and cowardice is
incompatible with the altruistic mentality of the best in Rome. He
wrote: ‘The Jews belong to a dark and repulsive force. I know how
numerous these cliques are, how they remain united and what power
they exert through their unions. They are a nation of liars and
deceivers’.

8
 Horace (65-8 BCE), in Book I of his Satires mocks the
Sabbath or Sabbatic rest, while Petronius (dies in 66 CE) ridicules the
circumcision in his Satyricon.
Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) in his Natural History speaks about
‘Jewish impiety’, and refers to ‘the Jews, well known for their
contempt for the gods’.
Seneca (4-65 CE) called Jewry ‘the evilest nation, whose waste
of a seventh of life [he refers to Shabbat] goes against the utility of
it… These most perverse people have come to extend their customs
into the whole world; the defeated have given laws to the victors’.
Quintilian (30-100 CE) says in his Institutio Oratoria that the
Jews are a derision for the rest of men and that their religion is the
embodiment of superstition.
Martial (40-105), in his Epigrams, sees the Jews as followers of
a cult whose true nature is secret for the rest of the world, and he
attacks circumcision, the Shabbat (Saturday), and their abstinence
from pork.
Tacitus (56-120), the famous historian who praised the
Germans, also spoke about the Jews but in very different terms. He
says that they descend from lepers expelled from Egypt and that
under the Assyrians, the Medes and Persians, they were the most
despised and humiliated people. Among the terms with which Tacitus
qualifies Jewry we have ‘perverse’, ‘abominable’, ‘cruel’, ‘superstitious’,
‘alien to any law of religion’, ‘evil’ and ‘filthy’ among others.
The Jewish customs are sad, dirty, vile and abominable, and
if they have survived it is thanks to their perversity. Of all enslaved
peoples, Jews are the most despicable and disgusting.
For the Jews, everything that is sacred to us is despicable,
and what is repugnant to us is lawful.
The Jews reveal a stubborn bond with one another, which
contrasts with their hatred for the rest of humanity… Among them,
nothing is lawful. Those who embrace their religion practice the
same thing and the first thing they are taught is to despise the gods
[History, chapters 4 and 5].
Juvenal (55-130), in his Satires, criticises the Jews for the
Sabbath, for not worshiping images, for circumcising themselves, for
not eating pork, for being scrupulous with their laws while despising
those of Rome, and that they only reveal to the ‘initiates’ the true
nature of Judaism. In addition, he blames Orientals in general and
Jewry in particular for the degeneration of the environment in Rome
itself.

9
 Marcus Aurelius (121-180) passed through Judea on his trip to
Egypt, being surprised by the ways of the local Jewish population. He
said, ‘I find these people worse than the Marcomanni, the Quadics
and the Sarmatians (quoted in Rerum Gestarum Libri by Ammianus
Marcellinus).
These quotes summarise how the Romans, an Indo-European
martial, virile and disciplined people, saw the Jewish quarter. It can be
said that, until the triumph of the Romans, no people had been so
aware of the challenge posed by Judaism. All these quotes point to a
stubborn ideological as well as military confrontation, in which both
Rome and Judea were going to think a lot for a final solution: a
conflict that would influence History in a huge way and, therefore,
cannot be ignored under any pretext. The aim of this book is to give
an idea of what the old clash of the East against the West meant.

The Hellenistic legacy

‘When the Macedonians seized power [in Judea], King
Antiochus sought to extirpate their superstitions and introduce
Greek habits to transform that inferior race’. —Tacitus
To understand the virulent ethnic conflicts that occurred
during the Roman domination, it is necessary to go back a few years
and place ourselves in the era of the Macedonian domination, since
the Greek social strata bequeathed from the conquest of Alexander
the Great had a lot to do with the uprisings of Jewry and the long
history of hatred, tensions, reprisals and counter-reprisals that
followed one another thereafter.
When Alexander the Great was on his way to conquer Egypt
he passed through Judea, and the Jewish community, fearful that they
would destroy Jerusalem, did with the Macedonians what they used to
do whenever there was a new triumphant invader: betray their former
lords and welcome the invader with open arms. Thus, just as they had
betrayed the Babylonians with the Persians, they betrayed the Persians
with the Macedonians. Grateful, Alexander granted them extensive
privileges; for example, in Alexandria they were legally equated with
the Greek population. This was important, because the legal status of
the Alexandrian Jews—who would constitute almost half of the city’s
population—later led to bitter misgivings on the part of the Greek
community, leading to riots, which we will see later.
When Alexander the Great died in the year 323 BCE, he left a
vast legacy. The whole area he had dominated, from Egypt to

10
Afghanistan, received a strong Hellenisation which produced the
period called Hellenistic, to differentiate it from the classical Hellenic.
The Macedonian generals, the so-called Diadochi, foolishly fought
among themselves to establish their own empires, and in this case we
will be interested in the empire of the Ptolemies (centered in Egypt)
and that of the Seleucids (centered in Syria) because Israel, between
both, would become part of the first and, finally, in 198 BCE,
annexed by the Seleucids.
Under the umbrella of Alexandrian protection, the Jews were
spread not only in Palestine and the Near East but throughout Rome,
Greece and North Africa. In these areas there already existed a well-
organised, rich and powerful Jewish Qahals, all of them connected to
Judea, the nucleus of Judaism. In Jewish society, some social sectors
would absorb the Hellenisation which, with the fermentation of the
centuries, produced a cosmopolitan breeding ground that would lead
to the birth of Christianity. Other Jewish sectors, the most
multitudinous, clung to their traditional xenophobia and began to
react against those who, in the lead of Alexander the Great, had
received them as saviours.
Although the Near East was a hotbed of Egyptians, Syrians
(also called Chaldeans or Arameans, whose language was lingua
franca in the area, being spoken regularly by the Jews), Arabs and
others, the traditionalist Jews saw with great displeasure that Asia
Minor and Alexandria were being populated with Greeks who,
naturally, were pagans and, therefore, in Jewish thought, infidels:
ungodly and idolatrous, as had been the hated Egyptians, Babylonians
and Persians before them. With time, to the discomfort of these
sectors of the Jewish quarter adverse to assimilate into the Greek
culture, a series of measures decreed by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the
Seleucid king, were added.
In December of the year 168 BCE, Antiochus literally forbade
Judaism, attempting to extirpate the cult of Yahweh, suppressing any
Jewish religious manifestation, placing circumcision outside the law
and even forcing Jews to eat foods considered religiously ‘unclean’.
The Greeks imposed an edict by which an altar to the Greek gods
should be built in every city in the area, and Macedonian officials
would be distributed to ensure that in every Jewish family the Greek
gods were worshiped. Here, the Macedonians demonstrated elemental
clumsiness as they did not know the Jewish people. According to the
Old Testament (2 Maccabees and 4 Maccabees), those who remained
faithful to the Mosaic Law, Antiochus had them burned alive and the

11
Orthodox Jews who escaped to the desert were persecuted and
massacred. These statements should be taken with caution, but what
is clear is that there was anti-Jewish repression in general.
What were these measures? We must bear in mind that the
pagan world was a world of religious tolerance, in which religions
were not persecuted just like that. However, in Judaism, the Greek
sovereigns saw a political doctrine that potentially could turn the
subversive Jews against the pagan states that dominated them. They
were hostile towards the other peoples, and therefore, a threat. In this
context, it is possible that the first manifestations of religious
intransigence came from the Jewish side because, as I have said, the
ancient Greeks were never intolerant.

Antiochus: perhaps the most brilliant of the generals of Alexander.

According to Jewish tradition, by desecrating the altar of the temple in
Jerusalem, he was possessed by the same demon who will possess the
anti-Messiah spoken of in the Old Testament (Daniel, 9:26).

In that year, 168 BCE, Antiochus sacrificed nothing more and

nothing less than a pig on the altar of the Temple in Jerusalem, in
homage to Zeus. This act was considered a double desecration: On
the one hand because it was a pig (a profane animal of Semitic creeds
like Judaism and Islam), and on the other because that was the first
step of consecrating the entire temple to the Olympian Zeus and to
convert Jerusalem into a Greek city. This sacrilegious act brought a
strong reaction from the fundamentalist sectors of the Jewish quarter.
The most zealous rabbis began to preach a kind of holy war against
the Greek occupation, urging the Jews to rebel, and when the first
Jew timidly decided to make an offering to the Greek Zeus, a rabbi,
Mattathias Maccabeus, slew him.

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 The ethnic turmoil that followed led to the period known as
the Maccabean wars (167 to 141 BCE), of which there is much talk in
the Old Testament book of Maccabees. Carrying out, with
the Hassidim (the ‘pious Jews’, also called Chassidim or Chassidic) a
guerrilla war against the Macedonian troops surrounded on all sides,
the ‘Maccabees’ were finally spared from being overwhelmed when an
anti-Greek rebellion broke out in Antioch and crushed the influence
of the Hellenizing Jews.
Judas Maccabeus, who succeeded Mattathias renewing the
cycle of treason, would even negotiate with the Romans to secure
their support. In fact, the Roman Senate would formally recognise the
Hasmonean dynasty in 139 BCE, without suspecting the headaches
that this remote land would give them in the near future.
During this time, in addition to the Hellenised Jews, two other
important Jewish factions would be formed, also in bitter dispute: on
the one hand, the Pharisees, a fundamentalist sector that had the
support of the multitudes; and on the other, the Sadducees, a group
of priests more ‘progressive’, more ‘bourgeois’, in better dealings with
the Greeks and who in the future would be victims of the ‘cultural
revolution’ that the Pharisees carried out after the fall of Jerusalem in
the hands of Rome. The Sadducees’ writings would be destroyed by
the Romans, so the vision we have today of the panorama is the point
of view of the Pharisees, from whom would come the lineages of
orthodox rabbis who would complete the Talmud. The Hasmonean
dynasty, in spite of numerous swings and changes, would be
essentially pro-Sadduceean.

Greek anti-Semitism
The Alexandrian school has special relevance, as here lived the
most important Jewish population (almost half of the total), and also
the most important ‘anti-Semitic’ tradition (I use quotation marks
because the Syrians, the Babylonians and the Arabs were Semites and
the Alexandrians had nothing against them). As an important part of
Jewish history had taken place in Egypt, these Hellenised Egyptian
writers attacked Jewry harshly. In addition, the Greeks of the Near
East had long been badly living with the Jews, and during that time a
real animosity had developed between the two peoples.
Hecataeus of Abdera (around 320 BCE), not an Alexandrian
himself, was probably the first pagan who wrote about Jewish history,
and he did not do it on good terms: ‘Due to a plague, the Egyptians

13
expelled them… The majority fled to uninhabited Judea, and their
leader Moses established a cult different from all the others. The Jews
adopted a misanthropic and inhospitable life’.
Manetho (3rd century BCE), an Egyptian priest and historian,
in his History of Egypt—the first time someone wrote a history of
Egypt in Greek—said that at the time of King Amenhotep, the Jews
left Heliopolis with a colony of lepers under the command of a
renegade Osiris priest named Osarseph, whom he identifies with
Moses. Osarseph would have taught them habits contrary to those of
the Egyptians and ordered them not to relate to the rest of the
villages, and also made them burn and loot numerous Egyptian
villages of the Nile valley before leaving Egypt in the direction of Asia
Minor.
Mnaseas of Patrae (3rd century BCE), a disciple of
Eratosthenes, was the first to say something that would later be
recurrent in Greek and also in Roman anti-Semitism: that the Jews, in
the temple of Jerusalem, worshiped a golden donkey’s head.
Agatharchides of Cnidus (181-146 BCE) in Affairs in Asia
mocks the Mosaic law and its practices, especially the Sabbath rest.
Posidonius of Apameia (philosopher and historian, 135-51
BCE), said that Jews are ‘an ungodly people, hated by the gods’.
Lysimachus of Alexandria (1st century BCE) said that Moses
was a kind of black magician and an impostor; that his laws,
equivalent to those recorded in the Talmud, were immoral and that
the Jews had been sick:
The Jews, sick with leprosy and scurvy, took refuge in the
temples, until the king drowned the lepers, and sent other hundred
thousand to perish in the desert. A certain Moses guided and
instructed them so that they would not show goodwill towards any
person and destroyed all the temples they found. They arrived in
Judea and built a city of temple robbers.
Apollonius Molon (around 70 BCE) of Crete, a grammarian,
rhetorician, orator and teacher of Caesar and Cicero in an academy of
Rhodes, dedicated an entire work to the Jewish quarter, calling them
misanthropes and atheists disguised as monotheists: ‘They are the
worst among the barbarians. They lack any creative talent; they have
not done anything for the good of humanity, and do not believe in
any god… Moses was an impostor’.
Diodorus Siculus (around 50 BCE), a Greek historian of
Sicily, wrote in his Bibliotheca Historica:

14
 The Jews treated other people as enemies and inferiors. The
‘usury’ is their practice of lending money with excessive interest
rates. This has caused for centuries the misery and poverty of the
Gentiles and has been a strong condemnation for Jewry.
Already King Antiochus’ advisors were telling him to
exterminate the Jewish nation completely because the Jews were the
only people in the world that resisted mixing with other nations.
They judged all other nations as their enemies and passed on that
enmity as an inheritance to future generations. Their holy books
contain aberrant rules and inscriptions hostile to all mankind.
The Greek Strabo (64 BCE-25 CE), in his Geographica admires
the figure of Moses but thinks that the priests distorted his history
and imposed on the Jews an unnatural lifestyle. In the following quote
it is clear that the Jews, already in those times, constituted a powerful
international mafia: ‘Jews have penetrated all countries, so it is
difficult to find a spot in the world where their tribe has not entered
and where they are not powerfully established’.
Apion, Egyptian writer and main promoter of the pogrom of
Alexandria of the year 38 CE that culminated in a massacre of 50,000
Jews at the hands of the Roman military, said that the Jews were
bound by a mutual pact to never help any foreigner, especially if he
was Greek:
The principles of Judaism oblige to hate the rest of
humanity. Once a year they take a non-Jew, they kill him and taste
his insides, swearing during the meal that they will hate the nation
from which the victim came. In the Holy of Holies of the sacred
temple of Jerusalem there is a golden ass head that the Jews idolise.
The Shabbat originated because of a pelvic ailment that the Jews
contracted when fleeing from Egypt, forced them to rest on the
seventh day.
Euphrates the Stoic (35–118) wrote: ‘The Jews have long been
in rebellion not only against Rome but against all humanity’.
Plutarch (50-120) was initiated into the mysteries of Apollo in
Chaeronea and served as a priest in the sanctuary of Delphi. His work
is one of the favourite sources of information about the lifestyles of
Sparta. In his Table Talks Plutarch wrote that the Jews neither kill nor
eat the pig or the donkey because they worship them religiously and
that in the Shabbat, they get drunk.
Philo of Byblos (64-141), a Hellenised Phoenician who wrote
about Phoenician history, the Phoenician religion, and the Jews,

15
speaks of human sacrifices of the firstborn among Hebrews
(remember the passage of Abraham and his son Isaac).
Celsus, a Greek philosopher of the 2nd century, especially
known for The True Word in which he attacked Christianity and also
Judaism, wrote: ‘The Jews are fugitives from Egypt who have never
done anything of value and were never held in esteem or had a good
reputation’.
Philostratus, a sophist of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, wrote:
The Jews are a people that have risen up against humanity
itself… They have made their life apart and irreconcilable, and
cannot share with the rest of humanity the pleasures of the table,
nor join their libations or prayers or sacrifices… They are separated
from us by a gulf greater than that which separates us from the
farthest Indies.

The conquest of Pompey

This section will deal with the first direct intervention of the
Roman authority on Jewish soil. In Israel, on the death of Alexander
Jannaeus (king of the Hasmonean dynasty, a descendant of the
Maccabees) in 76 BCE, his wife Salome Alexandra reigned as his
successor. Unlike her husband—who, as a good pro-Sadducee, had
severely repressed the Pharisees—Salome got on well with the
Pharisee faction. When she died, her two sons, Hyrcanus
II (associated with the Pharisees and supported by the Arab sheikh
Aretas of Petra) and Aristobulus II (supported by the Sadducees)
fought for power. In 63 BCE, both Hasmoneans sought support
from the Roman leader Pompey, whose victorious legions were
already in Damascus after having deposed the last Macedonian king
of Syria (the Seleucid Antigonus III), and now proposed to conquer
Phoenicia and Judea; perhaps to incorporate them into the new
Roman province of Syria. Pompey, who received money from both
factions, finally decided in favour of Hyrcanus II, perhaps because the
Pharisees represented the majority of the popular mass of Judea.
Aristobulus II, refusing to accept the general’s decision, entrenched
himself in Jerusalem with his men.
The Romans, therefore, besieged the capital. Aristobulus II
and his followers held out for three months, while the Sadducee
priests, in the temple, prayed and offered sacrifices to Yahweh.
Taking advantage of the fact that on the Shabbat the Jews did not
fight, the Romans undermined the walls of Jerusalem, after which

16
they quickly penetrated the city, capturing Aristobulus and killing
12,000 Jews.3 Pompey himself entered the Temple of Jerusalem,
curious to see the god of the Jews. Accustomed to seeing numerous
temples of many different peoples, and educated in the European
mentality according to which a god was to be represented in a human
form to receive the cult of mortals, he blinked in perplexity when he
saw no statue, no relief, no idol, no image… only a candelabrum,
vessels, a table of gold, two thousand talents of ‘sacred money’, spices
and mountains of Torah scrolls.
Did they not have a god? Were the Jews atheists? Did they
worship nothing? Money? Gold? A simple book as if the soul, the
feelings and the will of a people, depended on an inert roll of paper?
According to the Jewish historian Josephus, the confusion of the
general was considerable. The Roman had come to an abstract god.
For the Jewish mentality, Pompey committed a sacrilege, for
he penetrated the most sacred precinct of the Temple, which only the
High Priest could see. In addition, the legionaries made a sacrifice to
their banners, ‘polluting’ the area again.

Pompey the Great

After the fall of Jerusalem, all the territory conquered by the

Hasmonean or Maccabean dynasty was annexed by the Roman
Empire. Hyrcanus II remained like the governor of a district of Rome

3 The figures of the dead given throughout the text come from

the writings of Josephus, The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews, as well
as from Cassius Dio’s History of Rome. Most likely they are inflated to
magnify the importance of events, something common in history.

17
under the title of ethnarch, dominating everything that Rome had not
annexed: the territories of Galilee and Judea, which would pay taxes
to Rome but would retain their independence. Hyrcanus was also
made a High Priest, but in practice the power of Judea went to
Antipater of Idumea, as a reward for having helped the Romans.
Pompey annexed to Rome the most Hellenised areas of the Jewish
territory, while Hyrcanus remained as a governor of a district until his
death.
From the ethnic and cultural point of view, the Roman
conquest foreshadowed new and profound changes in that area of
conflict that is Near East. First of all, to the Jewish, Syrian, Arab and
Greek ethnic strata a Roman aristocracy occupying a military
character was going to be added. For the Greeks, this was a source of
joy: the decline of the Seleucid Empire had left them aside, and they
also had Rome literally in their pocket since the Romans felt a deep
and sincere admiration for the Hellenistic culture, not to mention that
many of their rulers had a Greek education that predisposed them to
be especially lenient with the Macedonian colonies. Moreover, in
Alexandria it was to be expected that, in view of the disturbances with
Jewry, the Romans would seize from the Jews the rights that
Alexander the Great had granted them, thereby ceasing to be citizens
on an equal footing with the Greeks, and the influence they exerted
through trade and the accumulation of money would be uprooted.
For these reasons, it is not surprising that the Decapolis (a set
of Hellenised cities surrounded by Syrians, Jews and Arabs) received
the Romans with open arms and began to count the years since the
conquest of Pompey.

The Jews in the Roman Empire

In 62-61 BCE, the proconsul Lucius Valerius Flaccus (son of
the consul of the same name and brother of the consul Gaius Valerius
Flaccus) confiscated the tribute of ‘sacred money’ that the Jews sent
to the Temple of Jerusalem. The Jews of Rome raised the populace
against Flaccus. The well-known Roman patriot Cicero defended
Flaccus against the accuser Laelius (a tribune of the plebs who would
later support Pompey against Julius Caesar) and referred to the Jews
of Rome in a few sentences of 59 BCE, which were reflected in his In
Defence of Flaccus, XVIII:
The next thing is that charge about the Jewish gold...

18
 I will speak in a low voice, just so as to let the judges hear
me. For men are not wanting who would be glad to excite those
people against me and against every eminent man, and I will not
assist them and enable them to do so more easily. As gold, under the
pretence of being given to the Jews, was accustomed every year to
be exported out of Italy and all the provinces to Jerusalem, Flaccus
issued an edict establishing a law that…
From these phrases, we can deduce that already in the 1st
century BCE, the Jews had great political power in Rome itself and
that they had an important capacity for social mobilization against
their political opponents, who lowered their voices out of fear: the
pressure of the lobbies.
Around 55 BCE the Republic, too large and militarised, was
calling for a new form of government. And it was de facto governed by
the so-called Triumvirate: an alliance of three great military
commanders: Marcus Licinius Crassus—the one who crushed the
Spartacus revolt in the year 74 BCE—, Pompey, the conqueror of
Syria, and Julius Caesar, the conqueror of Gaul.
In 54 BCE, Crassus, then Roman governor of the province of
Syria, while spending the winter in Judea decreed on the population a
‘war tax’ to finance his army, and also plundered the Temple of
Jerusalem, stealing its treasures (for value of ten thousand talents),
causing a huge stir in the Jewish quarter. Crassus and the vast majority
of his army would be massacred by the Parthians in the
unfortunate Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE. Lucius Cassius Longinus,
one of Crassus’ commanders who had managed to escape the Carrhae
massacre with his 500 horsemen, returned to Syria to prepare for a
counter-attack and re-establish the devalued Roman prestige in the
province. After expelling the Parthians, Cassius had to face a rebellion
of the Jewry. Cassius became an ally of Antipater and Hyrcanus II.
After taking Tariquea, a Judean stronghold and execute one of the
leaders of the rebellion who had ties with Aristobulus, Cassius
captured 30,000 Jews. In the year 52 BCE he sold them as slaves in
Rome.
This was the beginning of subversion within Rome itself,
since these 30,000 Jews (later freed by Mark Antony and his
descendants), dispersed throughout the Empire, would not cease
henceforth to promote agitation against the hated Roman authority.
They would have an important role in the construction of the
underground catacombs and synagogues, which were later the first

19
preaching field of Christianity. Cassius would later be appointed the
governor of Syria.
In 49 BCE Crassus was killed and the Triumvirate broken.
Civil war broke out between Pompey and Caesar: one of whom,
inevitably, was to become the autocratic dictator of the entire empire.
Hyrcanus II and Antipater decided to take sides with Caesar, who had
Antipater as regent. Julius Caesar would soon take control of the
situation, and Pompey was assassinated in Egypt by conspirators.
In 48 BCE, while the Roman and Ptolemaic fleets were
engaged in a naval battle, an event was held to further tense the
relations between Jews, Greeks and Egyptians: the burning of the
library of Alexandria. Of all the ethnic groups that were in the city,
none could have anything against the library. The Greeks had
founded it; the Egyptians had contributed much to it, and the
Romans sincerely admired this Hellenistic legacy. The Jews, however,
saw in the library an accumulation of ‘profane’ and ‘pagan’ wisdom,
so that if there was a group suspected of the first burning of the
library, logically it was the Jewish quarter or the most orthodox and
fundamentalists sectors. At least that is what the inhabitants of
Alexandria should have thought.
In 31 BCE, the year of a strong earthquake in Israel that killed
thousands of people, Cleopatra and Mark Antony committed suicide
after their fall from grace. Josephus mentions, during the reign of
Augustus, a judicial complaint in which 8,000 Jews supported one of
the parties. These Jews were to be all adult males, and since a nuclear
family used to be of four or five people, we may conclude that at the
time of Augustus there were about 35,000 Jews in Rome.

Herod the Great

Augustus (born Gaius Octavius), the successor of Julius
Caesar at the head of the Roman Empire, appointed Herod, son of
Antipater, as king of Judea, and financed his army with Roman
money. Herod was a capable, brutal, competent and unscrupulous
leader (he practically dispatched his entire family), as well as an
excellent warrior, hunter and archer. He expelled the Judean
Parthians; protected Jerusalem from pillage, persecuted the bandits
and highwaymen and executed the Jews who had supported the
Parthian marionette regime, consolidating himself in 37 BCE as king
of Judea.

20
 Although Herod is portrayed by history as a ruthless, cruel
and selfish king, the reality is that, as hard as it may seem to believe,
as a sovereign he was one of the best that this land ever had. Even in
25 BCE he sacrificed important personal wealth to import large
quantities of grain from Egypt, with the aim of fighting a famine that
was spreading misery in his country. Despite this and everything he
did for Israel, Herod is viewed with antipathy by the Jews, for having
been a pro-Roman, pro-Greek sovereign and, above all, because his
Jewishness was questioned: Herod descended from his father’s side of
Antipater (the one who supported Cassius), who in turn descended
from those Idumeans (or Edomites) forced to convert to Judaism
when John Hyrcanus, a Hasmonean king, conquered Idumea (or
Edom) around 135 BCE.
On the maternal side, Herod descended from the Arabs, and
the transmission of the Jewish condition is matrilineal. Therefore,
although Herod identified himself as a Jew and was considered a Jew
by most authorities, the masses of the Jewish people, especially the
most orthodox, systematically distrusted the king—especially in view
of the opulent and luxurious life he imposed on his court. They held
for him a contempt perhaps comparable to the one that the Spaniards
of the 16th century felt by the Marranos or Jews converted to
Christianity. For his education and Greco-Roman inclinations, it is
more likely that this king felt less Jewish, although he certainly wanted
to please Jewry and be an effective sovereign by the prosperity that he
brought to them. More rational than his fundamentalist subjects,
Herod understood that enraging Rome was not good business.
Herod gave Israel a splendour that it had never known, not
even under David or Solomon. He embellished Jerusalem with
Hellenistic architecture and sculpture; carried out an ambitious
program of public works, and in 19 BCE demolished and rebuilt the
very Temple in Jerusalem, considering it too small and mediocre. This
angered the Jews, who hated Herod for being a protégée of the
Romans, whom they hated even more. Undoubtedly, the most
orthodox sectors of the Jewish quarter were happy with the Temple
as it was, and they must have seen as bad its conversion in a more
Roman-looking building, especially when the king ordered to decorate
the entrance with a golden imperial eagle. (Paradoxically, the Jews
would later mourn the destruction of this same Temple at the hands
of the Romans.)

21
 Herod was continually involved in conspiracies with his
family, many of whom, including his own wife and two of his
children, were executed at his request. As he was getting old, he
developed ulcers and convulsions. He died in 4 BCE, at the age of 69.
Eventually it was said that he had ‘ascended to the throne like a fox;
ruled like a tiger, and died like a dog’.
In that same year of 4 BCE, two Jewish Pharisees called
Zadok (or Tsadoq) and Judas the Galilee (also called John of Gamala)
called for not paying tribute to Rome. There was a Pharisee uprising,
and the rabbis ordered to destroy the ‘idolatrous’ image of the
imperial eagle that Herod had placed at the entrance to the Temple in
Jerusalem. Herod Archelaus, the son of Herod, and Varus, a Roman
commander, stifled the revolt harshly and had nearly 3,000 Jews
crucified.
It is thought that perhaps this first revolt was originated by
the Zealot movement. Archelaus, despite having been proclaimed
king by his army, did not assume the title until he had presented his
respects, in Rome, to Augustus. He was made the Roman client king
of Judea, Samaria and Idumea, despite of the sentiments of the
Roman Jews, who feared him for the cruelty with which he had
repressed the Pharisee uprising. Archelaus is mentioned in the gospel
of Matthew, since Joseph, Mary and Jesus had escaped to Egypt to
avoid the massacre of the innocents (supposedly, that year Herod
Archelaus ordered the execution of all the firstborn of Bethlehem).4
In the year 6 CE, after the complaints of the Jews, Augustus
dismisses Archelaus, sending him to Gaul. Samaria, Judea and Idumea

4Note of the editor: An obviously fictional gospel tale, as no

Roman historian mentions it, not even the Jew Josephus.

22
are formally annexed as a province of the Roman Empire, with the
name of Judea. The Jews become governed by Roman ‘procurators’: a
kind of governors who had to maintain peace, Romanise the area and
exercise the fiscal policy of Rome by collecting taxes. They also
arrogated to themselves the right to appoint the High Priest of their
choice. The Jews hated the puppet kings despite the fact that they
imposed order, developed the area and, in short, civilised the country.
Paradoxically, from the beginning the Jewish quarter was also highly
hostile to the Romans, whose intervention they had practically
begged.
Now, in addition to the Temple tribute, they also had to pay
tribute to Caesar—and, by tradition, money was not something the
Jews happily lavished. That same year, the consul Publius Sulpicius
Quirinius arrived in Syria to make a census in the name of Rome with
the objective of establishing taxes. Since Judea had been annexed to
Syria, Quirinius included the Jews in the census. As a result of this
and of the new irruption of European culture in the area, the
fundamentalist terrorist movement of the Zealots flourished.
Josephus considers the Zealots as the fourth Jewish sect
together with—from least to greatest religious extremism—the
Essenes, the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Zealots were the most
fundamentalists of all: they refused to pay taxes to the Roman
Empire. For them, all other Jewish factions were heretical; any Jew
who collaborated minimally with the Roman authorities was guilty of
treason and should be executed. The armed struggle, the militarisation
of the Jewish people and the expulsion of the Romans, were the only
way to achieve the redemption of Zion. According to the New
Testament, the apostle Simon, one of the disciples of Jesus, belonged
to this faction (Luke, 6:15).
Among the Zealots the Sicarii stood out, a faction even more
fanatical, sectarian and radicalised, so called by the sica: a dagger that
could be easily hidden and used to kill their enemies. The Zealots and
Sicarii would form the hard core of the Great Jewish Revolt which we
will see in the next chapter. They were also the most active element of
Judaism since it is probable that most Jews, although they detested
both Greeks and Romans, would simply enrich themselves in peace,
agreeing with whom it was necessary for it. As it could not be
otherwise, the Sicarii and Zealots also fought among themselves.
There were a total of twenty-four Jewish factions that generally
fought against each other, in a very representative frame of what the
rabbis called Sinat chinam, that is, ‘groundless hatred’ from Jew to Jew

23
(maybe because hating non-Jews does make sense): an attitude that
perhaps has been better caricatured in the movie Life of Brian.

Tiberius

In year 19, with Jewry in process of climbing to acquire

influence at Rome itself, Tiberius expelled the Jews from the city,
instigated by the Senate. Concerned about the popularity of Judaism
among freed slaves, he forbids Jewish rites in the capital of the
Empire, considering Jewry ‘a danger to Rome’ and ‘unworthy to
remain within the walls of the City of the Legions’. That year, on the
occasion of a famine in the province of Egypt, Tiberius denies to the
Alexandrian Jews grain reserves, since he does not consider them his
citizens.
Tiberius set in motion anti-Jewish measures during his reign,
during which Jesus was executed.

Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdaeorvm

‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no
means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you will come
a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel’. —Matthew, 2:6
‘…which you have prepared in the sight of all nations: a
light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people
Israel’. —Luke 2: 31
‘You worship what you do not know; we worship what
we do know, for salvation is from the Jews’. — John 4:22

24
 ‘Christus, from whom the name [Christians] had its
origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius
at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a
most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment,
again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but
even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every
part of the world find their centre and become popular’. —
Tacitus, Annals, 15: 44, about the persecution decreed by Nero.
Yosef (a.k.a. Joseph), Jesus’ father, was a Jew from the House
of David. But since Yosef supposedly did not intervene in the
Virgin’s pregnancy, we will go on to examine the lineage of Miriam
(a.k.a. Mary). Luke the Evangelist was an individual from Antioch, in
present-day Turkey. According to him, this woman was from the
family of David and the tribe of Judah, and the angel who appeared to
her predicted that a son would be born to whom Jehovah ‘will give
him the throne of David, his father, and he will reign in the house of
Jacob’.
According to the gospel story, Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
In the Gospel of Matthew (1: 1) he is associated with Abraham and
David, and in that same gospel (21: 9) it is described how the Jewish
crowds in Jerusalem acclaim Jesus by shouting ‘Hosanna to the Son
of David!’ without mentioning the wizards of the East who visited the
Messiah by following a star and asking ‘Where is the king of the Jews
who was born?’ (Matthew, 2: 1-2).
Jesus, who never intended to found a new religion but to
preserve Orthodox Judaism made it clear, ‘I have not come to repeal
the Law [of Moses, the Torah] but to fulfil it’ and, enraged to see that
the Jerusalem Temple was being desecrated by merchants, he threw
them with blows. This Jewish agitator, like an Ayatollah, did not
hesitate to face—with the authority given to him by being called
rabbi—the other Jewish factions of his time, especially the Sadducees.
Jesus surrounded himself with a circle of disciples among
whom we could highlight the mentioned Simon the Zealot,
Bartholomew (of whom Jesus himself says in the Gospel of John,
where he is called Nathanael, ‘here is a true Israelite’); Judas Iscariot
(who betrayed him to the Sadducees for money), Peter, John and
Matthew.5 Although there is not much information about the rest of

5 Note of the editor: Not to be confused with Matthew the

Evangelist, a Greek-speaking author.

25
the Apostles, it is necessary to remember that, until the trip of Paul
(also Jewish) to Damascus after the death of Jesus, in order to be a
Christian it was essential to be a circumcised, orthodox and observant
Jew. That the doctrine of Jesus was addressed to the Jews is evident in
Matt. 10:6, when he says to the twelve apostles: ‘Do not go among the
Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost
sheep of Israel’. The phrase implies to rescue those Jews who have
strayed from the Law of Moses. This was because ‘if you believed in
Moses you would believe me’ (John, 5:46).
In the year 26, Tiberius, who had expelled the Jews from
Rome seven years before in times when the zeitgeist was fully anti-
Semitic, appointed Pontius Pilate as a procurator of Judea, a Spaniard
born in Tarragona or Astorga: the only decent character of the New
Testament according to Nietzsche.
After the incident with the banners of Pompey, the Jews had
obtained from previous emperors the promise not to enter Jerusalem
with the displayed banners, but Pilate enters parading in the city,
showing high the standards with the image of the emperor. This, the
golden shields placed in the residence of the governor, and the use of
the money of the temple to construct an aqueduct for Jerusalem (that
transported water from a distance of 40 km), provoked an angry
Jewish reaction. To suppress the insurrection, Pilate infiltrated the
soldiers among the crowds and, when he visited the city, gave a signal
for the infiltrated legionaries to take out the swords and start a
slaughter.
In the year 33, after various skirmishes of the Jesus gang with
rival factions—particularly with the Sadducees, who at that time held
religious power and saw with discomfort how a new vigorous faction
arose—, Pilate orders the punishment of Jesus, at the request of the
Sadducees. Jesus is scourged and the Roman legionaries, who must
have had a somewhat macabre sense of humour and knew that
Yeshua proclaimed himself Messiah, put a crown of thorns and a reed
in his right hand, and shout at him with sarcasm, ‘Hail, king of the
Jews!’ (Matthew 27: 26-31 and Mark 15: 15-20). When they crucified
him they placed the inscription at the top of the cross: IESVS
NAZARENVS REX IVDAEORVM (Jesus Nazarene King of the Jews).
Yeshua of Nazareth, known to posterity as Jesus, was one of
many Jewish agitators who were in Judea during the turbulent Roman
occupation. Executed around the year 33 during the reign of Tiberius,
his figure would be taken by Sha’ul of Tarsus (a.k.a. Paul): a Jewish
Pharisee marvelled at the power of subversion that enclosed the sect

26
founded by Jesus. Jesus was, then, one of many Jewish preachers
who, before him and after him, proclaimed themselves Messiah. Only
that, in this case, Sha’ul of Tarsus (now Turkey) would soon call him,
instead of masiah, Christus: the Greek equivalent of ‘Messiah’. After
changing his name to Paul he preached the figure of ‘Christ’,
indissolubly linked to the rebellion against Rome, throughout the
empire, deciding that Christianity should be spread out of its narrow
Jewish circle and introduced in Rome.

Caligula

In 38, Caligula, the successor of Tiberius, sends his

friend Herod Agrippa to the troubled city of Alexandria, to watch
over Aulus Avilius Flaccus, the prefect of Egypt, who did not enjoy
precisely the confidence of the emperor and who—according to the
Jew Philo of Alexandria—was an authentic villain. The arrival of
Agrippa to Alexandria was greeted with great protests by the Greek
community, as they thought he was coming to proclaim himself king
of the Jews. Agrippa was insulted by a crowd, and Flaccus did nothing
to punish the offenders, despite the fact that the victim was an envoy
of the emperor. This encouraged the Greeks to demand that statues
of Caligula be placed in the synagogues, as a provocation to Jewry.
This simple act seemed to be the sign of an uprising: the
Greeks and Egyptians attacked the synagogues and set them on fire.
The Jews were expelled from their homes, which were looted, and
thereafter segregated in a ghetto from which they could not leave:
since they were stoned, beaten or burned alive, while others ended up
in the sand to serve as food to the beasts in those macabre circus

27
shows so common in the Roman world. According to Philo, Flaccus
did nothing to prevent these riots and murders, and even supported
them, as did the Egyptian Apion, whom we have seen criticising the
Jewish quarter in the section devoted to Hellenistic anti-Semitism.
To celebrate the emperor’s birthday (August 31, a Shabbat),
members of the Jewish council were arrested and flogged in the
theatre; others were crucified. When the Jewish community reacted,
the Roman soldiers retaliated by looting and burning down thousands
of Jewish houses, desecrating the synagogues and killing 50,000 Jews.
When they were ordered to cease the killing, the local Greek
population, inflamed by Apion (not surprisingly, Josephus has a work
called Contra Apion) continued the riots. Desperate, the Jews sent
Philo to reason with the Roman authorities. The Jewish philosopher
wrote a text entitled Contra Flaccus and, along with the surely negative
report that Agrippa had given to Caligula, the governor was executed.
After these events, things calmed down and the Jews did not
suffer violence as long as they stayed within the confines of their
ghetto. However, although Flaccus’ successor allowed the
Alexandrian Jewry to give their version of the events, in the year 40
there were again riots among the Jews (who were outraged by the
construction of an altar) and among the Greeks, who accused the
Jews of refusing to worship the emperor. The religious Jews ordered
to destroy the altar and, in retaliation, Caligula made a decision that
really showed how little he knew the Jewish quarter: he ordered to
place a statue of himself at the Temple of Jerusalem. According to
Philo, Caligula ‘considered the majority of Jews suspects, as if they
were the only people who wished to oppose him’ (On the Embassy to
Gaius and Flaccus). Publius Petronius, governor of Syria, who knew the
Jews well and feared the possibility of a civil war, tried to delay as
long as possible the placement of the statue until Agrippa convinced
Caligula that it was a poor decision.
In 41, Caligula, who already promised to be an anti-Jewish
emperor, was assassinated in Rome, which unleashed the violence of
his German bodyguards, who had not been able to prevent his death
and who, because of their peculiar sense of fidelity, tried to avenge
him by killing many conspirators, senators and even innocent
bystanders who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the
wrong time. Claudius, the uncle of Caligula, would become the master
of the situation and, after being appointed emperor by the Praetorian
Guard, ordered the execution of the assassins of his nephew, many of

28
whom were political magistrates who wanted to reinstate the
Republic.
Here is the probable cause of the unprecedented historical
defamation of this emperor: The texts of Roman history would
eventually fall into the hands of the Christians, who were mostly of
Jewish origin and viscerally detested the emperors. Since, according to
Orwell, ‘he who controls the past controls the present’, Christians
adulterated Roman historiography, turning the emperors who had
opposed them and their Jewish ancestors into disturbed monsters.
Thus, we do not have a single Roman emperor who has
participated in harsh Jewish reprisals who has not been defamed by
accusations of homosexuality, cruelty or perversion. The Spanish
historian José Manuel Roldán Hervás has dismantled many of the
false accusations against the historical figure of Caligula.

Claudius

In the year 49, Claudius, who was sick and tired about the
conflict of the Alexandrian Jewish lobby, wrote:
Wherefore, once again I conjure you that, on the one hand,
the Alexandrians show themselves forbearing and kindly towards
the Jews who for many years have dwelt in the same city, and
dishonour none of the rites observed by them in the worship of
their god, but allow them to observe their customs as in the time of
the Deified Augustus, which customs I also, after hearing both sides,
have sanctioned.
And on the other hand, I explicitly order the Jews not to
agitate for more privileges than they formerly possessed, and not in
the future to send out a separate embassy as though they lived in a
separate city (a thing unprecedented), and not to force their way into
gymnasiarchic or cosmetic games, while enjoying their own
privileges and sharing a great abundance of advantages in a city not
their own, and not to bring in or admit Jews who come down the

29
 river from Egypt or from Syria, a proceeding which will compel me
to conceive serious suspicions.
Otherwise I will by all means take vengeance on them as
fomenters of a general plague infecting the whole world.
Claudius expelled all Jews from Rome in the year 50.
Apparently, according to Suetonius, ‘they acted without ceasing at the
instigation of Chrestus’. As Pontifex Maximus, Claudius tried to stop
the expansion of Eastern cults, including Christianity and Judaism,
into the Empire.

Nero

By the year 50 Judea is already part of the Roman Empire, but

its Romanisation will never materialise; on the contrary, the
Judaisation of Rome itself will be achieved. The next decade, the
Roman minister Sextus Afranius Burrus was assassinated in the year
62 by orders of Nero’s wife, Poppaea Sabina, or perhaps by Jews after
he denied them Roman citizenship in Greece.
Poppaea Sabina is an interesting figure as a beautiful woman,
ambitious, unscrupulous and immoral; conspiratorial, manipulative
and typical of a society too civilised—a real harpy. Having already
married twice, and because of her influences as a lover, Poppaea
convinces Nero to dispatch of his own mother and divorce his own
wife—after which she is exiled and forced to cut her veins: her corpse
is beheaded and her head presented to Poppaea. With such free way,
Poppaea marries Nero and breaks into high Roman society with
excesses in regard to coquetry, extravagances and high-handedness.
Precisely at the instigation of her intrigues, the famous Spanish
philosopher Seneca is pushed to suicide.

30
 Poppaea openly sympathised with the Jew and the Christian
cause, favouring them through palace conspiracies behind the
emperor’s back. For example, through Poppaea Sabina, Josephus
himself was freed, who had been sent to Rome in order to negotiate
better conditions for his people. Nero, tired of having the conspiracy
near him, had his wife executed. The official version is that he kicked
her in the belly while she was pregnant. The problem is that those
who divulged this version had a strong enmity with the emperor, so it
should be taken with caution.
This was followed by a bloodthirsty Roman repression against
Jews and Christians, in which Jewish ‘revolutionaries’ like Paul and
Peter fell. This execution of key characters in the Jewish strategic
movement to infect the Roman foundations, along with some other
factors, would be the trigger for a massive Jewish revolt, which we
will deal with in the next chapter.
Nero has gone down in history as a cruel, tyrannical,
perverted, capricious emperor given to excesses, and it is really
incredible the amount of trash that Christians poured into his
biography, to such an extent that the name of Nero is already
synonymous with tyranny, caprice and depravity. The problem of
Nero, we are led to believe, is that he did not tolerate Judaism or
Christianity; and that not a few Jews and Christians found their bones
in the Colosseum, in the jaws of some lion, under the thunderous
applause of the people of Rome by his express mandate. The reality is
that, in the year 64, there is a great fire in Rome that destroys many
districts and leaves the city in a state of emergency. Nero welcomes
the victims of the fire, opening the doors of his palaces so that the
people have a place to stay. In addition, he pays from his own private
funds the reconstruction of the city.
What the emperor did do was take action against the
Christians. In the words of the famous Roman historian Tacitus (55-
120), ‘Nero blamed and inflicted the cruellest tortures on a class hated
for its abominations, called Christians by the populace’. He orders to
arrest them ‘not so much because of arsonists but because of their
hatred of the human race’.
Nero, despite having shown himself to be magnanimous and
generous to the people, passed into modern history as the Antichrist,
a ruthless killer of Christians who murdered his own wife on a whim,
and who for fear of conspiracy surrounded himself with a personal
guard of praetorians of German origin—the only ones he considered
sufficiently loyal. He has also passed to the popular mind as the

31
perpetrator of the arson in Rome while he played the lyre, singing a
song before the flames; when in real history Nero was not even in
Rome when the fire started.

Chapter 2
Rome contra Judaea (The Jewish-Roman wars)
In the previous chapter we mentioned an anti-Semitic (anti-
Jewish and anti-Christian) repression that the Roman Emperor Nero
ordered in the year 62. Now we will see how all the previous events
evolved into an escalation of ethnic violence, which will culminate
with the unleashing of three immense wars in which, for the first
time, we will see the eradication of the Greek ethnic communities of
Asia Minor and North Africa at the hands of the Jewish uprisings.
In 64, Nero sends Gessius Florus as procurator to the
province of Judea. Josephus blames Florus for all the tumults that
happened in the area, but the truth is that, as we have seen, they did
not start with him. Also, because he was a Jew and a Sadducee, the
works of Josephus must always be read with caution. For example, he
has a writing called Against the Greeks, in which he makes apology for
Judaism.
In Caesarea, a Jewish sympathizer of Hellenism sacrificed
several birds in front of the synagogue, which, in the traditional
Jewish mentality, contaminated the building as we have seen several
times before. With this precedent, but with a long history of previous
hostility, the Greek and Jewish communities of Caesarea became
entangled in a judicial dispute in which, with Roman mediation, the
Greeks won. Under the advice of Gessius Florus, Nero revoked the
citizenship of the Jews of the city—which left them at the mercy of
the very anti-Jewish population.
The Greeks soon began a massive pogrom during which they
massacred thousands of Jews. Florus and the Roman military—who
logically identified with the Greeks rather than with the Jews, and
perhaps even planned to use the Greeks as the vanguard of ethnic
cleansing in the area—did not intervene to protect the Jewry or pacify
the city, allowing Jews to be murdered and synagogues to be profaned
on port and starboard. According to Josephus, when the rabbis took
away the sacred scrolls to save them from being burned by the flames,
Florus ordered them to be thrown into dungeons. This was too much
for a group as cohesive as the Jews, and they reacted with more

32
violence, which only intensified the pogrom and made it spread to
other populations, with the consequent Roman reprisals.
Jerusalem, then, began to fill with Jewish refugees from
Caesarea and other areas whose houses had been burned and whose
property had been confiscated by the Romans, claiming vengeance
and oozing resentment from all pores. The massacre of Jews in
Caesarea turned out to be the trigger of a great war that, in any case,
had been taking place for some time.

First Judeo-Roman war:

The Great Jewish Revolt (66-73 CE)
‘The East wants to rebel and Judas wants
to take over world dominion’. —Tacitus.
In the year 66 Florus arrived in Jerusalem, where he
demanded a tribute of seventeen talents from the temple
treasury. Eleazar ben Hanania, the son of the high priest, reacted by
stopping the prayers and sacrifices in honour of the emperor of
Rome, and ordered to attack the Roman garrison. The garrison
responded by killing around 3,600 Jews, looting the market, entering
homes, arresting many of the Jewish leaders, whipping them in public
and make them crucified. The next day, however, the concentration
of rebellious Jews had increased. A civil war was about to explode.
On August 8, 66 the Zealots and Sicarii struck a quick blow in
Jerusalem: they murdered the Roman detachment and put all the
Greeks to the sword. In a synchronised way, the Jews from all
provinces and Roman colonies rose up. In Jerusalem a council was
formed that sent sixty emissaries throughout the Empire with the goal
to harangue the various Jewish quarters. Each one of these emissaries
declared himself the Messiah and proclaimed the beginning of a sort
of ‘new order’. Herod Agrippa, the ethnarch of Judea, in view of the
fact that the popular masses were in full boiling, chose to take his
suitcases and leave the province for a good season.
The outcome was the return of Jewish uprisings and, in
reaction, more anti-Jewish pogroms in Caesarea, Damascus and
Alexandria, not counting the intervention of the Roman legions,
which harshly repressed the Jewish quarters of the aforementioned
cities and also in Ashkelon, Hippos, Tire and Ptolemaida. The more
moderate and sensible Jewish sectors advised to immediately reach an
agreement with Rome, but the criterion that was going to prevail
among Jewry was that of the Sicarii and Zealots who, fanatically,

33
vowed to fight to the death, entrenching themselves in the
impregnable fortresses of Jerusalem, fortifying the walls of the city
and mobilizing the entire population.
Under the command of Nero, Cestius Gallus, the Roman
legate in Syria, concentrated troops in Acre (a square that would be
many centuries later an important strategic centre of the European
Crusaders) with the aim of marching to Jerusalem, devastate the
Jewish populations found on his way and crush the revolt. Gallus
took the city of Jaffa, killing 8,400 Jews. Later the refugees would
regroup in the city and devote themselves to banditry and piracy,
attracting a second Roman intervention, in which the city would be
definitely razed and another 2,400 Jews killed. After encountering the
solid fortifications of Jerusalem, Gallus’ forces withdrew and were
intercepted by the Jewish fanatics in an ambush directed by elements
from the Zealots and the Sicarii, who massacred 6,000 Romans in the
same place in which the Maccabees had defeated the Macedonians
centuries before. The Jews, excited by the symbolic repetition of the
event, formed a government led by the most fundamentalist elements,
and minted coins with the inscription ‘Zion’s freedom’.
This tragic disaster undoubtedly moved the Roman authorities
to take more seriously the rebellion’s operations. Nero put General
Vespasian in charge of the repression. With four legions—the Legio
V Macedonica, the Legio X Fretensis , the Legio XII Fulminata and
the Legio XV Apollinaris (a total of 70,000 soldiers, that is to say, a
formidable force, although it faced an enemy far superior in
number)—Vespasian quelled the Jewish revolt in the north of the
province, re-conquering Galilee in the year 67, capturing there
Josephus, the famous historian and Samaria and Idumea in 68. The
Jewish leaders John of Giscala (Zealot) and Simon bar Giora (Sicarii)
fled to the fortified Jerusalem.
In Alexandria, the Greeks organised a public assembly in the
amphitheatre to send an embassy to the emperor. The Jews, who
were interested in parleying with Nero, came in large crowds, and as
soon as the Greeks saw them, they began to shout, called them
enemies, accused them of being spies, ran towards them and attacked
them (according to Josephus’ version of the event). Other Jews were
killed while fleeing, and three were captured and burned alive. The
rest of the Jews soon arrived to defend their coreligionists, beginning
to throw stones at the Greeks and then threatening to set fire to the
amphitheatre. Tiberius Julius Alexander, the governor of the city,
tried to convince the Jews not to provoke the Roman army, but this

34
advice was taken as a threat: the tumults continued and, consequently,
the governor, without patience, introduced two legions in the city, the
Legio III Cyrenaica and the Legio XXII Deiotariana, to punish the
Jewish quarter. The legions were given carte blanche to kill the Jews and
also to loot their property, whereupon the soldiers entered the ghetto
and, according to Jewish sources, burned houses with Jews inside,
also killing women, children and the elderly until the whole
neighbourhood was full of blood and 50,000 people were dead.
The survivors, desperate, begged Alexander for mercy, and
the governor took pity on them. He ordered the legions to cease the
massacre, and they obeyed in the act. Alexander would later
participate in the siege of Jerusalem.

Siege and fall of Jerusalem: the destruction of the Second Temple

That same year, 68, Nero was killed in Rome and a civil war
broke out. The whole Roman Empire was in check. On the one hand,
the numerous Jewish masses, in full boiling mode, challenged the
Roman power in Judea and on the other, they did it in the bosom of
Rome itself. If the Roman power in the East faltered, the Parthians
would have been able to take advantage quickly to conquer Asia
Minor and fortify themselves in the area, which would have been a
huge catastrophe for Rome. The government was staggering gently,
but Vespasian returned to Rome and fought against Vitellius, who
claimed to be Nero’s successor. After defeating the fat Vitellius,
Vespasian was named emperor and entrusted his 26-year-old son
Titus with the military operations of repression and the siege of the
Jewish capital.
Titus surrounded Jerusalem with the four legions, cutting off
supplies of water and food. He also increased the pressures on the
needs of the city by allowing the pilgrims to enter to celebrate the
Passover and then preventing them from leaving.
In besieged Jerusalem with famine and epidemics, thousands
and thousands of lives were claimed. The Jews who constituted the
hard core of the rebellion—the Zealots and the Sicarii—threw down
the wall the pacifists or the counter-revolutionaries suspected of not
communing with the Zionist cause, or of seeking an understanding
with Rome to obtain favourable conditions for their people.
According to some passages of the very Talmud, the Sicarii and
Zealots (leaders such as Menahem ben Ya’ir, Eleazar ben Ya’ir, and
Simon Bar Giora) came to commit atrocities against the Jewish

35
civilian population, even preventing them from receiving food, to
force them to be obedient and commit to the cause.
The defenders that constituted the active element of the
resistance must have been about 60,000 men. They were divided into
the Zealots under the command of Eleazar ben Simon who occupied
the Antonia Fortress and the Temple; the Sicarii under the command
of Bar Giora, centered in the high city, and the Idumeans and others
under John of Giscala. There was an obvious rivalry between the
combatant factions, which erupted from time to time in open
fighting. The population of the fortified Jerusalem exceeded three
million people, of whom most were willing to fight, hoping that their
god would lend a hand against the infidels.
While the Romans attacked, again and again, the fortifications
with immense casualties on their part, the Zealots occasionally left the
ramparts to make raids in which they managed to assassinate
unsuspecting Roman soldiers. After one of these actions, Titus, using
very clear tactics of intimidation, made deploy at the foot of the city
his entire army with the aim of intimidating the besieged and appealed
to Josephus, who yelled at the beleaguered a quite reasonable speech.
Apparently, for the ears of the Jews dominated by their superstitions
and surely awaiting any moment for an intervention of Yahweh,
Josephus only managed to get them angrier and was shot with an
arrow that wounded his arm. Josephus descended from a long
Sadduceean priestly line related to the Hasmonean dynasty of pre-
Roman times. During the Great Jewish Revolt, the Sanhedrin made
him governor of Galilee. After defending the Yodfat fortress for three
weeks, he surrendered to the Romans who killed almost all of his
men. Josephus, who was hiding in a cistern with another Jew, was
saved by demonstrating his great training and intelligence and
predicting to the general his future appointment as emperor of Rome.
Later, he would accompany Titus and the Romans who used him to
try to negotiate with the Sanhedrin.
After this, the Jews launched another sudden raid in which
they almost succeeded in capturing Titus himself. The Romans were
trained for frontal clashes with enemy armies; they were
unaccustomed to the dirty fight of guerrilla warfare, in which the
chivalry of combat is totally nullified.
In May of 70 the Romans opened with their battering rams a
breach in the third wall of Jerusalem, after which they also broke the
second wall and penetrated like a swarm of wasps into the city. Titus’
intention was to go to the Antonia Fortress, which was next to the

36
Temple: a vital strategic point of the Jewish defence. But as soon as
the Roman troops surpassed the second wall, they were engaged in
violent street fighting against the Zealots and the civil population
mobilised by them, and despite losing thousands of men to the
superiority of legionary training in body to body combat they
continued to attack, until they were ordered to retreat to the Temple
to avoid useless casualties.

A Statue of Titus modelled after the Doryphoros of Polykleitos, Vatican

Museum (compare it with the sculpture by the end of the chapter). As
can be seen, an anti-Hellenist Pope ordered this and many other Greco-
Roman statues to be ‘castrated’ centuries after they were sculpted.

Josephus tried, once again unsuccessfully, to negotiate with

the besieged authorities to prevent the bloodbath from continuing to
grow. The Antonia Fortress had been built by Herod in honour of
Mark Antony, who had supported him. The legions of Titus, faced
with a building built with Roman efficiency, had to overcome a
thousand calamities to take it. Several times the Romans tried to break
or climb the walls of the fortress without success. Finally, they
managed to take it in an undercover assault, during which a small
Roman party silently assassinated the Zealot guards who were
sleeping. The fortress was then filled with legionaries. Although Titus
planned to use the fortress as a base to breach the walls of the

37
Temple and take it, a Roman soldier (according to Josephus, the
Romans were enraged against the Jews for their treacherous attacks)
threw a torch that set the wall on fire.
The Second Temple was levelled, and to top it all for the
Jewish quarter, the flames quickly spread to other residential areas of
Jerusalem. When they saw their Temple being burned many Jews
committed suicide, thinking that Yahweh had become angry with
them; had abandoned them, and was sending them to a kind of
apocalypse. At this time the legions quickly crushed the resistance,
while some Jews escaped through underground tunnels, and others,
the more fanatical ones, barricaded themselves in the high city and
Herod’s citadel. After building siege towers, what remained of the
combative element was massacred by the Roman pilum and gladius,
and the city came under effective Roman control on September 8.
In the spring of 71, assured Jerusalem, Titus marches to
Rome, leaving the Legio X Fretensis, commanded by the new
governor of Judea, Lucius Flavius Silva, in charge of giving the coup de
grace to the Jewish resistance. The last bastion of the entire rebellion
was the fortified city of Masada, which had been erected by the
Maccabees in a strategic area. Herod had improved it in his attempt to
keep the Jews happy, but when he died, Masada’s trade declined and
became uninhabited. However, after the war it housed what remained
of the hard Zionist core: the Zealots and the Sicarii led by Eleazar ben
Ya’ir.
In the year 72, Lucius Flavius Silva was at the foot of Masada.
When, after a painful siege, the Romans entered the fortress the
following year, they discovered that the 953 defenders had committed
suicide.

Consequences of the Great Jewish Revolt

In the year 73, after seven long years of an incredibly
bloodthirsty war against the greatest military power on the planet,
Judea as a whole was devastated; Jerusalem reduced to ashen ruins,
and the Temple completely destroyed, except for a wall that remained
standing, the Mur des Lamentations. Judea became a separate province,
and the Legio X Fretensis permanently camped in the Jewish capital.
According to ancient sources, 1,100,000 Jews died during the
siege and during the legions’ invasion, and another 97,000, including
the leaders Simon Bar Giora and John of Giscala, were captured and
sold as slaves throughout the Roman Empire. The vestiges of

38
independence and political unity of the Jewish quarter were
pulverised, and the Jews became again a people without a country.
Once re-conquered the whole province of Judea, Rome coined
commemorative coins on which appeared the profile of Emperor
Vespasian and, on the other side, the inscription IVDEA CAPTA
(conquered Judea), under which Judea was represented by a crying
woman.

The Jewish rebellion was condemned as a kamikaze action

from the beginning. Simply, the Roman Empire was a force too
irresistible, and only the fundamentalist fanaticism, preached by
minority social sectors, could drag Jewry to fight until the end in a
way so tenacious with an enemy that was the bearer of an infinitely
superior culture and, above all, of a better and more effective way of
acting in the world. Will and faith may move mountains but in this
case the Jews did not achieve miracles but the destruction of their
holy land and the hardening of the Roman occupation.
The date of the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70 signals the
beginning of the so-called Galut or Diaspora: the dispersion of the
Jews throughout the world. In reality, the Jews were already more
numerous outside Judea than in Judea—the largest Jewish population
in the world was in Alexandria—, but the destruction of their capital
decapitated the Judaic centralism and further fostered this diaspora
process, favouring autonomous developments, the typical stateless
feeling, and the rise of that characteristic cosmopolitanism.
Vespasian had the Jews of Judea scattered throughout Italy,
Greece and, above all, North Africa and Asia Minor, believing that
this was the end of the Jewish danger to the Empire. Upon returning
to Rome, the triumphant Titus solemnly rejected the crown of laurels
of victory offered by the Roman people, claiming that he fulfilled the
divine will and that ‘there is no merit in defeating a people that have
been abandoned by their own god’. Shortly afterward the Romans
erected an arc of triumph, under which no Jew—at least no
traditionalist Jew—still passes today. The arch of Titus, erected in

39
Rome to commemorate the capture of Jerusalem, shows the Roman
legionaries transporting the fruits of the looting of the temple,
highlighting the giant menorah.
This is a key moment in Jewish history. The Jews saw how
their achievements were crushed by a proud European empire, how
their relics were trampled by Roman sandals and how their sacrosanct
Temple was burned by flames. To see it destroyed was a huge shock
in the collective psychology of Jewry, filling the Jews with resentment
and desires for revenge against what they knew of Europe: the Greek
and Roman communities. Rome might have easily been able to
exterminate all the Jews of Judea if she had wanted but did not, as it
seemed that the Jewish power was finished; the Jews had been
traumatised, and their tribal pride shattered. Alas, far from
neutralising them, this psychological shock on their collective
unconscious fed them cruel desires for revenge.

Second Jewish-Roman War:

The Rebellion of the Diaspora or Kitos War
‘The Jews, overwhelmed by a spirit of rebellion, rise
up against their Greek fellow citizens’. —Eusebius
This section will deal with the Jewish revenge on the Greeks
and Romans for the destruction of the Second Temple. While Judea is
still exhausted and under a heavy military occupation, we will see an
attempt to establish ‘communes’ or Jewish states abroad, starting with
secession in Cyprus, Egypt, Mesopotamia and Cyrenaica. The
constitution of these Jewish territories were done to exterminate the
local Greek communities.
The First Jewish-Roman War made it very clear that the Jews,
under the coexistence with the Greeks and the authority of the
Romans, had absolutely no chance of prospering or reaching levels of
power as they did in the past in Egypt, Babylon and Persia. The
ghettoised situation of the Jews submitted to Rome contrasted
radically with that of the Jews who, in Mesopotamia, were subjects of
the Parthian Empire. There existed many ancient Jewish
communities, especially in Babylon and Susa, who saw themselves as
prosperous, rich, powerful and with a long tradition. They had
enjoyed ample freedom for six centuries, and were horrified by the
situation of their coreligionists within the Roman Empire. It is not
surprising that the ‘international Jewry’ unconditionally supported the
Parthian Empire during this time, partly because it treated them much

40
better and partly because it was the only really serious enemy that
lurked the borders of the Roman Empire in the East; they were the
only power capable of liberating Jerusalem. After all, the Parthians
were the ones who killed the hated looter Crassus during the Battle of
Carrhae, and if the Romans were anti-Jewish and the Parthians were
enemies of the Romans, the opportunist strategy of the moment
considered the Parthian Empire as a pro-Jewish regime. At this time,
nothing would have pleased the Jews more than a military campaign
that conquered Judea, Syria, Asia Minor in general and, if possible,
Egypt, as the Persians had done before.

A bust of Trajan: the first emperor of Hispanic

origin. He had the honour of having ruled the Roman
Empire when its borders were most extensive.

In 113, Trajan, who admired Alexander the Great, was about

to start a series of campaigns against the Parthian Empire, with the
aim of conquering Mesopotamia. To carry out such an action, he
concentrated troops on the eastern borders, at the expense of leaving
many more western places unguarded. Knowing the conflict in the
province of Judea, Trajan forbade the Jews to study the Torah and
observe the Shabbat, which, in practice, did nothing but irritate them.
In 115, the Roman army conquered all of Mesopotamia, including
towns that were important Jewish centres. Throughout Mesopotamia,
the Jews horrified to see themselves falling into the hands of their
mortal enemies. They aligned themselves with the Parthians and
fought the Romans with ferocity. This open hostility, which was soon
heard throughout the Empire, caused a wave of indignation and
provided the perfect excuse for the Greek ethnic communities of the
provinces of Cyrenaica (current coast of Libya) and Cyprus, with
strong anti-Jewish tradition, to start riots against the ghettos, taking

41
advantage of the absence of the Roman legions, which could have
appeased the situation.
Several Jewish extremist leaders again preached agitation
against Rome, proclaiming the end of the Empire, travelling through
all the Roman provinces of Asia Minor and North Africa exhorting
local Jewries to rise up and fight against the European occupation.
The Jews, already angered by the disturbances with the Greek
population, took advantage of the absence of Roman soldiers to
begin, that same year, a bloody insurrection.
The rebellion began in Cyrenaica, led by Lukuas, a self-
proclaimed Messiah. The Jews, in a swift stroke of hand reminiscent
of their rebellion in Jerusalem half a century earlier, attacked Greek
neighbourhoods and villages, destroyed Greek statues and temples
dedicated to Jupiter, Artemis, Isis and Apollo, and also numerous
Roman official buildings. (These actions were a mere foreshadowing
of what the Christians would later do on a massive scale and
throughout the Empire.) The famous Roman historian Cassius Dio,
in his Roman History, describes the terrible massacre that was
unleashed, referring to Lukuas as ‘Andreas’, probably his Greco-
Roman name. At that time, the Jews who lived in Cyrenaica, having as
captain one Andreas, killed all the Greeks and Romans. They ate their
flesh and entrails, bathed in their blood and dressed in their skins.
They killed many of them with extreme cruelty, tearing them from
above head down the middle of their bodies; they threw some to the
beasts while others forced them to fight among themselves, to such
an extent that they took 220,000 to death. Cassius Dio also tells us
how from their intestines they made belts and anointed themselves
with their blood. These testimonies, although perhaps should not be
taken literally, are certainly interesting to see the negative image that
the Jews had in Europe, as an odious and misanthropic people. Also
noteworthy is the character of ethnic cleansing implicit in Jewish
actions in Cyrenaica. At that time, when it was much less populated
than now, 200,000 dead (although it may be an exaggerated number)
was a monstrous figure; to such an extent that, according to Eusebius,
Libya was totally depopulated and Rome had to found new colonies
there to recover the population.
After the genocide in Cyrenaica, the Lukuas masses went to
an unguarded city that had long been the world centre of wisdom and
also of anti-Judaism: Alexandria. There they set fire to numerous
Greek neighbourhoods, destroyed pagan temples and desecrated
Pompey’s tomb. But this Rebellion of the Diaspora was not limited

42
only to North Africa. Jewish terrorism in Cyrenaica and Alexandria
had emboldened Jews throughout the Mediterranean, who, seeing the
absence of Roman soldiers, felt the call of the uprising against Rome.
While Trajan was already in the Persian Gulf struggling against
the Parthians, crowds of Jews, fanaticised by the rabbis, rose up in
Rhodes, Sicily, Syria, Judea, Mesopotamia and the rest of North
Africa to carry out the ethnic cleansing against the European
populations. In Cyprus, the worst massacre of the entire rebellion
took place: 240,000 Europeans were massacred and the capital of the
island, Salamis, was completely razed, according to Cassius Dio.
Something similar happened in Egypt and on the island of Cyprus
under one Artemion, the chief of barbarism. In Cyprus they
massacred another two hundred and forty thousand people, so they
could no longer set foot on the island.
To quell the rebellion in Cyprus, Syria and the newly
conquered territories of Mesopotamia, Trajan sent the Legio VII
Claudia under the orders of a Berber prince, General Lusius Quietus.
The repression of Lusius Quietus in Mesopotamia was so ruthless
that the rabbis in that place forbade the study of Greek literature and
eliminated the custom of brides adorning themselves with garlands on
their wedding day. In Cyprus, Lusius Quietus exterminated the entire
Jewish population of the island and prohibited, under penalty of death
that no Jew steps on Cyprus. Even if he was a castaway who appeared
on a beach, the Jew should be executed on the spot. These actions left
a deep trace in the memory of the Europeans of those places. As a
reward for the services rendered, Lusius Quietus was made governor
of Judea.
For the pacification of Alexandria, Trajan took troops from
Mesopotamia under the command of Marcius Turbo, who in 117 had
already quelled the rebellion. To rebuild the damage caused by the
revolt, the Romans expropriated and confiscated all of the Jews’
goods and wealth. Marcius Turbo remained as governor of Egypt
during a period of reconstitution of Roman authority. Lukuas, who
was at that time in Alexandria, probably fled to Judea.
Throughout the Rebellion of the Diaspora, well over half a
million Europeans were massacred, mainly those belonging to the
noblest social strata of Cyrenaica, Cyprus, Egypt and Babylon. That is,
the European people of these places: men, women and children who
were at that time the aristocracy of the Eastern Mediterranean.
Although thousands of Jews were put to the sword and the rebellion

43
was ruthlessly crushed by Trajan, Lusius Quietus and Marcius Turbo,
many Europeans had been killed after suffering atrocious tortures.

Third Jewish-Roman War:

The Palestinian Revolt or Rebellion of Bar Kokhba (132-135)
Emperor Hadrian (reign 117-138) at first had been minimally
conciliatory with the province of Judea. He allowed the Jews to return
to Jerusalem, began rebuilding the city as a gift from Rome and even
gave them permission to rebuild the Temple. However, after a visit to
the ‘holy land’ he had a sudden change of mind and began again to
make Roman authority felt in the troubled province. While the Jewish
quarter was preparing the construction of the Temple, Hadrian
ordered it to be built in a different place from the original, and then
began deporting Jews to North Africa. Planning the complete
transfiguration of Judea, its de-Judaization, its repopulation with
Roman legionaries and its impregnation of Greco-Roman culture, he
ordered the foundation, on Jerusalem, of a new Roman city,
called Aelia Capitolina.
This implied the massive irruption of the classic art, extremely
hated by the Jews, besides the construction of numerous Roman
buildings—and the construction of a Roman building necessarily
went through a ceremony of consecration of religious character that,
according to the Talmudic mentality, polluted the ‘holy land’ for being
a pagan ritual. Jerusalem, before the nervous eyes of Jewry, was going
to become the scene of a highly ‘profane’, ‘impure’ and ‘pagan’ place,
such as streets decorated with naked statues with a prepuce! The Jews,
again indignant, prepared for a rebellion, but Rabbi Joshua ben
Hananiah calmed them down, so they were content to prepare
themselves clandestinely in case they had to rebel in the future, which
seemed every time most likely. They built caches in caves and began
to accumulate weapons and supplies. Although they did not carry out
an open rebellion, in 123 terrorist actions began to take place against
the Roman forces of occupation.
Hadrian, who was increasingly regretting his previous
indulgence for the Jewish quarter, brought the Legio VI Ferrata to act
as a police force. To make matters worse, the emperor was a man of
Hellenistic education. In addition to the anti-Judaism traditionally
associated with it, the Greek formation considered circumcision as a
barbaric act of mutilation. Although they admired the nakedness of a
beautiful human body, the Greeks, who in Judea formed the most

44
influential social sector after the Romans, considered it an act of
extreme bad education to show the glans in public (for which those
who had too short a foreskin from birth, had to cover the glans with
some accessory). Instead, according to Jewish tradition, Adam and
Moses were born without a foreskin, and the Messiah will also be
born circumcised. The Jews were not the only people to practice
circumcision: it was also practiced by other Semitic peoples such as
the Syrians and the Arabs. But in the case of the Jews it was a
religious matter: a sign of the covenant between them and Jehovah.
To make matters worse, Hadrian also decided to prohibit the
observance of the Sabbath.
The year 131, after an inauguration ceremony by the governor
Quintus Tineius Rufus, began the works of Aelia Capitolina, and the
following year coinage was minted with the new name of the city and
works were begun on a Temple dedicated to Jupiter in the location of
the ancient Temple of Jerusalem. Rabbi Akiva ben Yosef convinced
the Sanhedrin to proclaim as Messiah and commander of the coming
rebellion Simon Bar Kokhba (‘Son of a star’): a cunning, bloodthirsty
and shrewd leader. Bar Kokhba must have planned carefully, noting
the issues where previous rebellions had failed.

The Hellenistic education of Hadrian is evident in his beard in the

above reconstruction from one of his busts. The Romans, a people of
soldiers, like the Macedonians, had the deep-rooted habit of facial
shaving. Although Nero brought partial beard at some moments of
his life, it was Hadrian the first emperor to leave it permanently.

As soon as Hadrian left Judea, that same year of 132, the

Jewish quarter rose, attacked the Roman detachments and annihilated
the Legio X (Legio VI was encamped watching the passage of

45
Megiddo). The Jews from all the provinces of the Empire and beyond
began to attend, and also obtained the support of many Syrian and
Arab tribes.
With their fundamentalist Semitic hordes—supposedly
400,000 men, of whom it was said to have been started by cutting off
a finger or plucking a cedar from the roots—they stormed 50 fortified
plazas and 985 defenceless towns (including Jerusalem), exterminating
the Greek communities, the Roman detachments and all the
opponents they encountered; atrocities being common. Later, they
dedicated themselves to the construction of walls and underground
passages; in short, to entrench themselves in each square.
After these fleeting victories, the Jewish state in the area was
reorganised. In Betar, a mighty fortress in the mountains, Bar Kokhba
was crowned Messiah in a solemn ceremony. During the years of the
revolt, Ben Yosef and Bar Kokhba held co regency, one as a dictator
and the other as a religious pontiff who proclaimed the ‘era of the
redemption of Israel’ and even minted their own coins.
General Publicius Marcellus, governor of Syria, was sent to
support Quintus Tineius Rufus. Both Romans were defeated by
forces vastly superior in number, which also invaded the coastal areas,
forcing the Romans to fight with them in naval battles. At this
moment so worrying for Rome, Hadrian called Sextus Julius Severus,
who at that time was governor of the province of Britain. He also
required a former governor of Germania, Quintus Lollius Urbicus.
With them, he gathered an army even greater than the one that Titus
had had in the previous century, a total of perhaps twelve legions:
from one third to half of all the military troops of the Empire.
In view of the vast number of enemies and the desperation
with which they acted, the Romans avoided open battles; limited
themselves to attacking scattered groups and destroying the
populations where they could find sustenance: the tactics of anti-
partisan warfare. The Jews had fairly well entrenched themselves in
some fifty fortified cities, many of them truly impregnable complexes
in the mountains, so the Romans advanced slowly by besieging the
squares, cutting off supplies and entering when the defenders were
weak. This painful tactic, which also required long journeys through
hostile areas, cost the Romans innumerable deaths. In fact, it seems
that the Jews annihilated, or at least caused very heavy losses, to
the Legio XXII Deiotariana which had come from Egypt. To confirm
the hardships passed by the legions, Hadrian eliminated from his
military reports to the Senate and the people of Rome the traditional

46
opening formula ‘I and the legions are fine’ for the simple reason that
the legions… were not fine.
After enormous sacrifices and waste of discipline and feeling
of duty, the Romans were triumphing little by little. In the year 134
the Betar fortress remained, where Bar Kokhba had become strong
with the Sanhedrin; his most loyal followers, and thousands of Jews
who had come as refugees. The same day of the anniversary of the fall
of the Temple of Jerusalem, the fortress fell into the hands of the
Roman soldiers, who put the entire population to the sword and did
not allow the dead to be buried for six days.
Hadrian harangued to his legions thus:
Even if they swear to become good Roman citizens and
worship Jupiter and our other gods, kill them, if you do not want
them to destroy Rome or conquer it by the secret and cowardly
means that they usually do.

Consequences of the Palestinian revolt

The revolt had paramount consequences both for Rome and
for Jewry. To begin with, the Roman losses were such that, in
addition to Hadrian’s refusing to say in the military offices to the
Senate that everything was going well, he was the only Roman leader
in history who, after a great victory, refused to return to Rome
celebrating a triumph. Titus Vespasianus had only rejected a crown of
laurels in his day; Hadrian took it to the next step.
However, if the Roman losses were considerable, the Jewish
losses were huge. According to Cassius Dio, 580,000 Jews were killed,
50 cities and 985 Jewish villages were completely destroyed—and they
were not rebuilt—and hundreds of thousands of Jews sold as slaves
throughout the Empire. It is not surprising that the Talmud called this
process ‘the war of extermination’, and that it even made outrageous
statements to mythologize the conflict, such as: ‘Sixteen million Jews
were wrapped in parchments and burned alive by the Romans’ (Gittin,
58-A). The Jews, in any case, were definitively deprived of the will to
rise against Rome by force of arms. On the other hand, the Jewish
threat, which had caused so many headaches to Rome, was going to
increase throughout the Mediterranean due to the greater extension of
the Diaspora and the ideal breeding ground that this meant for the
expansion of another anti-Roman rebellion: Christianity.
The conditions of the defeat imposed on the Jews were even
harsher than the triumph of Titus in the year 70. As measures against

47
the Jewish religion, Hadrian prohibited the Jewish courts, the
meetings in synagogues, the Jewish calendar, the study of the religious
writings and Judaism itself as a religion! He executed numerous rabbis
and burned masses of sacred scrolls at a ceremony on the Temple
Mount. He tried to eradicate the very Jewish identity and Judaism
itself, sending them into exile, enslaving them and dispersing them
away from Judea. This persecution against all forms of Jewish
religiosity, including Christianity, would continue until the death of
the emperor in 138. Furthermore, in another attempt to obliterate
Jewish identity and dismantle its centre of power, the eastern
provinces were restructured, forming three Syrian provinces: Syria
Palestina (named in honour of the Philistines: a people of European
origin and enemies of Jewry who had inhabited the area); Phoenicia
under Roman rule and Coele-Syria.
In the new territorial order decreed by Hadrian, Judea became
Syria Palestina, and Jerusalem was turned into Aelia Capitolina: a
Greek and Roman city in which the Jews were proscribed. The three
Syrias form the Levant: an extremely active and conflictive strip in
history, to this day. From there came the Neolithic, the Phoenicians,
Judaism and Christianity; and practically all the civilisations of
antiquity, creating an ethnic chaos that always ended up in conflicts.
Centuries later, these areas would see the establishment of the
Crusader states. As for the city of Jerusalem, Hadrian carried out with
it the plans that had unleashed the revolt: the Jewish capital was
demolished and destroyed, and the Romans ploughed over the ruins
to symbolize its purification and its return to the earth. Hadrian finally
built the projected Aelia Capitolina over the ruins, introducing a new
urban planning, so that even today the old city of Jerusalem coincides
with the one built by the Romans.
In the centre of the city a forum was established, which
contained a temple dedicated to Venus. In the place of the temple
Hadrian had two statues erected, one of Jupiter and another of
himself, although he respected the Wailing Wall. Also, next to
Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified, Hadrian placed a statue of
Aphrodite. This was intended to symbolize the triumph of Rome over
Orthodox Judaism and over Christianity, considered a Jewish sect like
so many: another sect that in Rome was persecuted without
distinguishing it from official Judaism.
For the Greeks and Romans, the statues of their gods were
representatives of the divine, solar, luminous and Olympic spirit on
earth, while for the Jews, including the Christians, nothing stirred

48
their stomach more than a naked, strong statue, beautiful, of Nordic
features and invincible aspect.

To top off the de-Judaization of the city, Hadrian prohibited

any Jew from settling in Aelia Capitolina, on pain of death. This law
would only be revoked two centuries later by Constantine, the first
Christian emperor.

Some conclusions
Only naïve men could think of forbidding the Torah, the
Shabbat or the Brit Milah without realising that the whole of Jewry
would prefer to die rather than renouncing their traditions. The
Greeks and the Romans, from their Olympic naïveté, were too
myopic in their approach to the Jewish problem. They ignored the
particularities that differentiated the Jews from the rest of the Semitic
peoples of the Near East, and thought that they could place their
temples and statues there as if the Jews were nothing more than
another Arab or Syrian province, either Hellenised or Persianised.
The persistent identity that Jewry had shown did not motivate the
carefree Romans to sufficiently wrap their heads around the problem.
The conviction that the Greco-Romans had of being carriers of a
superior culture made them fall into a fateful error: to think that a
culture can be valid for all humanity and exported to peoples of
different ethnicity. The Hellenisation and Romanisation of the East
and North Africa had only one effect: ethnic chaos, the balkanization

49
of Rome itself, ethnic struggles and, finally, the appearance of
Christianity.
Even using the brute force of her legions Rome was slow to
realise that the Jews, in their resentment and their desire for revenge,
did not care to sacrifice waves upon waves of individuals if they
managed to annihilate a single Roman detachment. This
fundamentalist fanaticism, which went beyond the rational, must have
left the Romans speechless, who were not accustomed to seeing an ill-
equipped military people immolate themselves in that convinced
manner, with a mind full of blind faith coming from a jealous,
vengeful, abstract and tyrannical god. What the Jews call Yahweh and
in Europe became known as Jehovah is, without a doubt, an
extremely real will, and also a force clearly opposed to the Olympian
and solar gods of the European peoples, whose height was the
Greco-Roman Zeus-Jupiter.
The revolutionary and stirring vocation of Jewry was born
here. The Jews realised the primitive and overwhelming power that a
resentful, fanaticised and ignorant crowd contained, and they used it
skilfully in Christianity and later in Bolshevism. The same blind will to
sacrifice waves upon waves were seen in the Red Army during the
Second World War, with the Germans being the reincarnation of the
Roman spirit at that historical moment while the Soviet commissariat,
which was more than 90 percent Jewish, undoubtedly represented
Israel’s will.
Generally Jews faced extinction and ethnic cleansing. The
Greeks, who had more power and influence than they in Rome, in the
long run would have ended up gradually eradicating them in Asia
Minor; while Rome, under Germanic influence, could have lasted
forever: the city would simply have become part of the Germanic
world thanks to the increasing political influence of the Germans in
the legions and the progressive colonisation of the Empire by the
German foederati.
Both Judaism and Christianity are the products of cultural
chaos. It is no coincidence that Judaism was born in the area of
greatest ethnic confusion on the planet: no man’s land among
Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Akkadians, Chaldeans, Persians,
Hittites, Medes, Parthians, Macedonians and Romans; not to mention
the tangled mess of peoples like the Amorites, the Philistines, the
Ammonites, the Moabites, the Edomites and the twelve tribes of
Israel who inhabited the same area that concerns us and that,

50
together, annihilated the identity of entire peoples in a
genetic maremàgnum.
The direct and martial character of the Romans, who, despite
not having grasped the Jewish essence, did understand their desire for
power and problematic character, forced the Jews to act and exercise
their willpower as a people, to rave their brains to elaborate the
Christian invention, and also gave the Jews the perfect excuse to
spend the next two millennia making themselves the victims and
mourning at the only remaining wall of the Temple in Jerusalem.
Without the existence of Rome, Jewry probably would have ended up
falling asleep on its laurels and forgetting its interests.
The Diaspora and the eradication of Judea as a Jewish centre
did not lead at all to the dissolution of the Jewish identity. Rabbinic
Judaism, after wandering through Egypt and Babylon, was more than
accustomed to nomadism; and the Diaspora really came from much
earlier, although the wars in Judea did increase it with avalanches of
refugees. Jewry, showing an enormous intelligence, realised that it
could not defeat Rome in a conventional war and that rebellions,
fights and open wars failed because the Romans were stronger,
braver, more powerful and better soldiers by nature, despite being less
in number.
However, the underground and secret rebellion that the Jews
had quietly breathed into Rome was going to prosper, as if it was the
seed of discord, ‘by the secret and cowardly means’ that Hadrian
foresaw that Jewry would use to finally triumph over Rome. This
clandestine anti-European rebellion in general, and anti-Roman in
particular, also had a name: it was called Christianity or, in the words
of Tacitus, that ‘conflictive superstition’ that ‘not only broke out in
Judea, the first source of evil, but even in Rome: where all the
horrendous and shameful things from any part of the world find their
centre and become popular’.
In the long run, the effect of clashes between Jews and Greco-
Romans was the consolidation of Christianity as the only option of
Semitic conquest of Rome. This, in turn, had the effect of ethnic
cleansing of the European minority in the Eastern Mediterranean—
especially the hated Greek community, which had its centre in
Alexandria—mainly from the 4th century. It seems obvious to me
that, after the invention of Christianity, there was a highly developed
intellect, with a great psychological and geo-social capacity
throughout the empire, designed to destroy the Roman Empire:

51
snatching from Europe, especially from the Germanic Europe, the
legacy of the classical world.
The importation of oriental cults was nothing but the ritual
adaptation of the genetic changes in Rome itself, as well as the slow
rise of the ethnic substratum that existed in the lowest part of the
original Rome. Judea was a special province and the Romans would
have needed an equally special policy, consisting of shielding Rome
against Jewish influence—and, in fact, against all Oriental influence,
including its plebs—; leave the Jews in Judea and not give them
Roman citizenship under any circumstances; not desecrate their
traditions and, of course, never civilise them: because it was precisely
the Hellenisation of certain Jewish social sectors what led to the
emergence of Christianity. This was a sinister Jewish and Greco-
decadent schizophrenia that is evident in the very name of Jesus
Christ: Yeshua, a Jewish name, and Christos, ‘the anointed one’ in
Greek. To give examples of the insane Romanisation of Judea that
echo the hybrid Yeshua-Christos: Herod tried to Romanise the province
by building cities that would cause discord (like Caesarea); fortresses
that would be used by the Jews against the same Romans (like the
Antonia and Masada fortresses); and also he enlarged the Second
Temple at which the Jews now cry, in spite of the fact that they hate
the constructor.
If Rome had wanted to triumph in a more resounding way
over Judea, she should not have allowed its Romanisation, and should
have kept Hellenisation to a minimum. Imposing a culture on a
people does not mean that you have to share it. Because of his genetic
and cultural heritage, a Jew who knew how to speak Greek would
never really share or understand Hellenic culture. Kultur is the result
of the gene pool, and Jewish genetics was radically different from
Hellenic. To force or impose one culture over another that comes
from a different genetic well only leads to one thing: miscegenation,
which will end up manifesting through the total corruption of the
original culture.
All hell rained down upon the Jews, who little by little have
become like that typical figure in fiction who has received many blows
and becomes, over time, a misanthropic super-villain and resentful
against the world. Therefore, taking the Jews into Rome, however
much they were enslaved, was suicidal. Forced Romanisation, forced
Hellenisation, slavery, deportation and anything that tends to increase
the ethnic jumble, are extremely negative elements in the history of

52
any nation. And the first drawback of any Empire is precisely that:
that it is cosmopolitan by definition.

Chapter 3
Judaea contra Rome (Christianity and the fall of the Empire)
When Yahweh your Lord brings you into the land you
are entering to possess and drives out before you other
peoples… when Yahweh has delivered them over to you and
you have defeated them, then you must crush and destroy them
totally; make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy…
This is what you are to do to them: Break down their
altars, smash their sacred images, cut down their sacred forests
and burn their idols. For you are a people holy to Yahweh your
Lord. —Deuteronomy, 7: 1-7.
Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?
But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the
wise, He has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the
things which are strong. —I Corinthians: 1, 20, 27.
On the basis of what happened during this bloody history,
there is a laborious process of adulteration, falsification and distortion
of religious teachings: firstly, many centuries before Jesus at the hands
of Jewish prophets, judges and rabbis; and then at the hands of the
apostles and fathers of the Church, usually of the same ethnic group.
There existed an ethnic base of those conflicts, which we have already
discussed in the previous two chapters.
The Eastern Mediterranean (Asia Minor, the Aegean,
Carthage, Egypt, Phoenicia, Israel, Judea, Babylon, Syria, Jordan, etc.)
was a fermenting melting pot for all the good and bad products of the
Ancient World: the confluence of all slaves, the downtrodden and
banished; criminals, trampled peoples and pariahs of Mesopotamia,
Egypt, the Hittite Empire and the Persian Empire. That melting pot,
so full of different characters, was present in the foundations and the
origins of Judaism. Its vapours also intoxicated many decadent
Greeks of Athens, Corinth and other Hellenic states centuries before
the Christian era.
When Alexander the Great conquered the Macedonian
Empire, which extended from Greece to the confines of Afghanistan
and from the Caucasus to Egypt, the entire area of the Persian

53
Empire, the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa received a
strong Greek influence: an influence that would be felt on Asia
Minor, Syria (including Judea), and especially Egypt with the city of
Alexandria, founded by Alexander in 331 BCE. This inaugurated a
stage of Macedonian hegemony called Hellenistic, to differentiate it
from the classical Hellenic (Dorians, Ionians, Corinthians). Alexander
fostered knowledge and science throughout his empire, sponsoring
the various schools of wisdom; and after his death his Macedonian
successors continued the same policy.
Centuries later, during the lower Roman Empire, after a
terrible degeneration we can distinguish in the heart of Hellenism two
currents:
(a) A traditional elitist character, based in the Egyptian,
Hellenistic and Alexandrian schools, which advocated science and
spiritual knowledge, and where the arts and sciences flourished to a
point never seen before; with the city of Alexandria being the greatest
exponent. Such was the importance and ‘multiculturalism’ of
Alexandria—included the abundance of Jews who never ceased to
agitate against paganism—as the world’s largest city before Rome,
that it has been called ‘the New York of ancient times’. The Library of
Alexandria, the domain of the high castes and vetoed to the plebe,
was a hive of wise Egyptians, Persians, Chaldeans, Hindus and
Greeks; as well as scientists, architects, engineers, mathematicians and
astronomers from all over the world. The Library stood proud of
having accumulated much of the knowledge of the Ancient World.
(b) Another countercultural and more popular current: liberal,
sophist and cynical (more freely established in Asia Minor and Syria)
had distorted and mixed ancient cults. It was directed to the slave
masses of the Eastern Mediterranean: preaching for the first time
notions such as ‘free democracy for all’, ‘free equality for all’ and ‘free
rights for all’. This was characterised by a well-intentioned but
ultimately fateful multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism that
enchanted the minds of many educated slaves; by the exportation of
the Greek worldview and culture to non-Greek peoples, and by the
importation of Jewish culture to non-Jewish peoples. This last current
was the Hellenistic background that, disfigured, united with Judaism
and the decomposing Babylonian matter, formed Christianity: which,
let us not forget, was originally preached exclusively in the Greek
language to masses of serfs, the poor and commoners in the
unhealthy neighbourhoods of the cities of the Eastern
Mediterranean.

54
 The first Christians were exclusively Jewish blood
communities, converted into cosmopolitans with their enforced
diaspora and Hellenistic contacts. To a certain extent, these ‘Jews
from the ghetto’—of which Saint Paul is the most representative
example—were despised by the most orthodox Jewish circles. This
geographic core is to Christianity what Bavaria is to Nazism: the
centre in which the new creed ferments and its expansion is
invigorated. This area, so strongly Hellenised, densely populated and
the seat of a true ethnic chaos, is where the apostles, in the Greek
language, were inflated to preach; and here also took place important
Christian theological councils (such as Nicaea, Chalcedon or
Ancyra). Christianity, which to expand itself took the advantage
offered by the dispersion of Semitic slaves throughout the Roman
Empire, represents an Asian ebb spilled all over Europe.

The Seven Churches mentioned by John of Patmos in

the New Testament (Book of Revelation, 1:11). As can be
seen, all of them located in Asia Minor.6

A Jewish sect appears

The story starts in the year 33: the date on which a Jewish
rebel named Yeshua or Jesus, who had proclaimed himself the
Messiah of the Jews and King of Israel, was crucified at the hands of
the Romans. In this first expansive phase of Christianity, Sha’ul of
Tarsus (for posterity, Saint Paul), a Jew with Roman citizenship of

6 Note of the editor: It is very significant that the last word that the
Christian Bible confers to an author is the word of John of Patmos.
Most likely, the author of the Book of Revelation was Jewish, as his
hatred of Rome (which he calls ‘Babylon’) seems absolute. The Bible
ends with the dream of this John of Patmos about a New Jerusalem
precisely when the Romans had destroyed Old Jerusalem to build, on its
ruins, Aelia Capitolina. See also Nietzsche’s appendix after this chapter.

55
Hellenistic and cosmopolitan education, although brought up under
the most recalcitrant Jewish fundamentalism, takes on special
importance.
At first, Sha’ul had been dedicated to persecuting Christians
(which, let’s not forget, were all Jews) in the name of the authorities
of official Judaism. At a given moment in his life, he falls off the
horse—literally, it is said. Then, after a great revelation, ‘Paul’ decides
that Christianity is a valid doctrine to be preached to Gentiles, that is,
to non-Jews. With that intelligent diplomatic skill for business and
subversive movements, Sha’ul/Paul establishes numerous Christian
communities in Asia Minor and the Aegean, from which the ‘good
news’ will be hyper-actively preached.
Subsequently, numerous preaching centres are founded in
North Africa, Syria and Palestine, inevitably going to Greece and
Rome itself. Christianity ran like wildfire through the most humble
layers of the population of the Empire, which were the most
ethnically orientalised layers. It then passes to the Roman Empire
through the Jews, headed by Sha’ul/Paul, Peter and other preachers.
Its nature, based on the sinister Syrian-Phoenician mysteries that
presupposed the sinfulness and impurity of the being which practiced
them, is attractive to the non-white majority: Rome’s slaves.
The first Christian meetings in Rome are carried out secretly,
in the underground Jewish catacombs; and in the Jewish synagogues
Christian discourses and sermons are delivered: very different from
those that will take place in later Christian Europe.
Sha’ul/Paul’s speeches are political cries: intelligent, virulent
and fanatical harangues that urge the faithful to accept Jesus Christ to
achieve redemption. The book of John of Patmos is a mixed
incendiary formula like delirious visions of the Apocalypse, the fall of
Rome or Babylon, the New Jerusalem, the slaughter of the infidels,
the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven, the eternal salvation through
Jesus Christ, the horrendous condemnation of pagan sinners and all
those strange oriental ideas. Another key point that must be
recognised as very skilful by the first preachers was to take advantage
of the affinity for the poor, the dispossessed, the abandoned, the
vagabonds and those who cannot help themselves; and the
establishment of institutions of charity, relief and assistance.
All this is clearly a forerunner of the social fighters that we see
today, and that had never been seen before in the pagan world. It is
easy to see that these measures had the effect of attracting to

56
themselves all the scum from the streets of Rome, in addition to
preserving and increasing it.

These are the type of mongrels that composed the first Christians. The
image is taken from funerary portraits of faithful resemblance to Greek-
speaking people residing in Egypt. The portraits survived thanks to the
dryness of the Egyptian climate. Although it is impossible to say who
these men or women were, all were early Christians.

Since its members refuse to serve in the legions and pay

homage to the emperor, Christianity is immediately persecuted by the
Empire in an intermittent and sporadic manner. Although the Roman
persecutions have been greatly exaggerated, the moderate oppression
suffered by the Christians was essentially for political and not
religious reasons. The Roman Empire always tolerated different
religions, but its authorities saw in Christianity a subversive sect, a
cover of that Judaism which had caused so many headaches in the
East. Moreover, the Roman politicians of the time did not even
distinguish between Jews and Christians, and not without reason, saw
in Christianity a tool for the revenge of the Jew against Rome, since
they considered Christianity a religious movement of many from the
heart of the Jewish quarter (Sadducees, Pharisees, and Zealots).

Christianity takes hold outside Judea

As soon as the Jews learn about the events in Rome with the
Christians, they begin to plan an uprising and, perfectly coordinated,
rebel throughout the Roman Empire. Thus, in the year 66, in a rapid
and well-planned coup d’état, they put to the knife all the non-Jewish
inhabitants of Jerusalem except the slaves. Nero uses his legions to
crush the revolt harshly in the rest of the Empire, but in their capital
the Jews become strong. In the year 68, just as General Vespasian left

57
to take Jerusalem, Nero is mysteriously murdered. Vespasian, then,
becomes emperor and sends his son Titus to the front of the X Legio,
with the aim of crushing the Jews.
The year 70 Rome triumphs; Jerusalem is devastated, sacked
by the Roman legionaries, and it is said that in the process a million
Jews died under Roman arms (only in Jerusalem the town had
accumulated, during the siege, three million Jews). The year 70:
fateful, traumatizing, outrageous and key for Jewry, means the
enslavement and dispersion of Jews throughout the Mediterranean
(Diaspora), greatly enhancing the growth of Christianity. There are
successive emperors (Trajan, Hadrian), very aware of the Jewish
problem, who do not pay much attention to the Christians, mainly
because they are too busy with the Judaic puzzle in ‘holy land’,
repressing the Jews again and again, without destroying them
completely.
In this time, the new religion grows little by little, gaining
followers among the enslaved masses thanks to its egalitarian
ideology, and also in high positions of the administration: among an
increasingly decadent and materialist bureaucracy. Christianity
glorified misfortune instead of glorifying the struggle against it;
considered suffering as a merit that dignifies itself and proclaimed
that Paradise awaits anyone who behaves well. (Remember the
difference: how the pagans taught that only fighters entered the
Valhalla.) It is the religion of the slaves, and they willingly subscribe to
it. Early Christianity played a very similar role to that of the later
Freemasonry: it was a Jewish strategy dressed up using weak and
ambitious characters, fascinating them with a sinister ritualism. The
result was like a communism for the Roman Empire, even favouring
the ‘emancipation’ and independence of women from their husbands
by capturing them with a strange and novel Christian liturgy, and
urging them to donate their own money to the cause (a scam quite
similar in its essence to the current New Age cults).
It is at the beginning of the second century that the figure of
Christian fat cats called ‘bishops’ begins to take on importance. St.
Ignatius wrote in the year 107, in the corniest way: ‘It is obvious that
we must look to a bishop like the Lord in person. His clerics are in
harmony with their bishop like the strings of a harp, and the result is a
hymn of praise to Jesus Christ of minds that feel in unison’. Ignatius
of Antioch is captured by the Roman authorities and thrown to the
lions in 107. It is interesting to pay attention to the names of the

58
preachers since they always come from the mongrelised areas: eastern
and Judaised, in this case, Syria.

The above map in Spanish shows the extension of Christianity around

the year 100. The Roman Empire is represented in a lighter shade than
the barbarian territories. Note that the areas of Christian preaching
coincide exactly with the densest Jewish settlement areas.

Around the year 150, the Greek Marcion tries to form a kind
of ‘de-Judaised’ purification in Christianity, rejecting the Old
Testament; giving pre-eminent importance to the Gospel of St. Luke,
and adopting a Gnostic worldview with Orphic and Manichean airs.
This is the first attempt of reform or Europeanization of Christianity:
trying to deprive it from its obvious Jewish roots.7 Marcion’s
followers, the Marcionites, who professed a Gnostic creed, are
classified as heretics by mainstream Christianity.
Sometime after the year 200, in view of the incorporation into
Christianity of great new masses that did not speak Greek but Latin, a
Latin translation of the Gospels began to circulate in most western
Christian centres. Emperor Diocletian (reigned 284-305) divided the
Empire into two halves to make it more governable. He keeps the
eastern part and hands over the western part to Maximian, a former
comrade in arms. He establishes a rigid bureaucracy, and these
measures smell like irremediable decadence. Despite this, Diocletian is
a just and realistic veteran. He allows its Christian legionaries to be
absent from pagan ceremonies, provided they maintain their military
discipline.

7 Note of the editor: In our times, adepts of Christian Identity also

try to square the circle by claiming that Aryans descend from the biblical
characters.

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 This above map shows the general expansion of Christianity in
185. Note the great difference with respect to the previous map
and note also that the area most influenced by Christianity is still
the Eastern Mediterranean: a highly Semitic zone.

But this was precisely the trickiest issue, as the bishops

insolently defy the authority of the emperor. Diocletian is benevolent
and only one Christian pacifist is executed. However, he now insists
that Christians participate in state ceremonies of a religious nature,
and the Christian response to this decision is growing pride and
arrogance, with numerous revolts and provocations. Even at this
point, Diocletian renounces to apply the death penalty, contenting
himself with making slaves of the rebels that he captured. The answer
to this is more riots and a fire in the imperial palace itself;
provocations and Christian insolence occur throughout the Empire.
But the most Diocletian does is to execute nine rebellious bishops
and eighty rebels in Palestine, the area most troubled by Christian
rebellions.
One of these rebels was a spawn named St. Procopius of
Scythopolis. To get an idea of the kind of creature Procopius was,
let’s see the words of a contemporary, Bishop Eusebius of
Caesarea: ‘He had tamed his body until turning it, so to speak, into a
corpse; but the strength that his soul found in the word of God gave
strength to his body… He only studied the word of God and had
little knowledge of the profane sciences’. That is to say, this was a
subhuman in a sick body, a crushed and resentful spirit moved away
from all the natural goods of the world, and who only knows the
Bible and the speeches of the bishops. In the beginning Christianity
was nourished with similar men: Jewish practitioners of an asceticism
bordering on sadomasochism who turned their bodies into a wreck,
and their spirits into tyrannical and resentful shepherds.

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 Despite the softness of these persecutions, Diocletian goes
down in history as a monster thirsting for Christian blood (history is
written by the victors). The certain thing is that, after Emperor
Diocletian’s reign, Rome entered in frank decay.

‘Saint’ Constantine
In 311 another emperor, Galerius, ceased the persecution of
Christianity through the Edict of Toleration of Nicomedia, and
Christian buildings began to be built without state interference. Who
knows by which methods the Christians infiltrated the upper
echelons, exercise the relevant leverages and launched the resources
they needed for Rome to yield more and more. This emperor was a
supporter of the mediocre persecution that Diocletian used, but did
not learn the lesson and perhaps thought that, by appeasing the
Christian rebels, they will cease their agitations.
He was wrong. The Christians had for some time already
proposed themselves to overthrow Rome.
In 306, Constantine ‘The Great’ rises to power. He reigned
from 306 to 337. This emperor was not a Christian, but his mother
Helena was, and he soon declared himself a strong supporter of
Christianity. In the year 313, through the Edict of Milan, ‘religious
freedom’ is proclaimed and the Christian religion is legalised in the
Roman Empire by Constantine representing the Western Empire, and
Licinius representing the Oriental Empire. The Roman Empire is in
clear decadence because not only the original Romans were debasing
themselves with luxury, voluptuousness and opulence and refusing to
serve in the legions. The Christians have now infiltrated the
bureaucratic elite, and already numerous influential characters practice
it and defend it. The Edict of Milan was important since it had ended
once and for all the clandestinely in which the Christian world was
immersed.
Once legalised, the Christians begin to attack without quarter
the adepts of Hellenic culture. The Council of Ancyra of 314
denounces the cult of the goddess Artemis (the favourite and most
beloved goddess of the Spartans). An edict of this year provokes for
the first time that hysterical populaces begin to destroy Greco-Roman
temples, break statues and murder the priests. We have to get an idea
of what was involved in the destruction of a Temple in the Ancient
World. A Temple was not only a place of religious worship for priests
but a place of meeting and reference for all the people. (In our days,

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soccer stadiums or nightclubs are minimally similar to what the
Temple represented for the people.) To destroy it was tantamount to
sabotaging their unity, destroying the people themselves.
As for the breaking of statues, the Greeks—and this was
inherited by the Romans—firmly believed that their best individuals
were similar to the gods, of whom they considered themselves
descendants. This is very clearly seen in Greek mythology, where
there were mortals so perfect and beautiful that many gods (like Zeus)
took mortal lovers, and many goddesses (like Aphrodite) did the
same. In addition, many particularly perfect and brave individuals
could reach Olympic immortality as just another god. Only a people
who consider themselves so close to the gods could have devised this.
And to leave reflected what was that human type loved by the divine
forces, the Greeks established a canon of perfection for the body and
face, on which was created a network of complex mathematical
proportions and sacred numbers. To destroy a statue was to destroy
the Hellenic human ideal: it was to sabotage the capacity of man to
reach the very divinity, from which he advances and to which he must
return one day.

While destructions of Greco-Roman heritage takes place, and

as a reminder that early Christianity was always philo-Jewish and anti-
Roman, Constantine allows Jews to visit Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem)
to mourn at the Western Wall: the only thing that remains of the
Temple. Thus, Constantine breaks the prohibition decreed to the
Jews in the year 134, when the Roman legions annihilated the
Palestinian Revolt of Bar Kokhba during the Third Jewish-Roman
War.
By this time, the emperor needs a force of union for the
melting pot of races that have been imposed in Rome. There were
many ‘salvation cults’ with rites practiced in secret, mainly of the
underground type of cults that always arise in times of decadence and
degeneration. There is the cult of Mithras (a cult of Iranian origin and

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military character, already corrupted by the masses although during an
ascending era it was popular in the Roman legions), and the cult of
Cybele. The emperor chose Christianity for his empire, not because of
its value as a religion, but because of its Semitic intolerance; its
fanaticism—famous throughout the empire—, its centuries-old
experience as a tool of intrigue, its intelligence networks and its
equalizing, proselytising and globalising ethos make it the perfect
‘emergency religion’. The other religions, lacking intolerance, would
not impose themselves by violence on reluctant people with that
unifying effect of a flock of sheep that Christianity will provide. And
what the unwise Constantine needs is precisely a flock, not a
combination of different people each with its own identity.
Christianity, therefore, slightly prolongs the agony of the Roman
Empire. People begin to convert to Christianity by snobbishness and
climbing eagerness, to reach high positions: that is, to make a career.
Since 317, the legions of the empire—which have nothing to
do with those ancient Roman legionaries of Italic origin, but are
plagued by unruly Christians on the one hand, and Germans loyal to
the Empire on the other—are accompanied by bishops. In addition,
they already fight under the sign of Labarum, the first two Greek
letters of the name Christ: that is, X (Chi) and, P (Rho) combined with
the cross, supposedly revealed to Constantine in that famous dream,
In hoc signo vinces (With this sign you will win).
After the Council of Nicaea, Christianity reaches a doctrinal
uniformity that unifies the diverse factions, and acquires a legal
administrative character, like a state within the State. Nicaea,
incidentally, is a city in the province of Bithynia, Asia Minor (now
Turkey). Constantine brings together 318 bishops, each elected by
their community, to debate and establish a ‘Christian normalization’,
in view of the many factions and discrepancies within the religion.
The result is the so-called ‘Nicene Creed’: the Christianity to preach.
After a thousand intrigues, conspiracies, factional fights, poisonings,
manipulations and blackmail, Christianity became a respectable
religion. Its former creeping humility disappears and the most
unpleasant Christian face arises: Christians immediately demand that
the ‘idol-worshipers’ be prescribed the bestial punishments described
in the Old Testament.
324 CE. Throughout Italy, with the exception of Rome, the
temples of Jupiter are closed. In Didyma, Asia Minor, the sanctuary of
the Oracle of Apollo is sacked. Priests are sadistically tortured to
death. Constantine expelled the adepts of the old culture from Mount

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Athos (a mystical zone of classical Greece that later became an
important Christian-Orthodox centre), destroying all the Hellenic
temples in the area. In 324 Constantine ordered to destroy the temple
of the god Asclepius in Cilicia, as well as numerous temples of the
goddess Aphrodite in Jerusalem, Afak (Lebanon), Mamre, Phoenicia,
Baalbek, and other places.
326 CE: Constantine changes the capital of his empire to
Byzantium, which he renames with the name Nuova Roma. This,
together with the adoption of Christianity, means a radical change
within the Roman Empire. From then on, the Roman focus of
cultural attention changes from its origin in northern Europe and
Greece, to Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine and North Africa (the Eastern
Mediterranean, from which most of the inhabitants of the Empire
now come): importing models of dark Semitic beauty unthinkable for
the ancient Romans who, like the Greeks, had the Nordic beauty in
high esteem as a sign of noble and divine origin.

Saint Constantine

330 CE: Constantine steals statues and treasures from Greece

to decorate Nuova Roma (later Constantinople), the new capital of his
empire. At this same time, a bishop from Caesarea, Asia Minor, later
known as St. Basil who is credited with grandiose phrases such as ‘I
wept for my miserable life’, laid the foundations for what would later
become the Orthodox Church.
337 CE: On his deathbed, Emperor Constantine I is baptised
a Christian, becoming the first Christian Roman emperor. The Judeo-
Christian sycophants, wanting to make clear what example of an
emperor he was, will call him Constantine ‘the Great’ or ‘Saint
Constantine’.

64
Constantine’s heir: Constantius
341 CE: Emperor Constantius, who reigned from 337 to 361
(bust below), was another fanatical Christian who proclaimed his
intention to persecute ‘all fortune-tellers and pagans’. Under his reign
many Greek Hellenists are imprisoned, tortured and executed.
Famous Christian leaders such as Marcus of Arethusa or Cyril of
Heliopolis do their way, particularly demolishing temples, burning
important writings and persecuting the Hellenists who, in some way,
threaten the expansion of the incipient Church.

We cannot doubt that, at least in part, Christianity used its

repugnance for Roman decadence to persecute any pagan cult, just as
Islam today rejects the decline of Western Civilization. This was just
the perfect excuse how Christianity justified its deeds and
exterminated classical culture. That which Christianity systematically
persecuted with shameful excuses, was something pure and
aristocratic: luminous Hellenism, love of gnosis, art, philosophy, free
debate and the natural sciences. It was Egyptian, Greek and Persian
knowledge. What Christianity was doing with its persecution and
extermination was literally erasing the traces of the gods.
346 CE: Another great anti-Hellenist persecution in
Constantinople. The famous anti-Christian author and speaker
Libanius is accused of being a ‘magician’ and is banished.8 At this
point, what was once the Roman Empire has gone crazy, chaotic and
unrecognisable. The patriotic Romans must take their hands to their
heads when they see how ignorant crowds snatch from their heirs all
the harvest of the ancient cultures, not only of Rome itself but also of
Egypt, Persia and Greece.

8Note of the editor: Gore Vidal, in his historical novel Julian, gives
Libanius the last word: a moving final page of the novel.

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 353-54 CE: A decree by Constantius establishes the death
penalty for anyone who practices a religion with ‘idols’. Another
decree, in 354, orders to close all the Greco-Roman temples. Many of
them are assaulted by fanatical crowds, who torture and murder the
priests, loot the treasures, burn the writings, destroy works of art that
today would be considered sublime and destroy everything in general.
Most of the temples that fall in this era are desecrated, being
converted into stables, brothels and gambling halls. The first lime
factories are installed next to these closed temples, from which they
extract their raw material—in such a way that a large part of classical
sculpture and architecture is transformed into lime! In this same year
of 354, a new edict plainly orders the destruction of all Greco-Roman
temples and the extermination of all ‘idolaters’. The killings of the
adepts of Greco-Roman culture, the demolitions of their temples, the
destructions of statues and the fires of libraries throughout the empire
follow each other.
Let us not make the mistake of blaming the Christianised
Roman emperors. They were ridiculous and weak men, but they were
in the hands of their educators. The instructors, who respond to the
type of vampiric and parasitic priest so hated by Nietzsche, were the
true leaders of the meticulous and massive destruction that was taking
place. The numerous bishops and saints to whom we have referred
were ‘cosmopolitan’ men of Jewish education, many of whom had
been born in Judea, or came from essentially Jewish areas. They were
transformed Jews who, having come in contact with their enemies,
studying them carefully and hatefully, knew how to destroy them.
They had a broad rabbinical education and knew in depth the
teachings of classical culture, dominating the Latin, Greek, Hebrew,
Aramaic, Syrian and Egyptian languages. Such characters, of an
intelligence and a cunning as outstanding as their resentment, were
convinced that they were building a new order, and that to do so it
was necessary to erase a hundred percent every trace of any previous
civilisation, and any thought that was not of Jewish origin. We must
recognise that their psychological knowledge and their mastery of
propaganda were of a very high level.
356 CE: All the rituals of classical culture are placed outside
the law and punished by death. A year later, all methods of divination,
including astrology, are also proscribed.
359 CE: In the very Jewish city of Scythopolis, (province of
Syria, today corresponds to Beit She’an, in Israel), Christian leaders
organise nothing more and nothing less than a concentration camp

66
for the adepts of classical culture, detained throughout the empire. In
this field those who profess the old beliefs, or who simply opposed
the Church, are imprisoned, tortured and executed. Over time,
Scythopolis becomes a whole infrastructure of camps, dungeons,
torture cells and execution rooms, where thousands of Hellenists
would go. The most intense horrors of the time take place here. It
was the gulag that the communism of the time used to suppress the
dissidents.9

A statue of Augustus, the first Roman Emperor,

who was obviously pagan. It was disfigured by the
Christians, who engraved a cross on the forehead.

Emperor Julian as the last flick of the tail of Rome

‘Why were you so ungrateful to our gods as to desert
them for the Jews?’
—Julian, addressing the Christians

While Europe is in this lamentable state, and all hope seems

lost, there is a last representative figure of the ancestral tradition: the
Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus (reign 360 to 363), whom
Christians will call Julian the Apostate, for having rejected Christianity
(in which he was educated) and advocated a return to the past. Julian
restored the old ways in 361, organised religious practices to oppose
the Christian Church, and proclaimed benevolence towards the
Hellenists. In 362, he ordered to destroy the tomb of Jesus in
Samaria.

9 Note of the editor: Unlike Karlheinz Deschner, who uses

thousands of footnotes in his books about the criminal history of
Christianity, Evropa Soberana does not reference most of what he
writes. I guess his source for the Judaeo-Christian death camp in
Scythopolis was Ammianus Marcellinus.

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 Julian. After this bust we will
see how the statues of the Roman
Emperors gradually degenerate.
Julian was a philosopher, ascetic, artist, Neo-Platonist, Stoic,
strategist, a man of letters, mystic and soldier. In wars, he always
accompanied his legions, suffering the same privations and calamities
as a foot infantry soldier. It is said that Julian had a vision in dreams
before his death: The imperial eagle of Rome (solar symbol of Jupiter)
leaves Rome and flies towards the East, where he takes refuge in the
highest mountains in the world. After sleeping for two millennia, he
wakes up and returns to the West with a sacred symbol between his
legs, and is acclaimed by the people of the empire.
In 363, in full campaign against the empire of the
Emperor Shapur II, Julian is killed by a stabbing in the back by a
Christian infiltrated in his ranks. The last emperor who was an adept
of classical culture was also the man who, trying to avoid the end,
envisioned a new beginning. It belongs to that mysterious list of great
men born too late or too soon.
After this last announcement of the future resurrection, Rome
is already eaten up, rotten, cursed. It has gone from a coarse, forceful,
natural and Spartan spirit to a decadent, cosmopolitan, promiscuous,
pseudo-sophisticated and complacent world with slaves—and from
there to the Christian creed. Now nothing will save Rome from the
final, galloping decay.

After Julian
Julian, the last patriotic emperor of Rome, is succeeded by
Emperor Flavius Jovian: a fundamentalist Christian who reinstates
terror, including the Scythopolis camps. In 364 he orders the burning

68
of Antioch’s library. We must assume that what has come to us today
from the philosophy, science, poetry and art in general of the classical
era is nothing but a mutilated dispossession of what was left behind
from the Christian destruction.
Through a series of edicts, the emperor decrees the death
penalty for all individuals who worship the ancient gods instead of the
god of the Jews (including domestic and private worship) or practice
divination; and all the assets of the temples of the old religions are
confiscated. With a decree of 364, the emperor forbids non-Christian
military leaders to command over Christian troops.
That same year, Jovian is succeeded by Emperor Valentinian,
another insane fundamentalist. In the eastern part, his brother Valens
continued the persecution of the followers of classical culture, being
especially cruel in the easternmost part of the empire. In Antioch, he
executed the former governor and the priests Hilary and Patrician.
The philosopher Semonides is burned alive and Maximus, another
philosopher, is decapitated. All the Neo-Platonists and loyal men to
Emperor Julian are persecuted with fury. At this point there should
already be a strong anti-Christian reaction from the part of the wise
men and all the patriots in general. But it was too late and their only
option was to preserve their knowledge in some way. In the squares
of the eastern cities huge bonfires are erected where the sacred books,
the Gnostic texts, the Egyptian teachings, the Greek philosophy, the
Roman literature burns…

Ceres, the Roman Demeter, goddess of agriculture and grain,

patiently carved on ivory and of unprecedented beauty. The
Christians mutilated her face and threw it into a well in a later
abbey in the northeast of France.

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 The classic world is being destroyed, and not only in that
present, but also in the past and in the future. The Christian fanatics
want, literally, to erase all traces of Egypt, Greece and Rome; that
nobody knows that they ever existed and, above all, know what the
Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans have said, thought and taught.
372 CE: Emperor Valentinian orders the governor of Asia
Minor to exterminate all the Hellenes (meaning as such the non-
Christian Greeks of ancient Hellenic lineage, i.e., the Aryans, and,
especially, the old Macedonian ruling caste) and destroy all documents
relating to their wisdom. In addition, the following year he again
prohibits all methods of divination.
It is around this time when Christians coined the
contemptuous term ‘pagan’ to designate the gentiles, that is, all who
are neither Jews nor Christians. ‘Pagan’ is a word that comes from the
Latin pagani which means villager. In the dirty, corrupt, decadent,
cosmopolitan and mongrelised cities of the now decadent Roman
empire, the population is essentially Christian but in the countryside,
the peasants, who keep their heritage and tradition pure, are ‘pagans’.
It is in the countryside, oblivious to multiculturalism, where the
ancestral memory is preserved. (Both Christians and communists did
their best to end the way of life of the landowner, the farmer and the
peasant.) However, this peasant ‘paganism’, stripped of priestly
leadership and temples and finally plunged into persecution and
miscegenation, is doomed to eventually become a bundle of popular
superstitions mixed with pre-Indo-European roots, although
something of the traditional background will always remain, as in the
local ‘healers’ and ‘witches’ who for so long subsisted despite the
persecutions.
Ending classical culture was not so easy. It was not easy to
find all the temples or destroy them. Nor was it easy to identify all the
priests of the old religion or those who practiced their rites in secret.
That was a long-term task for a zealous, meticulous and fanatical elite
of ‘commissaries’ that would last for many, many generations:
centuries and centuries of spiritual terror and intense persecution.
375 CE: The temple of the god Asclepius in Epidaurus,
Greece is forcibly closed.
378 CE: The Romans are defeated by the Gothic army in the
battle of Hadrianopolis. The Emperor intervenes and, through a
sagacious diplomacy, makes allies (foederati) of the Goths, a Germanic
people originally from Sweden: famous for their beauty and who had
a kingdom in what is now Ukraine.

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Theodosius ‘the Great’
389 CE: Emperor Theodosius (reign 379 to 394) decrees,
through the edict of Thessalonica, that Christianity is officially the
only tolerable religion in the Roman Empire, although this has been
obvious for years. Theodosius calls non-Christians ‘crazy’ as well as
‘disgusting, heretics, stupid and blind’.

Theodosius I

Bishop Ambrose of Milan starts a campaign to demolish the

temples in his area. In the ancient Greek sanctuary of Eleusis,
Christian priests throw a hungry crowd, ignorant and fanatical against
the temple of the goddess Demeter. The priests are almost lynched by
the mob. Nestorius, a venerable old man of 95 years, announces the
end of the mysteries of Eleusis and foresees the submergence of men
in darkness for centuries.
381 CE: Simple visits to the Hellenic temples are forbidden,
and the destruction of temples and library fires throughout the
eastern half of the empire continues. The sciences, technology,
literature, history and religion of the classical world are thus burned.
In Constantinople, the temple of the goddess Aphrodite is turned into
a brothel, and the temples of the god Helios and the goddess Artemis
are converted into stables. Theodosius persecutes and closes the
mysteries of Delphi, the most important of Greece, which had so
much influence on the history of ancient Greece.
382 CE: The Jewish formula Hellelu-Yahweh or Hallelujah
(‘Glory to Yahweh’) is instituted in Christian masses.
384 CE: The emperor orders the praetor prefect Maternus
Cynegius, uncle of the emperor and one of the most powerful men of
the empire, to cooperate with the local bishops in the destruction of
the temples in Macedonia and Asia Minor.
385-88 CE: Cynegius, encouraged by his fanatical wife, and
together with Bishop St Marcellus, organises bands of Christian

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‘paramilitary’ murderers who travel throughout the Eastern Empire to
preach the ‘good news’; that is, to destroy temples, altars and
reliquaries. They destroy, among many others, the temple of Edessa,
the Kabeirion of Imbros, the temple of Zeus in Apamea, the temple
of Apollo in Didyma and all the temples of Palmyra. Thousands are
arrested and sent to the dungeons of Scythopolis, where they are
imprisoned, tortured and killed in subhuman conditions. And in case
any lover of antiquities or art comes up with restoring, preserving or
conserving the remains of the looted, destroyed or closed temples, in
386 the emperor specifically prohibits the practise!
388 CE: The emperor, in a Soviet-like measure, forbids talks
on religious subjects probably because Christianity cannot be
sustained and can even suffer serious losses through religious debates.
Libanius, the old orator of Constantinople once accused of a
magician, directs to the emperor a desperate and humble epistle Pro
Templis (‘In Favour of the Temples’), trying to preserve the few
remaining temples.
389-90 CE: All non-Christian holidays are banned. Savage
groups of those times, headed by hermits of the desert, invade the
Roman cities of East and North Africa. In Egypt, Asia Minor and
Syria, these hordes sweep away temples, statues, altars and libraries;
killing anyone who crosses their path. Theodosius I orders the
devastation of the sanctuary of Delphi, centre of wisdom respected
throughout the Hélade, destroying its temples and works of art.
Bishop Theophilus, the patriarch of Alexandria, initiates
persecutions of the Hellenists, inaugurating in Alexandria a period of
real battles on the streets. He converts the temple of the god
Dionysus into a church, destroys the temple of Zeus, burns the
Mithraic and profanes the cult images. The priests are humiliated and
mocked publicly before being stoned.
391 CE: A new decree of Theodosius specifically prohibits
looking at the shattered statues! The persecutions of the whole empire
are renewed.
In Alexandria, where the tensions were always very common,
the pagan minority, headed by the philosopher Olympius, carries out
an anti-Christian revolt. After bloody street fights with dagger and
sword against crowds of Christians who outnumber them greatly, the
traditionalists entrench themselves in the Serapeum, a fortified temple
dedicated to the god Serapis. After encircling the building, the
Christian mob, under the patriarch Theophilus, breaks into the temple
and murder all those present; desecrates the cult images, plunders the

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property, burns down its famous library and finally throws down all
the construction. It is the famous ‘second destruction’ of the Library
of Alexandria, the jewel of ancient wisdom in absolutely every field,
including philosophy, mythology, medicine, Gnosticism, mathematics,
astronomy, architecture or geometry: a spiritual catastrophe for the
heritage of the West. A church was built on its remains.

A bust of Germanicus defaced

by Christians who also engraved
a cross on his forehead.

392 CE: The emperor forbids all ancient rituals, calling

them gentilicia superstitio, superstitions of the gentiles.
The mysteries of Samothrace are bloodily closed and all their
priests are killed. In Cyprus, the spiritual and physical extermination is
led by St. Epiphanius—born in Judea and raised in a Jewish
environment, with Jewish blood himself. The emperor gives carte
blanche to St. Epiphanius in Cyprus, stating that ‘those who do not
obey Father Epiphanius have no right to continue living on that
island’. Thus emboldened, the Christian eunuchs exterminate
thousands of Hellenists and destroy almost all the temples of Cyprus.
The mysteries of the local Aphrodite, based on the art of eroticism
and with a long tradition, are eradicated. In this fateful year there are
insurrections against the Church and against the Roman Empire in
Petra, Areopoli, Rafah, Gaza, Baalbek and other eastern cities. But the
Eastern-Christian invasion is not going to stop at this point in its
push towards the heart of Europe.
393 CE: The Olympic Games are banned, as well as the
Pythia Games and the Aktia Games. The Christians must have sensed
that this cult for ‘profane’ and ‘mundane’ sports of agility, health,

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beauty and strength must logically belong to the Greco-Roman world,
and that sport is an area where Christians of the time could never
reign. Taking advantage of the conjuncture, the Christians plunder the
temple of Olympia.
394 CE: In this year all gymnasiums in Greece are shut down
by force. Any place where the slightest dissidence flourishes, or where
unchristian mentalities thrive, must be shut down. Christianity is
neither a friend of the muscles nor of athletics or of triumphant
sweat: but of the tears of impotence and of terrifying tremors.
That same year, Theodosius removed the statue of Victory
from the Roman Senate. The so-called ‘war of the statue’ thus ended:
a cultural conflict that pitted Hellenist and Christian senators in the
Senate, removing and restoring the statue numerous times. The year
394 also saw the closing of the temple of Vesta, where the sacred
Roman fire burned.

Emperor Arcadius

Arcadius. At first glance an eunuch,

a brat, when compared to the Roman
emperors and soldiers of yore.

395 CE: Theodosius dies, being succeeded by Arcadius (reign

395 to 408).
This year, two new decrees reinvigorate the persecution.
Rufinus, a eunuch and prime minister of Arcadius, makes the Goths
invade Greece knowing that, like good barbarians, they will destroy,
loot and kill. Among the cities plundered by the Goths are Dion,
Delphi, Megara, Corinth, Argos, Nemea, Sparta, Messenia and

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Olympia. The Goths, already Christianised in Arianism, kill many
Greeks; set fire to the ancient sanctuary of Eleusis and burn all its
priests, including Hilary, priest of Mithras.
396 CE: Another decree of the emperor proclaims that the
previous culture will be considered high treason. Most of the
remaining priests are locked in murky dungeons for the rest of their
days.
397 CE: The emperor literally orders to demolish all the
remaining temples.
398 CE: During the Fourth Ecclesiastical Council of Carthage
(North Africa, now Tunisia) the study of Greco-Roman works is
forbidden to anyone, even the Christian bishops themselves.
399 CE: Arcadius, once again, orders the demolition of the
remaining temples. At this point, most of them are in the deep rural
areas of the empire.
400 CE: Bishop Nicetas destroys the Oracle of Dionysus and
forcibly baptizes all non-Christians in the area. By this final year of
the fourth century, a definite Christian hierarchy has already been
established which includes priests, bishops, archbishops of larger
cities and the ‘patriarchs’: the archbishops responsible for major cities,
namely Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Constantinople.
401 CE: A crowd of Christians lynched the Hellenists in
Carthage, destroying temples and statues. In Gaza, the Hellenists are
lynched at the request of Bishop Porphyry, who also orders the
destruction of the nine temples still standing in the city. That same
year, a council in Chalcedon commands the excommunication—even
after their deaths!—of Christians who keep good relationships with
their Hellenist relatives.
St. John Chrysostom, ‘Holy and Father of the Church’, raises
funds with the help of rich, boring, idle and resentful Christian
women against the patriarchal Roman worship of perfection and war
(such women are fascinated by the sickly Christian sadomasochism).
Thus financed, he carries out a work of demolition of Greek temples.
Thanks to the work of ‘Saint’ John Chrysostom, the ancient temple of
Artemis in Ephesus is demolished.
406-7 CE: Emperor Arcadius returns to launch a decree in
which he prohibits all non-Christian cults, which means that at this
point so-called ‘paganism’ persists. A group of foederati tribes
(federated to Rome, residents within its borders and faithful
defenders of the empire), the Vandals, the Swabians and the Alans

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(the latter of Iranian origin, not Germanic) invaded France, destined
for Spain.

The immense temple of Artemis in Ephesus was one of the Seven

Wonders of the Ancient World and had been built in the 6th century
BCE over an area considered sacred since, at least, the Bronze Age.
Its construction took 120 years and it could be said that it was
perfectly comparable to a cathedral. The Christians end the
existence of this almost millennial building.

Other emperors
408 CE: Emperor Honorius of the Western Empire and
Emperor Arcadius of the Eastern Empire ordered together that all
Greco-Roman sculptures be destroyed. There are again destructions
of temples, massacres and fires of their writings. Around this time,
the famous African St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, ‘Saint, Father
and Doctor of the Church’ massacred hundreds of pagans in Calama,
Algeria. (It will not be long before he died at the hands of the
Vandals, a Germanic people that don’t walk around nonsense.)
Augustine also established the persecution of judges who show mercy
to the ‘idolaters’.
This same year of 408 the emperor Arcadius dies, being
succeeded by the Emperor Theodosius II. To get an idea of the
fanaticism, dementia and moral quality of this abortive subhuman,
suffice it to say that he ordered children to be executed for playing
with pieces of destroyed Greco-Roman statues. According to the
same Christian historians, Theodosius II ‘meticulously followed the
Christian teachings’.
While all this takes place, this same year of 408 a Roman chief
of Germanic origin who had courageously defended the borders of
the empire, Stilicho the vandal, is executed by a party of decadent

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Romans envious of his triumphs. After his unjust death, this party
gives a sort of coup d’état and the women and children—we are talking
about a minimum of 60,000 people—of the German foederati are
massacred throughout Italy by the Christians. Devastated with rage
and calling for revenge against the murderers, after this cowardly act
the fathers and husbands of these families—30,000 men who had
been faithful soldiers of Rome—went over the ranks of the Visigothic
king Alaric.

Theodosius II. Judging by the quality

of the portrait, the empire was not in good
shape under his reign, or perhaps it is that
the old sculptors had been killed.

409 CE: The Roman Empire collapses in irremissibly crisis, in

filthy corruption and overwhelmed by the Germans. But the powerful
Christians are in a hurry to eradicate the Greco-Roman legacy before
the Germans discover it—lest the Germanised empire becomes
Greece-Rome II! That same year, the Swabians, Vandals and Alans
cross the Pyrenees and invade Spain.
410 CE: An army of Visigoths and other German allies loot
Rome itself.

Alexandria, Egypt, 415 CE

The protagonist of this year is Hypatia, philosopher and
mathematician instructed by her father, the also famous philosopher
and mathematician Theon of Alexandria.
Hypatia’s biographers say that in the morning she spent
several hours in physical exercise and the she took relaxing baths that
helped her to devote the rest of the day to the study of philosophy,
music and mathematics. Hypatia was virgin and chaste; that is, she
was at the level of a priestess—a wise woman, ‘a perfect human being’

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just as her father had wanted. Hypatia also ran a philosophical school
from which women were excluded. (This is to give thought to the
feminists who have tried to use her figure in recent times.)
The bigwig of Alexandria during that time was Archbishop
Cyril (370-444), nephew of the aforementioned Theophilus. He had
the title of patriarch, an ecclesiastical honour that amounted almost to
that of the pope, and which was held only by the archbishops of
Jerusalem, Alexandria and Constantinople: that is, the most Jewish
and Christian cities of the Roman Empire. During this time there was
another mass rebellion; once again, street fights, tensions and settling
of scores between Christians and Hellenists followed each other.
Archbishop Cyril had started a persecution of Alexandria scholars,
twenty-four years after the library fire. This time, more radicalised, the
Christians murdered anyone who refused to convert to the new
religion. Hypatia, at that time director of the museum, where she
dedicated herself to the philosophy of Plato, was one of those
people—for which she was accused of conspiring against the
archbishop.
Days after the accusation, friars called parabalani, fanatical
monks in charge of the dirty work of the archbishop and coming
from the church of Jerusalem,10 kidnapped her from her carriage, beat
her, stripped her and dragged her throughout the city until they
reached the church of Caesarea. There, at the orders of a lector
named Peter, they raped her several times and then skinned her and
ripped the flesh with sharp oyster shells. Hypatia died raped, skinned
and bleeding in atrocious pains. After this, they dismembered her
corpse, took her pieces through Alexandria as trophies and then to a
place called Cinarion, where they were burned. The archbishop who
ordered her martyrdom is remembered by the Church as St. Cyril of
Alexandria.
Only a crowd sick with resentment and hatred, and enraged
by commissaries expert in the art of raising slaves, could carry out this
act which disgusts any person with a minimum of decency. Hypatia
was the perfect victim for a ritual sacrifice: European, beautiful,
healthy, wise, Hellenistic and virgin. And that is what excites slaves
the most when sacrificing the innocence and kindness of the victim.
The cruelty shown, even in regard to the destruction of her body,
indicates that the Christians greatly feared Hypatia and all that she

10 Note of the editor: Probably ethnic Semites.

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represented. The death of the scientist, in addition to being perfectly
illustrative of the atrocities committed by Christians at this time,
inaugurated an era of persecution of priests in North Africa, especially
directed against the Egyptian priesthood. Most of them were crucified
or burned alive.
Hypatia’s atrocity is described here because it is well known;
and it is shocking that it happened to an unarmed, defenceless and
harmless woman. But let us not think of it as an isolated case. Many
simple Hellenists who did not look for trouble were sacrificed in a
similar or worse way and would continue to be so for many centuries.

Judaea, victorious
416 CE: A famous Christian leader known as ‘Sword of God’
exterminates the last ‘pagans’ of Bithynia, Asia Minor. That year, in
Constantinople all public officials, army commanders and judges who
are not Christians are fired.
423 CE: The emperor decrees that ‘paganism’ is ‘a cult of the
devil’ and orders that all those who continue to practice it be
imprisoned and tortured.
429 CE: The Athenians are persecuted, and the temple of the
goddess Athena—the famous Parthenon of the Acropolis—is looted.
435 CE: In this year occurs the most significant action on the
part of Emperor Theodosius II: He openly proclaims that the only
legal religion in Rome apart from Christianity is Judaism!
Through a bizarre, subterranean and astonishing struggle,
Judaism has not only persecuted the old culture, and Rome, its mortal
archenemy, adopts a Jewish creed—but the Jewish religion itself, so
despised and insulted by the old Romans, is now elevated as the only
official religion of Rome along with Christianity!
We must recognise the conspiratorial astuteness and the
implacable permanence of objectives of the original Judeo-Christian
nucleus! What they did was literally turn the tables on their favour:
turn Rome into anti-Rome; put at the service of Jewry everything that
the Jews so hated; take advantage of the strength of Rome and its
state apparatus, to put Rome against Rome itself in a sinister political-
spiritual jiu-jitsu—from spitted slaves, trampled, insulted, despised
and looked down, to absolute spiritual masters of the Roman Empire!
In a nutshell, Christianity was a subversive movement of
agitation against Rome, against Greece and, ultimately, against the
European world.

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 As already stated, we have to assume that what has come
down to us from the Greco-Roman world is only a tiny part of what
was really there and that it was taken away by the Judeo-Christian
destruction. Christianity, as a slave rebellion devised and led by Jews
with the aim of destroying Roman power—and, ultimately, all
European power—was and is a doctrine aimed at converting vigorous
peoples into a domesticated flock of sheep. Nietzsche understood it
perfectly, but when will we be able to fully assimilate what this meant
and what it still means today?

Laocoön and His Sons. The sculpture that once was in the palace
of Emperor Titus represents the tragic agony of the Ancient
World: Classic, athletic, wise, beautiful, courageous and close
to the gods, at the hands of the Eastern serpent.

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 Appendix: Nietzsche on Christianity 11
Rome contra Judea; Judea contra Rome

On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

1st treatise, § 8
But you fail to understand that? You have no eye for
something that needed two millennia to emerge victorious…?
This Jesus of Nazareth, the personified evangelist of love, this
‘Saviour’ bringing holiness and victory to the poor, to the sick, to the
sinners—was he not that very seduction in its most sinister and most
irresistible form, the seduction and detour to exactly those Judaic
values and innovations in ideals?
Didn’t Israel attain, precisely with the detour of this ‘Saviour’,
of this apparent enemy against and dissolver of Israel, the final goal of
its sublime thirst for vengeance?
Isn’t it part of the secret black art of a truly great politics of
revenge, a farsighted, underground, slowly expropriating, and
premeditated revenge, that Israel itself had to disown and nail to the
cross, like some mortal enemy, the tool essential to its revenge before
all the world, so that ‘all the world’, that is, all Israel’s enemies, could
then take this particular bait without a second thought?…
At least it is certain that sub hoc signo Israel, with its vengeance
and transvaluation of the worth of all other previous values, has
triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over all nobler ideals.
§ 16
The two opposing values ‘good and bad’ and ‘good and evil’
have fought a fearful battle on earth for thousands of years… The
symbol of this battle, written in a script which has remained legible
through all human history up to the present, is called ‘Rome against
Judea, Judea against Rome’. To this point there has been no greater

11Note of the editor: While I reproduced some Nietzsche quotes

chosen by the author, I added other quotes from the same Nietzsche
books that Evropa Soberana chose for this appendix.

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event than this war, this posing of a question, this contradiction
between deadly enemies.
Rome felt that the Jew was like something contrary to nature
itself, its antipodal monstrum, as it were. In Rome the Jew was
considered ‘convicted of hatred against the entire human race’. And that
view was correct, to the extent that we are right to link the health and
the future of the human race to the unconditional rule of aristocratic
values—to Roman values…
By contrast, how did the Jews feel about Rome? We can guess
that from a thousand signs, but it is sufficient to treat ourselves again
to the Apocalypse of John, that wildest of all written outbursts which
vengeance has on its conscience. (Incidentally, we must not
underestimate the deep consistency of the Christian instinct when it
ascribed this particular book of hate to the name of the disciple of
love, the same man to whom it attributed that enthusiastic amorous
gospel—there is some truth to this, no matter how much literary
counterfeiting may have been necessary for this purpose.)
The Romans were indeed strong and noble men, stronger and
nobler than any people who had lived on earth up until then or even
than any people who had ever been dreamed up. Everything they left
as remains, every inscription, is delightful, provided that we can
guess what is doing the writing there. By contrast, the Jews were par
excellence that priestly people of resentment, who possessed an
unparalleled genius for popular morality.
Which of them has proved victorious for the time being, Rome or
Judea? Surely there’s not the slightest doubt. Just think of who it is
people bow down to today in Rome itself as the personification of all
the highest values (and not only in Rome, but in almost half the earth,
all the places where people have become merely tame or want to
become tame): in front of three Jews, as we know, and one Jewess—in
front of Jesus of Nazareth, the fisherman Peter, the carpet maker
Paul, and the mother of the first-mentioned Jesus, named Mary.
This is very remarkable: without doubt Rome has been
conquered.
The Anti-Christ: A Curse on Christianity
(Written in 1888)
§ 24
This is precisely why the Jews are the most disastrous people in
world history: they have left such a falsified humanity in their wake

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that even today Christians can think of themselves as anti-Jewish
without understanding that they are the ultimate conclusion of Judaism.
§ 58
The harvest is blighted overnight… That which stood
there aere perennis, the imperium Romanum, the most magnificent form
of organisation under difficult conditions that has ever been achieved,
and compared to which everything before it and after it appears as
patchwork, bungling, dilettantism—those holy anarchists made it a
matter of ‘piety’ to destroy ‘the world’, which is to say, the imperium
Romanum, so that in the end not a stone stood upon another.

This piece came from a statue of Emperor Hadrian

that should have measured about five meters and was
found in Sagalassos, present south-central Turkey,
where Christianity took root early.

The Christian and the anarchist: both are décadents; both are
incapable of any act that is not disintegrating, poisonous,
degenerating, blood-sucking; both have an instinct of mortal hatred of
everything that stands up, and is great, and has durability, and
promises life a future…
Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum—
overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the
conquest of the soil for a great culture that could await its time. Can it
be that this fact is not yet understood?
The imperium Romanum that we know, and that the history of
the Roman provinces teaches us to know better and better. This most
admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was merely the
beginning, and the structure to follow was to prove its worth for
thousands of years. To this day, nothing on a like scale sub specie
aeterni has been brought into being, or even dreamed of! This
organisation was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the

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accident of personality has nothing to do with such things—
the first principle of all genuinely great architecture.
But it was not strong enough to stand up against
the corruptest of all forms of corruption—against Christians… These
stealthy worms, which under the cover of night, mist and duplicity,
crept upon every individual, sucking him dry of all earnest interest
in real things, of all instinct for reality—this cowardly, effeminate and
sugar-coated gang gradually alienated all ‘souls’, step by step, from
that colossal edifice, turning against it all the meritorious, manly and
noble natures that had found in the cause of Rome their own cause,
their own serious purpose, their own pride.
One has but to read Lucretius to know what Epicurus made
war upon—not paganism, but ‘Christianity’, which is to say, the
corruption of souls by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment
and immortality. He combated the subterranean cults, the whole of
latent Christianity—to deny immortality was already a form of
genuine salvation. Epicurus had triumphed, and every respectable
intellect in Rome was Epicurean when Paul appeared…
Paul, the Chandala hatred of Rome, of ‘the world’, in the flesh
and inspired by genius—the Jew, the eternal Jew par excellence…
What he saw was how, with the aid of the small sectarian
Christian movement that stood apart from Judaism, a ‘world
conflagration’ might be kindled; how, with the symbol of ‘God on the
cross’, all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues in the
empire, might be amalgamated into one immense power…
‘Salvation is of the Jews’. Christianity is the formula for
exceeding and summing up the subterranean cults of all varieties, that
of Osiris, that of the Great Mother, that of Mithras, for instance: in
his discernment of this fact the genius of Paul showed itself.
This was his revelation at Damascus: he grasped the fact that
he needed the belief in immortality in order to rob ‘the world’ of its
value, that the concept of ‘hell’ would master Rome, that the notion
of a ‘beyond’ is the death of life… Nihilist and Christ: they rhyme, and
they do more than rhyme.12
§ 59
The whole labour of the ancient world gone for naught: I have
no word to describe the feelings that such an enormity arouses in me!

12 Note of the editor: They rhyme in German.

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 And, considering the fact that its labour was merely
preparatory, that with adamantine self-consciousness it laid only the
foundations for a work to go on for thousands of years, the
whole meaning of antiquity disappears…
To what end the Greeks? To what end the Romans? All the
prerequisites to a learned culture, all the methods of science, were
already there. All gone for naught!... All overwhelmed in a night, but not
by a convulsion of nature! But brought to shame by crafty, sneaking,
invisible, anæmic vampires! Not conquered,—only sucked dry…!
Hidden vengefulness, petty envy, became master! Everything
wretched, intrinsically ailing, and invaded by bad feelings, the
whole ghetto-world of the soul was at once on top! One needs but read
any of the Christian agitators, for example St. Augustine, in order to
realize, in order to smell, what filthy fellows came to the top.
§ 61
Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a
hundred times more painful to Germans. The Germans have
destroyed for Europe the last great harvest of civilisation that Europe
was ever to reap—the Renaissance. Is it understood at last, will it ever
be understood, what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian
values: an attempt with all available means, all instincts and all the
resources of genius to bring about a triumph of the opposite values, the
more noble values… To attack at the critical place, at the very seat of
Christianity, and there enthrone the more noble values—that is to say,
to insinuate them into the instincts, into the most fundamental needs
and appetites of those sitting there…
I see before me the possibility of a heavenly enchantment and
spectacle: it seems to me to scintillate with all the vibrations of a fine
and delicate beauty, and within it there is an art so divine, so infernally
divine, that one might search in vain for thousands of years for
another such possibility; I see a spectacle so rich in significance and at
the same time so wonderfully full of paradox that it should arouse all
the gods on Olympus to immortal laughter: Cæsar Borgia as pope!… Am
I understood? Well then, that would have been the sort of triumph
that I alone am longing for today: by it Christianity would have
been swept away!
What happened? A German monk, Luther, came to Rome.
This monk, with all the vengeful instincts of an unsuccessful priest in
him, raised a rebellion against the Renaissance in Rome…

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 Instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiving, the miracle
that had taken place: the conquest of Christianity at its capital—
instead of this, his hatred was stimulated by the spectacle. A religious
man thinks only of himself. Luther saw only the depravity of the
papacy at the very moment when the opposite was becoming
apparent: the old corruption, the peccatum originale, Christianity itself,
no longer occupied the papal chair! Instead there was life! Instead
there was the triumph of life! Instead there was a great yea to all lofty,
beautiful and daring things!
And Luther restored the church.
§ 62
With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my
judgment.
I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the
most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his
mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks
to work the ultimate corruption. The Christian church has left
nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into
worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into
baseness of soul.
This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon
all walls, wherever walls are to be found—I have letters that even the
blind will be able to see…
I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic
depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are
venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,—I call it
the one immortal blemish upon the human race…
And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when this
fatality befell—from the first day of Christianity!—Why not rather from
its last?—From today?—
Transvaluation of all values!

Law against Christianity

Given on the Day of Salvation, on the first day of the year one
(30 September 1888, according to the false calculation of time).
War to the death against vice: the vice is Christianity
First article.—Every type of anti-nature is a vice. The priest is
the most vicious type of person: he teaches anti-nature. Priests are not
to be reasoned with, they are to be locked up.

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 Second article.—Any participation in church services is an attack
on public morality. One should be harsher with Protestants than with
Catholics, harsher with liberal Protestants than with orthodox ones.
The criminality of being Christian increases with your proximity to
science. The criminal of criminals is consequently the philosopher.
Third article.—The execrable location where Christianity
brooded over its basilisk eggs should be razed to the ground and,
being the infamous spot on earth, it should be the horror of all
posterity. Poisonous snakes should be bred on top of it.
Fourth article.—The preacher of chastity is a public incitement
to anti-nature. Contempt for sexuality, making it unclean with the
concept of ‘uncleanliness’, these are the real sins against the holy spirit
of life.
Fifth article.—Eating at the same table as a priest ostracizes:
you are excommunicated from honest society. The priest is our
Chandala,—he should be ostracised, starved, driven into every type of
desert.
Sixth article.—The ‘holy’ history should be called by the name
it deserves, the cursed history; the words ‘God’, ‘saviour’, ‘redeemer’,
‘saint’ should be used as terms of abuse, to signify criminals.
Seventh article.—The rest follows from this.
The Antichrist 13

13 Note of the editor: Nietzsche’s ‘Law Against Christianity’ is a

piece that has been eliminated from numerous editions.

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 Tommaso Laureti, The Triumph of Christianity (also called The Triumph
of the Cross, painted in 1585): The story of how an oriental messiah
came to replace the strong pagan gods.

___________________

Originally published on May 2013 in Spanish on Evropa

Soberana’s site (http://europasoberana.blogspot.com).

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