by Merivale to the Montagnards of the French Revolution, driven by their
own indomitable passion to assert the truths that possessed them with a
ferocity that no possession could justify. They were continually rousing
the people to expel the foreign rulers, and in the northern province of
Galilee, where they found shelter amid the wild tracts of heath and
mountain, they maintained a constant state of insurrection.[1]

[Footnote 1: It is important to notice that much of our knowledge of the
Zealots is derived from Josephus, who, as will be seen, set himself to
misrepresent them, and repeated the calumnies of hostile Roman writers
against them. The Talmud contains several references to them, describing
them as Kannaim (the Hebrew equivalent of Zealots), and it would appear
that they were in their outlook successors of the former Hasidim,
distinguished as much for their religious rigidity as their patriotic
fervor. See Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. Zealots.]

The Romans, on their side, accustomed to the ready submission of all the
peoples under their sway, could not understand or tolerate the Jews. To
them this people with its dour manners, its refusal to participate in
the religious ideas, the social life, and the pleasures of its
neighbors, its eruptions of passion and violence on account of abstract
ideas, and its rigid exclusion of the insignia of Roman majesty from the
capital, seemed the enemies of the human race. In their own religion
they had freely found a place for Greek and Egyptian deities, but the
Jewish faith, in its uncompromising opposition to all pagan worship,
seemed, in the words that Anatole France has put into the mouth of one
of the Roman procurators, to be rather an _ab_ligion than a _re_ligion,
an institution designed rather to sever the bond that united peoples,
than bind them together. Every other civilized people had accepted their
dominion; the Jews and the Parthians alone stood in the way of universal