The very forms of privilege which had been left to the Jews were turned
to their hurt. The Herodian tetrarchs of Chalcis, to whom the Romans
granted the power of appointing the high priests, true to the tradition
of their house, appointed only such as were confirmed Romanizers, and
the most unscrupulous at that. When Felix was governor, the high priest
was the notorious Ananias, of whom the Talmud says, "Woe to the House of
Ananias; woe for their cursings, woe for their serpent-like
hissings."[1] Herod Agrippa II, the son of Agrippa, who held the
principate from 50-100 C.E., and was the faithful creature of Rome
throughout the period of his people's stress, proclaiming himself on his
coins "lover of Caesar and lover of Rome," deposed and created high
priests with unparalleled frequency as a means of extorting money and
rewarding the leading informers. There were seven holders of the office
during the last twenty years of Roman rule, and "he who carried furthest
servility and national abnegation received the prize." The high priests
thus formed a kind of anti-national oligarchy; they robbed the other
priests of their dues, and reduced them to poverty, and were the willing
tools of Roman tyranny. Together with the Herodian princes, who indulged
every lust and wicked passion, they undermined the strength of the
people like some fatal canker, much as the priests and nobles had done
at the first fall of Jerusalem, or, again, in the days of the Seleucid
Emperors. Apart from governors, tax-collectors, and high priests, the
Romans had an instrument of oppression in the Greek-speaking population
of Palestine and Syria, which maintained an inveterate hostility to the
Jews. The immediate cause of the great Rebellion actually arose out of a
feud between the Jewish and the Gentile inhabitants of Caesarea. The
Hellenistic population outnumbered the Jews in the Herodian foundations
of Caesarea, Sepphoris, Tiberias, Paneas, etc., as well as in the old
Greek cities of Doris, Scythopolis, Gerasa, Gadara, and the rest of the
Decapolis. This population regarded religion only as the pretext for