232 A History of Judaism
the land of Israel was not to grow again to any great extent for many
centuries, although the Jewish community prospered for the first half-
century of Arab rule, protected by the founder of the Umayyad dynasty,
Caliph Mu’awiya. Conditions worsened in the eighth century, with the
introduction of restrictions on the public conduct and religious obser-
vances of non- Muslims by Omar II. The level of such restrictions on
Jews and Christians as the protected non- Muslim population (the
dhimmi ) varied over ensuing centuries, and some Jews at least must
have accepted the invitation to convert to Islam. Those Jews who
remained in the land were generally to be found in trading towns, such
as Ramleh. There was a slightly larger concentration up to the ninth
century in Tiberias in Galilee, after which Jerusalem again became the
main centre of Jewish population in Palestine for two centuries until the
turmoil brought by the Crusaders from the end of the eleventh century.
Over the following centuries the surviving smaller communities were
reinforced occasionally by settlers from Europe, with new centres of
population in Acre and Ashkelon. The return of Muslim rule in 1291
under the Mamluks brought some respite and, from the beginning of
the fifteenth century, a resurgence of Jewish settlement in Jerusalem.
The Jews of the Mediterranean diaspora were affected by the same
upheavals in the wider world. Ructions in Egypt and Cyrene (modern
Libya) following the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce were rapidly
quashed by the Roman state, only to burst out again in a huge uprising,
from 115 to 117 ce, by the Jews in the south- eastern corner of the
Mediterranean. This revolt in the last years of the emperor Trajan
resulted in the disappearance of the whole of the powerful Jewish com-
munity of Egypt and Alexandria. A hundred years later, Cassius Dio
recorded that any Jew who set foot on the island of Cyprus was still to
be put to death. The Jews of Asia Minor and Greece seem to have
remained more at peace, flourishing at least to the sixth century ce but
often subjected to restrictions by Christian emperors after Constantine.
At times they came under direct physical pressure from Christian clergy:
when a synagogue in Callinicum (modern Raqqa) in Mesopotamia was
burned down by a mob in 388, the emperor Theodosius I, keen to pre-
serve imperial order, tried to punish the perpetrators and require them to
reconstruct the building at their own expense, only to be thwarted by
Ambrose, bishop of Milan, who viewed such a rebuilding as sacrilegious.
The severity of the restrictions placed upon Jews by the Christian
state, and the efficiency with which they were enforced, naturally varied