70-638 CE
The Jews of the post-Temple period were a people defined by scripture, law, and exile, scattered across the Roman and Persian worlds after the destruction of Jerusalem yet holding together through synagogue, scholarship, and an unbroken chain of religious practice.
By 70 CE the Jews were a people whose center had been destroyed. The Roman sack of Jerusalem and the burning of the Second Temple removed the physical heart of Jewish religious life: the place of sacrifice, the dwelling of the divine presence, the point toward which every Jew in the world turned to pray. What remained was everything else: the Torah, the oral law, the synagogue, and a network of communities stretching from Mesopotamia to Spain. Other peoples in the ancient world lost their temples and disappeared. The Jews lost theirs and became more distinctive than before.
The transition from a temple-based religion centered on priestly sacrifice to a text-based religion centered on study and prayer is one of the most remarkable adaptations in religious history. It happened within a generation, driven by necessity and by rabbis who understood that a faith carried in a scroll could survive anything.
After 70, Jewish life had two major centers: Palestine, where a diminished Jewish population continued under Roman rule, and Babylonia, where a large and ancient community lived under Parthian and then Sassanid Persian authority. Smaller communities existed in every major city of the Roman world: Alexandria, Antioch, Rome itself, and dozens of towns across North Africa, Greece, and Gaul.
Jews in these communities worked as farmers, artisans, merchants, and laborers. A Jewish dyer in a workshop in third-century Tyre, staining cloth with Tyrian purple, lived among non-Jewish neighbors and conducted business in Greek or Aramaic. A Jewish farmer in the Galilee tending olive trees followed the same agricultural calendar as his gentile neighbors but observed the Sabbath, kept dietary laws, and paid his tithes to the rabbinical authorities rather than to a temple that no longer stood. Daily life was shaped by halakha, the body of Jewish law that governed everything from prayer schedules to business ethics to the preparation of food.
The destruction of the Temple was not the end of Jewish military resistance. The Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-135 was a full-scale war that expelled the Romans from Judea for three years before being crushed with enormous casualties on both sides. After Bar Kokhba, armed revolt ceased to be a viable strategy. The emperor Hadrian banned Jews from Jerusalem, renamed the province Syria Palaestina, and attempted to erase Jewish association with the land entirely.
Jewish political power after 135 was exercised through influence rather than force. The Patriarch in Palestine and the Exilarch in Babylonia served as communal leaders recognized by their respective empires, negotiating tax obligations, legal autonomy, and protection. A community's survival depended on making itself economically useful and politically inoffensive. This required a diplomatic skill that was itself a form of statecraft, practiced without armies or borders.
The rabbis who reshaped Judaism after 70 produced two monumental works: the Mishnah, compiled around 200 CE in Palestine, and the Talmud, completed in its Babylonian version by the sixth century. The Talmud is not a book in the ordinary sense but an enormous record of legal argument, biblical interpretation, folklore, medical advice, and ethical debate, organized as a running conversation among generations of scholars who disagreed constantly and considered the disagreement itself sacred. A student in a Babylonian yeshiva in the fifth century, puzzling over a passage where one rabbi contradicted another and a third contradicted both, was learning not just law but a method of thinking that valued questions as highly as answers.
The synagogue replaced the Temple as the center of communal life. Every community of sufficient size maintained one, and it served as prayer house, study hall, court, and meeting place. The weekly Torah reading cycle ensured that every Jewish community in the world heard the same texts on the same schedule, creating a shared rhythm that bound the diaspora together across thousands of kilometers.
Jewish merchants operated across the entire breadth of the ancient world, their commercial networks following the diaspora. A trader who could find a synagogue and a Jewish host in any major city from Cadiz to Ctesiphon had a built-in infrastructure of trust, credit, and communication that no other merchant community could match. Jewish communities served as commercial intermediaries between the Roman and Persian worlds, carrying goods and information across a frontier closed to most other traffic.
The relationship with Christianity grew increasingly difficult as Christianity became the Roman state religion. Legal restrictions accumulated through the fourth and fifth centuries: bans on building new synagogues, exclusion from public office, periodic forced conversion. Jewish communities survived through economic indispensability, legal negotiation, and sheer persistence. When the Arab conquests of the seventh century replaced Christian Roman rule in the eastern Mediterranean, Jewish communities generally found the new regime more tolerant. The pattern of survival through adaptation, a people without political power maintaining cultural coherence through law, text, and communal discipline, continued unbroken.
to change the price of any one good
by one step
with your fortifications also has your 
to ignore 1 damage
In the game, the Jews are a diaspora nation built for economic boom, not military confrontation. Fortifications spread your religious communities cheaply, market manipulation with glory lets you control trade prices, and 5 coins can absorb a point of damage when trouble arrives. You cannot add experience or voting cubes to the battle bag, so avoid provoking wars. Negotiate with opponents, offer favorable trades, even pay tribute if needed. If diplomacy fails, Theocracy and the conversion mechanic give you a last line of defense. Build walls, build markets, and make yourself too valuable to attack.
No. You must spend 1 glory to use this ability. If you have no glory, you cannot activate it.
Yes. However, your first Reform action can only select a government, not a religion. You cannot change your religion or choose a new one as a main action. Judaism remains your religion throughout the game.
No. You may spend 5 coins to ignore 1 damage only. The ability cannot be used multiple times against the same instance of damage.
Your opponent still chooses. Spending 5 coins reduces the damage from 3 to 2. Your opponent then assigns those 2 damage according to standard rules and priority order.
Yes. A wall or palisade segment on a hex edge exists in both adjacent provinces. This is the cheapest way to spread religious communities, as one fortification creates presence in two provinces.
No. Spread religion is a separate main action. When you construct a fortification, your religious community appears there as a passive effect of your ability, not as the spread religion action.
Yes. Your restriction prevents choosing a religion as a main action only. The Khazars grant a free action to choose an additional religion, which bypasses this restriction.