But these purges also reveal the great social divide between Jewish peasants and aristocrats at this time.
They were taking the identity of the Roman emperor and giving it to a Jewish peasant.
Socialist Zionists therefore set about becoming Jewish peasants and proletarians and focused on settling land and working on it.
The break with Judaism is complete; Jesus, the Jewish peasant, has become a divine god called the Christ.
Not Jesus meek, the fair-haired man in a child's Sunday school book, but Christ the muscular carpenter who could talk the plain talk of Jewish peasants and toss around the money changers' tables.
He meets a family of Jewish peasants living on a farm in the shtetl.
Dr Macnab described Moses as a mass murderer, Abraham as concocted and Jesus as a Jewish peasant and certainly not God.
Another Zionist thinker, A. D. Gordon, was influenced by the völkisch ideas of European romantic nationalism, and proposed establishing a society of Jewish peasants.
One of the few important events of his rule-seen through the lens of hindsight-was the execution of a Jewish peasant said to have claimed to be king of the Jews.
