User:Piper Logl./sandbox

Siege of Jerusalem (poem) Contribution
Some have argued that the violence against the Jews was not intended to be against the Jews specifically or taken to be commentary on Judaism; any other religious group might as well have been used to the same ends. Identifying the Jews, by such logic, would have been a way of indicating otherness, their role serving as a placeholder for a group different than the initial aggressor. If so, then the violence enacted upon or attributed to them, being at times so unnecessarily graphic and cruel, would have come across, even to an audience at the time so taken with reading about violence, as so unjustified (regardless as to whom it was for or against) as to create pause and encourage reflection on the atrocities committed by the invading Romans.