A Roman official named Hadrakitilios wrote a troubled letter to the Emperor Hadrian.
"Clearly the God of the Jews hates me," he wrote. "I do not circumcise myself as the Saracens do. I do not keep the Shabbat as the Samaritans do. And now nothing I undertake succeeds. My works fail. My wife trades in the markets and can turn no profit. Disaster follows my household wherever we go."
Hadrian read the letter and wrote back a short, strange line.
"Let the God of the Jews," he said, "be avenged upon him."
The misfortunes continued. Business collapsed. The wife's ventures soured. Nothing the minister touched held together.
Eventually Hadrian issued the command that seems, on the surface, cruel: the minister was to be crucified. But the Emperor explained his reasoning plainly.
"By dying now," he said, "he will be spared the evils and misfortunes that are coming for him for years. The God of the Jews is already destroying him slowly. A swift ending will be less painful than the slow one heaven has prepared."
The story, preserved in Gaster's Exempla #214, is a Jewish tale told about a Roman emperor, reading Roman cruelty as a strange kind of mercy — the Roman intervention cut short the divine unraveling already underway. The Rabbis did not pretend to know whether Hadrian truly reasoned like this. They only knew that the gods Rome trusted in had no such care, and the God of the Jews had no such reluctance.