The Provinces of the Roman Empire 23

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 23

But the end came. As to the Arabian tribes who immigrated to this

region from the south, the historical tradition of the Romans is

silent, and what the late records of the Arabs report as to that of

the Ghassanids and their precursors, can hardly be fixed, at least as

to chronology.[156] But the Sabaeans, after whom the place Borechath

(Brêka to the north of Kanawât) is named, appear in fact to be

south-Arabian emigrants; and these were already settled here in the

third century. They and their associates may have come in peace and

become settled under Roman protection, perhaps even may have carried

to Syria the highly-developed and luxuriant culture of south-western

Arabia. So long as the empire kept firmly together and each of these

tribes was under its own sheikh, all obeyed the Roman lord-paramount.

But in order the better to meet the Arabians or--as they were now

called--Saracens of the Persian empire united under one king,

Justinian, during the Persian war in the year 531, placed all the

phylarchs of the Saracens subject to the Romans under Aretas son of

Gabalus--Harith Abu son of Chaminos among the Arabs--and bestowed on

this latter the title of king, which hitherto, it is added, had never

been done. This king of all the Arabian tribes settled in Syria was

still a vassal of the empire; but, while he warded off his countrymen,

he at the same time prepared the place for them. A century later, in

the year 637, Arabia and Syria succumbed to Islam.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER XI.

 

JUDAEA AND THE JEWS.

 

 

The history of the Jewish land is as little the history of the Jewish

people as the history of the States of the Church is that of the

Catholics; it is just as requisite to separate the two as to consider

them together.

 

[Sidenote: Judaea and the priestly rule under the Seleucids.]

 

The Jews in the land of the Jordan, with whom the Romans had to do,

were not the people who under their judges and kings fought with Moab

and Edom, and listened to the discourses of Amos and Hosea. The small

community of pious exiles, driven out by foreign rule, and brought

back again by a change in the hands wielding that rule, who began

their new establishment by abruptly repelling the remnants of their

kinsmen left behind in the old abodes and laying the foundation for the

irreconcilable feud between Jews and Samaritans--the ideal of national

exclusiveness and priestly control holding the mind in chains--had

long before the Roman period developed under the government of the

Seleucids the so-called Mosaic theocracy, a clerical corporation with

the high-priest at its head, which, acquiescing in foreign rule and

renouncing the formation of a state, guarded the distinctiveness of its

adherents, and dominated them under the aegis of the protecting power.

This retention of the national character in religious forms, while

ignoring the state, was the distinctive mark of the later Judaism.

Probably every idea of God is in its formation national; but no other

God has been so from the outset the God only of his people as Jahve,

and no one has so remained such without distinction of time and place.

Those men returning to the Holy Land, who professed to live according

to the statutes of Moses and in fact lived according to the statutes

of Ezra and Nehemiah,[157] had remained just as dependent on the

great-kings of the East, and subsequently on the Seleucids, as they had

been by the waters of Babylon. A political element no more attached

to this organisation than to the Armenian or the Greek Church under

its patriarchs in the Turkish empire; no free current of political

development pervades this clerical restoration; none of the grave

and serious obligations of a commonwealth standing on its own basis

hampered the priests of the temple of Jerusalem in the setting up of

the kingdom of Jahve upon earth.

 

[Sidenote: Kingdom of the Hasmonaeans.]

 

The reaction did not fail to come. That church-without-a-state could

only last so long as a secular great power served it as lord-protector

or as bailiff. When the kingdom of the Seleucids fell into decay, a

Jewish commonwealth was created afresh by the revolt against foreign

rule, which drew its best energies precisely from the enthusiastic

national faith. The high priest of Salem was called from the temple

to the battlefield. The family of the Hasmonaeans restored the empire

of Saul and David nearly in its old limits, and not only so, but

these warlike high priests renewed also in some measure the former

truly political monarchy controlling the priests. But that monarchy,

at once the product of, and the contrast to, that priestly rule,

was not according to the heart of the pious. The Pharisees and the

Sadducees separated and began to make war on one another. It was not

so much doctrines and ritual differences that here confronted each

other, as, on the one hand, the persistence in a priestly government

which simply clung to religious ordinances and interests, and

otherwise was indifferent to the independence and the self-control of

the community; on the other hand, the monarchy aiming at political

development and endeavouring to procure for the Jewish people, by

fighting and by treaty, its place once more in the political conflict,

of which the Syrian kingdom was at that time the arena. The former

tendency dominated the multitude, the latter had the preponderance in

intelligence and in the upper classes; its most considerable champion

was king Iannaeus Alexander, who during his whole reign was at enmity

not less with the Syrian rulers than with his own Pharisees (iv. 139)

{iv. 133}. Although it was properly but the other, and in fact the more

natural and more potent, __EXPRESSION__ of the national revival, it yet by

its greater freedom of thinking and acting came into contact with the

Hellenic character, and was regarded especially by its pious opponents

as foreign and unbelieving.

 

[Sidenote: The Jewish Diaspora.]

 

But the inhabitants of Palestine were only a portion, and not the most

important portion, of the Jews; the Jewish communities of Babylonia,

Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, were far superior to those of Palestine even

after their regeneration by the Maccabees. The Jewish Diaspora in the

imperial period was of more significance than the latter; and it was an

altogether peculiar phenomenon.

 

The settlements of the Jews beyond Palestine grew only in a subordinate

degree out of the same impulse as those of the Phoenicians and the

Hellenes. From the outset an agricultural people and dwelling far from

the coast, their settlements abroad were a non-free and comparatively

late formation, a creation of Alexander or of his marshals.[158] In

those immense efforts at founding Greek towns continued throughout

generations, such as never before and never afterwards occurred to a

like extent, the Jews had a conspicuous share, however singular it

was to invoke their aid in particular towards the Hellenising of the

East. This was the case above all with Egypt. The most considerable of

all the towns created by Alexander, Alexandria on the Nile, was since

the times of the first Ptolemy, who after the occupation of Palestine

transferred thither a mass of its inhabitants, almost as much a city

of the Jews as of the Greeks, and the Jews there were to be esteemed

at least equal to those of Jerusalem in number, wealth, intelligence,

and organisation. In the first times of the empire there was reckoned a

million of Jews to eight millions of Egyptians, and their influence, it

may be presumed, transcended this numerical proportion. We have already

observed that, on no smaller a scale, the Jews in the Syrian capital

of the empire had been similarly organised and developed (p. 127). The

diffusion and the importance of the Jews of Asia Minor are attested

among other things by the attempt which was made under Augustus by the

Ionian Greek cities, apparently after joint concert, to compel their

Jewish fellow townsmen either to withdrawal from their faith or to full

assumption of civic burdens. Beyond doubt there were independently

organised bodies of Jews in all the new Hellenic foundations,[159] and

withal in numerous old Hellenic towns, even in Hellas proper, _e.g._ in

Corinth. The organisation was placed throughout on the footing that the

nationality of the Jews with the far-reaching consequences drawn from

it by themselves was preserved, and only the use of the Greek language

was required of them. Thus amidst this Graecising, into which the East

was at that time coaxed or forced by those in authority, the Jews of

the Greek towns became Greek-speaking Orientals.

 

[Sidenote: Greek language.]

 

That in the Jew-communities of the Macedonian towns the Greek language

not merely attained to dominion in the natural way of intercourse, but

was a compulsory ordinance imposed upon them, seems of necessity to

result from the state of the case. In a similar way Trajan subsequently

Romanised Dacia with colonists from Asia Minor. Without this

compulsion, the external uniformity in the foundation of towns could

not have been carried out, and this material for Hellenising generally

could not have been employed. The governments went in this respect

very far and achieved much. Already under the second Ptolemy, and at

his instigation, the sacred writings of the Jews were translated into

Greek in Egypt, and at least at the beginning of the imperial period

the knowledge of Hebrew among the Jews of Alexandria was nearly as rare

as that of the original languages of scripture is at present in the

Christian world; there was nearly as much discussion as to the faults

of translation of the so-called Seventy Alexandrians as on the part

of pious men among us regarding the errors of Luther’s translation.

The national language of the Jews had at this epoch disappeared

everywhere from the intercourse of life, and maintained itself only in

ecclesiastical use somewhat like the Latin language in the religious

domain of Catholicism. In Judaea itself its place had been taken by

the Aramaic popular language of Syria, akin no doubt to the Hebrew;

the Jews outside of Judaea, with whom we are concerned, had entirely

laid aside the Semitic idiom, and it was not till long after this

epoch that the reaction set in, which scholastically brought back the

knowledge and the use of it more generally among the Jews. The literary

works, which they produced at this epoch in great number, were in the

better times of the empire all Greek. If language alone conditioned

nationality, there would be little to tell for this period as to the

Jews.

 

[Sidenote: Retention of nationality.]

 

But with this linguistic compulsion, at first perhaps severely felt,

was combined the recognition of the distinctive nationality with

all its consequences. Everywhere in the cities of the monarchy of

Alexander the burgess-body was formed of the Macedonians, that is,

those really Macedonian, or the Hellenes esteemed equal to them. By

the side of these stood, in addition to foreigners, the natives, in

Alexandria the Egyptians, in Cyrene the Libyans and generally the

settlers from the East, who had indeed no other home than the new city,

but were not recognised as Hellenes. To this second category the Jews

belonged; but they, and they only, were allowed to form, so to speak,

a community within the community, and--while the other non-burgesses

were ruled by the authorities of the burgess-body--up to a certain

degree to govern themselves.[160] The “Jews,” says Strabo, “have in

Alexandria a national head (ἐθνάρχης) of their own, who presides over

the people (ἔθνος), and decides processes and disposes of contracts and

arrangements as if he ruled an independent community.” This was done,

because the Jews indicated a specific jurisdiction of this sort as

required by their nationality or--what amounts to the same thing--their

religion. Further, the general political arrangements had respect in

an extensive measure to the national-religious scruples of the Jews,

and accommodated them as far as possible by exemptions. The privilege

of dwelling together was at least frequently added; in Alexandria,

_e.g._ two of the five divisions of the city were inhabited chiefly

by Jews. This seems not to have been the Ghetto system, but rather a

usage resting on the basis of settlement to begin with, and thereafter

retained on both sides, whereby conflicts with neighbours were in some measure obviated.