The Provinces of the Roman Empire 24

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 24

Thus the Jews came to play a prominent part in the Macedonian

Hellenising of the East; their pliancy and serviceableness on the

one hand, their unyielding tenacity on the other, must have induced

the very realistic statesmen who assigned this course of action,

to resolve on such arrangements. Nevertheless the extraordinary

extent and significance of the Jewish Diaspora, as compared with the

narrowness and poorness of their home, remains at once a fact and

a problem. In dealing with it we may not overlook the circumstance

that the Palestinian Jews furnished no more than the nucleus for the

Jews of other countries. The Judaism of the older time was anything

but exclusive; was, on the contrary, no less pervaded by missionary

zeal than were afterwards Christianity and Islam. The Gospel makes

reference to Rabbis who traversed sea and land to make a proselyte; the

admission of half-proselytes, of whom circumcision was not expected but

to whom religious fellowship was yet accorded, is an evidence of this

converting zeal and at the same time one of its most effective means.

Motives of very various kinds came to the help of this proselytising.

The civil privileges, which the Lagids and Seleucids conferred on

the Jews, must have induced a great number of non-Jewish Orientals

and half-Hellenes to attach themselves in the new towns to the

privileged category of the non-burgesses. In later times the decay of

the traditional faith of the country helped the Jewish _propaganda_.

Numerous persons, especially of the cultivated classes, whose sense

of faith and morality turned away with horror or derision from what

the Greeks, and still more from what the Egyptians termed religion,

sought refuge in the simpler and purer Jewish doctrine renouncing

polytheism and idolatry--a doctrine which largely met the religious

views resulting from the development of philosophy among the cultured

and half-cultured circles. There is a remarkable Greek moral poem,

probably from the later epoch of the Roman republic, which is drawn

from the Mosaic books on such a footing that it adopts the doctrine of

monotheism and the universal moral law, but avoids everything offensive

to the non-Jew and all direct opposition to the ruling religion,

evidently intended to gain wider acceptance for this denationalised

Judaism. Women in particular addicted themselves by preference to the

Jewish faith. When the authorities of Damascus in the year 66 resolved

to put to death the captive Jews, it was agreed to keep this resolution

secret, in order that the female population devoted to the Jews might

not prevent its execution. Even in the West, where the cultivated

circles were otherwise averse to Jewish habits, dames of rank early

formed an exception; Poppaea Sabina, Nero’s wife, sprung from a noble

family, was notorious for her pious Jewish faith and her zealous

protectorate of the Jews, as for other things less reputable. Cases of

formal transition to Judaism were not rare; the royal house of Adiabene

for example--king Izates and his mother Helena, as well as his brother

and successor--became at the time of Tiberius and of Claudius in every

respect Jews. It certainly was the case with all those Jewish bodies,

as it is expressly remarked of those of Antioch, that they consisted in

great part of proselytes.

 

[Sidenote: Hellenising tendencies in the Diaspora.]

 

This transplanting of Judaism to the Hellenic soil with the

appropriation of a foreign language, however much it took place with

a retention of national individuality, was not accomplished without

developing in Judaism itself a tendency running counter to its

nature, and up to a certain degree denationalising it. How powerfully

the bodies of Jews living amidst the Greeks were influenced by the

currents of Greek intellectual life, may be traced in the literature

of the last century before, and of the first after, the birth of

Christ. It is imbued with Jewish elements; and they are withal the

clearest heads and the most gifted thinkers, who seek admission either

as Hellenes into the Jewish, or as Jews into the Hellenic, system.

Nicolaus of Damascus, himself a Pagan and a noted representative of the

Aristotelian philosophy pleaded, as a scholar and diplomatist of king

Herod, the cause of his Jewish patron and of the Jews before Agrippa as

before Augustus; and not only so, but his historical authorship shows

a very earnest, and for that epoch significant, attempt to bring the

East into the circle of Occidental research, while the description

still preserved of the youthful years of the emperor Augustus, who

came personally into close contact with him, is a remarkable evidence

of the love and honour which the Roman ruler met with in the Greek

world. The dissertation on the Sublime, written in the first period

of the empire by an unknown author, one of the finest aesthetic works

preserved to us from antiquity, certainly proceeds, if not from a Jew,

at any rate from a man who revered alike Homer and Moses.[161] Another

treatise, also anonymous, upon the Universe--likewise an attempt,

respectable of its kind, to blend the doctrine of Aristotle with that

of the Stoa--was perhaps written also by a Jew, and dedicated certainly

to the Jew of highest repute and highest station in the Neronian age,

Tiberius Alexander (p. 204), chief of the staff to Corbulo and Titus.

The wedding of the two worlds of intellect meets us most clearly in

the Jewish-Alexandrian philosophy, the most acute and most palpable

__EXPRESSION__ of a religious movement, not merely affecting but also

attacking the essence of Judaism. The Hellenic intellectual development

conflicted with national religions of all sorts, inasmuch as it

either denied their views or else filled them with other contents,

drove out the previous gods from the minds of men and put into the

empty places either nothing, or the stars and abstract ideas. These

attacks affected also the religion of the Jews. There was formed a

Neo-Judaism of Hellenic culture, which dealt with Jehovah not quite

so badly, but yet not much otherwise, than the cultivated Greeks and

Romans with Zeus and Jupiter. The universal expedient of the so-called

allegorical interpretation, whereby in particular the philosophers

of the Stoa everywhere in courteous fashion eliminated the heathen

national religions, suited equally well and equally ill for Genesis as

for the gods of the Iliad; if Moses had meant by Abraham in a strict

sense understanding, by Sarah virtue, by Noah righteousness, if the

four streams of Paradise were the four cardinal virtues, then the most

enlightened Hellene might believe in the Law. But this pseudo-Judaism

was also a power, and the intellectual primacy of the Jews in Egypt was

apparent above all in the fact, that this tendency found pre-eminently

its supporters in Alexandria.

 

[Sidenote: Fellowship of the Jews generally.]

 

Notwithstanding the internal separation which had taken place among

the Jews of Palestine and had but too often culminated directly in

civil war, notwithstanding the dispersion of a great part of the

Jewish body into foreign lands, notwithstanding the intrusion of

foreign ingredients into it and even of the destructive Hellenistic

element into its very core, the collective body of the Jews remained

united in a way, to which in the present day only the Vatican perhaps

and the Kaaba offer a certain analogy. The holy Salem remained the

banner, Zion’s temple the Palladium of the whole Jewish body, whether

they obeyed the Romans or the Parthians, whether they spoke Aramaic

or Greek, whether even they believed in the old Jahve or in the new,

who was none. The fact that the protecting ruler conceded to the

spiritual chief of the Jews a certain secular power signified for the

Jewish body just as much, and the small extent of this power just as

little, as the so-called States of the Church in their time signified

for Roman Catholics. Every member of a Jewish community had to pay

annually to Jerusalem a _didrachmon_ as temple-tribute, which came in

more regularly than the taxes of the state; every one was obliged at

least once in his life to sacrifice personally to Jehovah on the spot

which alone in the world was well-pleasing to Him. Theological science

remained common property; the Babylonian and Alexandrian Rabbis took

part in it not less than those of Jerusalem. The feeling, cherished

with unparalleled tenacity, of belonging collectively to one nation--a

feeling which had established itself in the community of the returning

exiles and had thereafter contributed to create that distinctive

position of the Jews in the Greek world--maintained its ground in spite

of dispersion and division.

 

[Sidenote: Philo.]

 

Most worthy of remark is the continued life of Judaism itself in

circles whose inward religion was detached from it. The most noted and,

for us, the single clearly palpable representative of this tendency in

literature, Philo, one of the foremost and richest Jews of the time

of Tiberius, stands in fact towards the religion of his country in a

position not greatly differing from that of Cicero towards the Roman;

but he himself believed that he was not destroying but fulfilling it.

For him as for every other Jew, Moses is the source of all truth, his

written direction binding law, the feeling towards him reverence and

devout belief. This sublimated Judaism is, however, not quite identical

with the so-called faith in the gods of the Stoa. The corporeality of

God vanishes for Philo, but not His personality, and he entirely fails

in--what is the essence of Hellenic philosophy--the transferring of the

deity into the breast of man; it remains his view that sinful man is

dependent on a perfect being standing outside of, and above, him. In

like manner the new Judaism submits itself to the national ritual law

far more unconditionally than the new heathenism. The struggle between

the old and the new faith was therefore of a different nature in the

Jewish circle than in the heathen, because the stake was a greater one;

reformed heathenism contended only against the old faith, reformed

Judaism would in its ultimate consequence destroy the nationality,

which amidst the inundation of Hellenism necessarily disappeared with

the refining away of the native faith, and therefore shrank back from

drawing this consequence. Hence on Greek soil and in Greek language the

form, if not the substance, of the old faith was retained and defended

with unexampled obstinacy, defended even by those who in substance

surrendered before Hellenism. Philo himself, as we shall have to tell

further on, contended and suffered for the cause of the Jews. But on

that account the Hellenistic tendency in Judaism never exercised an

overpowering influence over the latter, never was able to take its

stand against the national Judaism, and barely availed to mitigate its

fanaticism and to check its perversities and crimes. In all essential

matters, especially when confronted with oppression and persecution,

the differences of Judaism disappeared; and, unimportant as was the

Rabbinical state, the religious communion over which it presided was a

considerable and in certain circumstances formidable power.

 

[Sidenote: The Roman government and Judaism]

 

Such was the state of things which the Romans found confronting them

when they entered on rule in the East. Conquest forces the hand of

the conqueror not less than of the conquered. The work of centuries,

the Macedonian urban institutions, could not be undone either by

the Arsacids or by the Caesars; neither Seleucia on the Euphrates

nor Antioch and Alexandria could be entered upon by the following

governments under the benefit of the inventory. Probably in presence

of the Jewish Diaspora there the founder of the imperial government

took, as in so many other things, the policy of the first Lagids as his

guiding rule, and furthered rather than hampered the Judaism of the

East in its distinctive position; and this procedure thereupon became

throughout the model for his successors. We have already mentioned

that the communities of Asia Minor under Augustus made the attempt to

draw upon their Jewish fellow-citizens uniformly in the levy, and no

longer to allow them the observance of the Sabbath; but Agrippa decided

against them and maintained the _status quo_ in favour of the Jews,

or rather, perhaps, now for the first time legalised the exemption of

the Jews from military service and their Sabbath privilege, that had

been previously conceded according to circumstances only by individual

governors or communities of the Greek provinces. Augustus further

directed the governors of Asia not to apply the rigorous imperial

laws respecting unions and assemblies against the Jews. But the Roman

government did not fail to see that the exempt position conceded to

the Jews in the East was not compatible with the absolute obligation

of those belonging to the empire to fulfil the services required by

the state; that the guaranteed distinctive position of the Jewish body

carried the hatred of race and under certain circumstances civil war

into the several towns; that the pious rule of the authorities at

Jerusalem over all the Jews of the empire had a perilous range; and

that in all this there lay a practical injury and a danger in principle for the state.