JEWS
400
JEWS
with Jerusalem as its centre, would recognize and
worship Yahweh; they broke every tie with the sur-
rounding nationalities, and formed a community
wholly sacred unto the Lord, chiefly concerned with
the preservation of His faith and worship by a strict
compliance with all the ritual prescriptions of the
Law. On the one hand, this rehgious attitude of the
Judean Jews secured the preservation of Monotheism
among them. History proves that the Persians and
the Macedonians respected their religious freedom and
even to some extent favoured their worship of Yah-
weh. It remains true, however, that in the time of
the Machabees, the children of Israel escaped being
thoroughly hellenized only through their attachment
to the Law. Owing to this attachment, the fierce
persecutions which they then underwent, confirmed
instead of rooting out their belief in the true God. On
the other hand, the rigour with which the letter of the
Law became enforced gave rise to a narrow " legalism".
The mere external compliance with ritual observances
gradually superseded the higher claims of conscience;
the Prophet was replaced by the " scribe", t!~e casuistic
interpreter of the Law; and Israel, in its sacred isola-
tion, looked down upon the rest of mankind. A
similarly narrow spirit animated the Babylonian Jews,
for it was from Babylon that Esdras, "a ready scribe
in the Law of Moses", had come to revive the Law in
Jerusalem, and their existence in the midst of heathen
populations made it all the more imperative for them
to cling tenaciously to the creed and worship of
Yahweh.
Apparently, things went on smootlily with the priestly community of Juda as long as the Persian supremacy lasted. It was the policy of ancient Asiatic empires to grant to each province its auton- omy, and the Judean Jews availed themselves of this to live up to the requirements of the Mosaic Law under the headship of their high-priests and the guid- ance of their scribes. The sacred ordinances of the Law were no burden to them, and gladly did they even increase the weight by additional interpretations of its text. Nor was this happy condition materiaUy interfered with under Alexander the Great and his immediate successors in Syria and in Egypt. In fact, the first contact of the Judean Jews with hellenistic civilization seemed to open to them a wider field for their theocratic influence, by giving rise to a Western Dispersion with Alexandria and Antioch as its chief local centres and Jerusalem as its metropolis. How- ever much the Jews living among the Greeks mingled with the latter for business pursuits, learned the Greek language, or even became acquainted with hellenistic philosophy, they remained Jews to the core. The Law as read and explained in their local synagogues regulated their every act, kept them from all defile- ment with idolatrous worship, and maintained intact their religious traditions. With regard to creed, wor- ship, and morality, the Jews felt themselves far su- perior to their pagan fellow-citizens, and the works of their leading writers of the time were in the main those of apologists bent on convincing pagans of this supe- riority and on attracting them to the service of the sole living God. In fact, through this intercourse be- tween Judaism and Hellenism in the Gr»co-Roman world, the Jewish religion won the allegiance of a cer- tain number of Gentile men and women, while the Jewish beliefs themselves gained in clearness and pre- cision through the efforts then made to render them accpptaljle to Western minds.
Much less happy results followed on the contact of Jewish Monotheism with Greek Polytheism on Pales- tinian soil. There, worldly and ambitious high- priests not only accepted, but even promoted, Greek culture and heathenism in Jerusalem itself; and, as already stated, the Greek rulers of the early Macha- Ijean Age proverl violent persecutors of Yahweh wor- ship. The chief question confronting the Palestinian
Jews was not, therefore, the extension of Judai.sro
among the nations, but its very preservation among
the children of Israel. No wonder then that Judaism
assumed there an attitude of direct antagonism to
everything hellenistic, that the Mosaic observances
were gradually enforced with extreme rigour, and that
the oral Law, or rulings of the Elders relative to such
observances appeared in the eyes of pious Judean
Jews of no less importance than the Mosaic Law itself.
No wonder, too, that in opposition to the lukewarm-
ness for the oral Law evinced by the priestly aris-
tocracy — the Sadducees as they were called — there
arose in Juda a powerful party resolved to maintain
at any cost the Jewish separation — hence their name
of Pharisees — from the contamination of the Gentiles
by the most scrupulous compliance, not only with the
Law of Moses, but also with the "Traditions of the
Elders". The former of these leading parties was
pre-eminently concerned with the maintenance of the
status quo in politics, and in the main sceptical with re-
gard to such prominent beliefs or expectations of the
time as the existence of angels, the resurrection of the
dead, the reference of the oral Law to Moses, and the
future Redemption of Israel. The latter party stren-
uously maintained these positions. Its extreme wing
was made up of Zealots always ready to welcome any
false Messias who promised deliverance from the hated
foreign yoke; while its rank and file earnestly prepared
by the "works of the Law" for the Messianic Age va-
riously described by the Prophets of old, the apoca-
lyptic writings and the apocryphal Psalms of the time,
and generally expected as an era of earthly felicity and
legal righteousness in the Kingdom of God. The rise
of the Essenes is also ascribed to this period (see
ESSENES).
(2) Judaisvi and Early Christianity. — At the be- ginning of our era, Judaism was in external appearance thoroughly prepared for the advent of the Kingdom of God. Its great centre was Jerusalem, the "Holy City", whither repaired in hundreds of thousands Jews of every part of the world, anxious to celebrate the yearly festivals in the "City of the Great King". The Temple was in the eyes of them all the worthy House of the Lord, both by the magnificence of its structure and by the wonderful appointment of its service. The Jewish priesthood was not only nu- merous, but also most exact in the offering of the daily, weekly, monthly, and other, sacrifices, which it was its privilege to perform before Yahweh. The high-priest, a person mo^- sacred, stood at the head of the hier- archy, and acted as final arbiter of all religious con- troversies. The Sanhedrin of Jerusalem, or supreme tribunal of Judaism, watched zealously over the strict fulfilment of the Law and issued decrees readily obeyed by the Jews dispersed throughout the world. In the Holy Land, and far and wide beyond its boun- daries, besides local Sanhedrins, there were syna- gogues supplying the ordinary religious and educa- tional needs of the people, and wielding the power of excommunication against breakers of the Law, oral and written. A learned class, that of the Scribes, not only read and interpreted the text of the Law in the synagogue meetings, but sedulously proclaimed the "Traditions of the Elders", the collection of which formed a "fence to the Law", because whoever ob- served them was sure not to trespass in any way against the Law itself. Legal righteousness was the watchword of Judaism, and its attainment by separa- tion from Gentiles and sinners, by purifications, fasts, almsgiving, etc., in a word by the fulfilment of tradi- tional enactments which applied the Law to each and every walk of lilc and to all imaginable circumstances, was the one concern of jiious .Jews wherever found. Plainly, the Pharisees and the Si-ribcs who belonged to their party had generally won the day. In Pales- tine, in particular, the people blindly followed their leadership, confident that the present rule of pagan
