Page:David Baron – The History of the Ten "Lost" Tribes.djvu/35

This page has been validated.

AT THE TIME OF CHRIST

35

Pentecost—who were doubtless there also during the previous Passover, when the crucifixion took place—were "Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and dwellers in Mesopotamia, in Judea and Cappadocia, in Pontus and Asia, in Phyrgia and Pamphylia, in Egypt and parts of Libya and Cyrene, and sojourners from Rome, Cretans and Arabians": all of them either Jews or proselytes miraculously hearing in their own tongues the mighty works of God.

Here it is to be noted that, at the commencement of the Christian era, we find in this motley and cosmopolitan Jewish crowd representatives from Israelitish settlements in the very parts where they were carried by the Assyrians and Babylonians some seven centuries before, but who are all called "Jews," and all alike regarded Jerusalem as their national metropolis.^[1]

III. The name of "Jew" and "Israelite" became synonymous terms from about the time of the Captivity. It is one of the absurd fallacies of Anglo-Israelism to presuppose that the term "Jew" stands for a bodily descendant of "Judah." It stands for all those from among the sons of Jacob who acknowledged themselves, or were considered, subjects of the theocratic kingdom of Judah, which they expected to be established by the promised "Son of David"—the Lion of the tribe of Judah—whose reign is to extend not only over "all the

↑ "Everywhere we have distinct notices of these wanderers," says Dr. Edersheim, "and everywhere they appear as in closest connection with the Rabbinical hierarchy of Palestine. Thus the Mishnah, in an extremely curious section, tells how on Sabbaths the Jewesses of Arabia might wear their long veils, and those of India the kerchiefs round their head, customary in those countries, without incurring the guilt of desecrating the holy day by needlessly carrying what, in the eyes of the law, would be a burden; while in a rubric for the Day of Atonement we have it noted that the dress which the High Priest wore 'between the evenings' of the great feast—that is, as afternoon darkened into evening—was of most costly Indian stuff."

[p35-1] "Everywhere we have distinct notices of these wanderers," says Dr. Edersheim, "and everywhere they appear as in closest connection with the Rabbinical hierarchy of Palestine. Thus the Mishnah, in an extremely curious section, tells how on Sabbaths the Jewesses of Arabia might wear their long veils, and those of India the kerchiefs round their head, customary in those countries, without incurring the guilt of desecrating the holy day by needlessly carrying what, in the eyes of the law, would be a burden; while in a rubric for the Day of Atonement we have it noted that the dress which the High Priest wore 'between the evenings' of the great feast—that is, as afternoon darkened into evening—was of most costly Indian stuff."

[1]