Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/446

430 ISRAEL community in Alexandria ; according to Philo a million of Jews had their residence there, under an ethnarch for whom a gerusia was afterwards substituted by Augustus (In Flac., sees. 6, 10). The extent to which this diaspora was helpful in the diffusion of Christianity, the manner in which the mission of the apostles everywhere attached itself to the synagogues and proseuchai, is well known from the New Testament That the Christians of the 1st century had much to suffer along with the Jews is also a familiar fact. For at this period, in other respects more favourable to them than any other had previously I een, the Jews had occasionally to endure persecution. The emperors, taking umbrage at their intrusiveness, more than once ban: : shed them from Koine (Acts xviii. 2). The good will of the native population they never secured; they were most hated in Egypt and Syria, where they were strongest. 1 The position of the Jews in the Roman empire was naturally not improved by the great risings under Nero, Trajan (in Cyrene, Cyprus, Mesopotamia), and Hadrian. The East, strictly so called, became more and more their proper home. The Christianization of the empire helped still further in a very special way to detach them from the Western world. 2 They sided with the Persians against the Byzantines; in the year 614 they were even put in posses sion of Jerusalem by Chosroes, bat were not long able to Rela- hold their own against Heraclius. 3 With Islam also they tions found themselves in greater sympathy than with Chris- j Vith tianity, although they were cruelly treated by Mahomet in Arabia, and driven by Omar out of the Hejaz, and not withstanding the facts that they were as matter of course excluded from citizenship, and that they were held by Moslems as a whole in greater contempt than the Christians. They throve especially well on what may be called the bridge between East and West, in Mauretania and Spain, where they were the intellectual intermediaries between the Arab and the Latin culture. In the Sephardim and Ashkenazim the distinction between the subtler Oriental and the more conservative Western Jews has maintained itself in Europe also. From the 8th century onwards Judaism put forth a remarkable side shoot in the Khazars on the Volga ; if legend is to bo believed, but little was required at one time to have induced the Russians to accept the Jewish rather than the Christian faith. In the West the equal civil rights which Caracalla had 1 Comp. Schiirer, Neuiest. Zeitgcschichte (1874), sec. 31. The place taken by the Jewish element in the world of that time is brilliantly set forth by Mommsen in his History of Rome (bk. v. ch. ii. ; Eng. tr. iv. p. 538 sqq. , 1866): " How numerous even in Rome the Jewish popu lation was already before Cmsar s time, and how closely at the same time the Jews even then kept together as fellow-countrymen, is shown by the remark of an author of this period, that it was dangerous for a governor to offend the Jews in his province, because he might then certainly reckon on being hissed after his return, by the populace of the capital. Even at this time the predominant business of the Jews was trade. . . . At this period too we encounter the peculiar antipathy of the Occidentals towards this so thoroughly Oriental race and their foreign opinions and customs. This Judaism, although not the most pleasing feature in the nowhere pleasing picture of the mixture of nations which then prevailed, was nevertheless an historical element developing itself in the natural course of things, . . . which Ctesar just like his pre decessor Alexander fostered as far as possible. . . . They did not of course contemplate placing the Jewish nationality on an equal footing with the Hellenic or Italo-Hellenic. But the Jew who has not, like the Occidental, received the Pandora s gift of political organization, and stands substantially in a relation of indifference to the state, who more over is as reluctant to give up the essence of his national idiosyncrasy as he is ready to clothe it with any nationality at pleasure and to adapt himself up to a certain degree to foreign habits the Jew was for this very reason as it were made for a state which was to be built on the ruins of a hundred living polities, and to be endowed with a some what abstract and, from the outset, weakened nationality. In the ancient world also Judaism was an effective leaven of cosmopolitanism and or national decomposition." 2 For a brief time only were they again favoured by Julian the Apostate ; comp. Gibbon, chap, xxiii. 3 Gibbon, chap. xlvi. conferred on all free inhabitants of the empire came to an end, so far as the Jews were concerned, in the time of Constantino. The state then became the secular arm of the church, and took action, though with less severity, against Jews just as against heretics and pagans. As early as the year 315, Constantino made conversion from Christianity to Judaism a penal offence, and prohibited Jews, on pain of death, from circumcising their Christian slaves. These laws were re-enacted and made more severe by Constantius, who attached the penalty of death to marriages between Jews and Christians. Theodosius I. and Honorius, indeed, by strictly prohibiting the destruction of synagogues, and by maintaining the old regulation that a Jew was not to be summoned before a court of justice on the Sabbath day, put a check upon the militant zeal of the church by which even Chrysostom, for example, allowed himself to be carried away at Antioch. But Honorius rendered them ineligible for civil or military service, leaving open to them only the bar and the decurionate, the latter being a privilegium odiosum. Their liberty to try cases by their own law was curtailed ; cases between Jews and Christians were to be tried by Christian judges only. Theodosius II. prohibited them from building new syna gogues, arid anew enforced their disability for all state employments. Most hostile of all was the orthodox Justinian, who, however, was still more severe against Pagans and Samaritans. 4 He harassed the Jews with a law enjoining them to observe Easter on the same day as the Christians, a law which it was of course found impossible to carry out. 5 In the Germanic states which arose upon the ruins of the Roman empire, the Jews did not fare badly on the whole. It was only in cases where the state was dominated by the Catholic Church, as, for example, among the Spanish Visigoths, that they were cruelly oppressed ; among the Arian Ostrogoths, on the other hand, they had nothing to complain of. One thing in their favour was the Germanic principle that the law to be applied depended not on the land but on the nationality, as now in the east Europeans are judged by the consuls according to the law of their respective nations. The autonomy of the Jewish com munities, which had been curtailed by the later emperors, was now enlarged once more under the laxer political and legal conditions. The Jews fared remarkably well under the Frankish monarchy ; the Carolingians helped them in every possible way, making no account of the complaints of the bishops. They were allowed to hold property in land, but showed no eagerness for it ; leaving agriculture to the Germans, they devoted themselves to trade. The market was completely in their hands; as a specially lucrative branch of commerce they still carried on the traffic in slaves which had engaged them even in ancient times. Meanwhile the church was not remiss in seeking con stantly repeated re-enactments of the old imperial laws, in the framing of which she had had paramount influence, and which she now incorporated with her own canon law. 7 Gradually she succeeded in attaining her object. In the later Middle Ages the position of the Jews in the Christian society deteriorated. Intercourse with them was shunned ; 4 Cod. Theod., xvi. 8 : " De Judoeis, Ccelicolis, etSamaritanis"; Cod. Just., i. 9 : " De Judseis et Ccelicolis." With regard to these ccelicolre, see Gothofredus on Cod. Theod., xvi. 8, 9, and also J. Bernays "Ueber die Gottesfiirchtigen bei Juvenal," in the Comm. Philol. in lion. TJi. Mommsen, 1877, p. 163. 5 Gibbon, ch. xlvii. 6 Agobardus Lngdunensis, De Insolentin Judncorum, De Judaicis superstitionibits. Agobard was no superstitious fanatic, but one of the weightiest and most enlightened ecclesiastics of the Middle Ages. 7 Compare Decret. i. , dist. 45, c. 3 ; Deer. ii. , cans. 23, qiuest. 8, c. 9, caus. 28, qu. 1, c. 10-12 ; Deer, iii., de consecr., dist. 4, c. 93 ; Decretal. Greg. 5, 6 (" De Judaeis, Sarracenis, et eorum servis"), 5, 19, 18 ; Extrav. commun. 5, 2.