life of Europe. They reject the ordinary dogmas of Christianity and base their religious theories largely on Old Testament prophecies. Their first colony was founded at Haifa in 1868, the second immediately afterwards in Jaffa; and they also have colonies in Jerusalem, Sarona and Wilhelma (near Jaffa), and Beit-Lahm, near Nazareth. They are excellent agriculturists.
§ 14. The Jews.
Judaism in Palestine after 70 A.D.—The destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple at the hands of the Romans in 70 A.D. marked the material ruin of the Jewish nation in Palestine. But it survived spiritually. The Jews no longer had a national territory to govern; nevertheless they still had a great national literature to preserve, to expound and to propagate. Rabbi Johannan ben Zakkai founded at Jabneh a new Jewish centre where the hakhamim (the 'learned') toiled to collect their spiritual possessions, to tabulate and correlate the religious Law (Torah), both that which was written and that which was traditional. These hakhamim organized themselves into what was an academic imitation of the Sanhedrin, but they naturally had no power beyond that with which the piety of their coreligionists chose to invest them.
The collapse of the rebellion under Bar Cochba (135 A.D.) and the persecuting edicts of Septimus Severus caused the remnant of the Jews in Judea to seek a fresh home. A large proportion settled in Galilee, and there, for some two centuries, the rabbinic Sanhedrin under its Nâsi ('Prince') and Ab bēth dīn ('Father of the Law Court') carried out its functions. Its home changed from time to time: we hear of it first at Usha, then at Sepphoris, and finally at Tiberias. Its labours are preserved to us in the Mishna (a codification, roughly according to subject-matter, of the legal prescriptions of the Pentateuch, together with much discussion over debatable points, interpretations and corollaries), the Palestinian Talmud (an explanation of the
