JUDAISM AND PAGANISM
OVER and above the two great causes of the unpopularity of the Jew,
already adduced, namely, man’s intolerance of dissent, and the
antipathy between the European and the Asiatic, there was another
and more obvious barrier to a good understanding between the two
elements--one sin which the Gentile could not pardon in the Jew: the
Jew’s infatuated arrogance--that contempt for all men born outside
the pale of the Synagogue, which national humiliation, instead of
effacing, had deepened and embittered. It was this provincial spirit
that had prevented the message of Moses from spreading abroad, as the
message of Jesus and the message of Mohammed spread in after times.
It was the same spirit that now forbade the Jew to feel at home in
the presence of the Gentile. Judaism has always lacked the magnetic
attraction of Christianity and Islam, not because the rule of life
which it prescribes is less pure, or the prospect of peace which it
holds out less alluring to the heart that yearns for rest, but because,
unlike Christianity and Islam, it deliberately repels instead of
inviting outsiders. The doors of Moses’s heaven are jealously closed
to the stranger; and those who have entered into it have at no time
been more numerous than those who have come out of it. When Jehovah
ceased to be the God of a clan, he became the God of a nation, but
he could not, and would not, become the God of mankind. In spite of
periodical attempts made by individual prophets and Rabbis to soar
above the barriers of narrow nationalism, and to infuse their own noble
spirit into the teaching of their predecessors and into the minds
of their contemporaries, in spite, also, of the broadening of the
conception of the divine, due to contact with the sublime religion of
Babylon, Jehovah, to the ordinary Jew, remained an essentially tribal
god. His interests continued to be bound up with the interests of the
chosen people. An elaborate fence of ceremonial and custom separated
this people from all other peoples. On leaving their native soil the
Jews carried away with them all the spiritual pride and all the pious
prejudices which distinguished their ancestors. A wider knowledge of
the world and its inhabitants failed to broaden their sympathies.
Intermarriage with the Gentiles was prohibited as strictly as ever, in
obedience to the old commandment: “Neither shalt thou make marriages
with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his
daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.”[21] And so it came to pass
that, while they appeared to the Gentile a strange and unsocial species
of men, to them the Gentile continued to be an unclean animal.
Had it not been for its stern and exclusive spirit, the Hebrew cult
might have excited the derision or the scornful curiosity of the
Pagans, but it would have hardly been made the object of systematic
attack. The Jews would have continued their eccentric worship of “the
sky and the clouds”[22] unmolested, though unrespected, and their
Temple, with all its uncanny “emptiness,”[23] would have remained
standing; for Paganism was nothing if not tolerant. The religion
of classical antiquity was a matter of convention rather than of
conviction. The earnest and the unhappy sought solace in philosophy;
the masses in superstition. Philosophy did not degenerate into
theology, but left theology to the poets who, unfettered by doctrine,
created or transformed the popular deities and legends, purging or
perverting them according to the promptings of their own imagination,
or the requirements of their art. The priests in pagan society counted
for less than the poets. The word “heresy” in pagan Greece meant
simply “free choice,” and later “a philosophical school.” The terms
“orthodox” and “heterodox” had hardly as yet acquired their invidious
meaning. Religious rancour, that baneful mother of manifold misery
to mankind, was not yet born. There is no parallel in antiquity to
that unremitting and systematic war of creeds by which, in later
ages, men tried to crush those who disagreed with them in matters of
metaphysical conjecture. Tolerance and speculative freedom were never
better understood than in pagan Greece and Rome. The Pagan was content
to navigate his own ship by his own compass--whether of head or of
heart--without insisting that every one else should adopt the same
compass, or be drowned. The total absence of dogma, which forms at once
the charm and the foible of polytheism, while precluding persecution,
encouraged a free exchange of religious traditions, not only between
sister nations, as the Greek and the Italian, but even between entirely
foreign and even hostile races. Thus, while the Latin writers hastened,
more or less successfully, to identify the deities of Italy with those
of Hellas, Greek travellers in the East, from Herodotus onwards,
habitually sought and found, or imagined that they found, common
attributes between the divinities of Olympus and those of Memphis and
Sidon. Frequent intercourse facilitated the work of assimilation, and
not only specific attributes but whole gods and goddesses found their
way from one pagan country to another, where they were welcomed. The
doors of the Pantheon stood hospitably open to all comers.
In this religious brotherhood of nations there was one disturbing unit:
one race alone stubbornly and offensively declined to join the concert.
The Jews held that their own religion was wholly true; the religions of
others were wholly false. They arrogantly boasted that they alone were
God’s people. They believed themselves to be in league with the Creator
of the Universe, sharing His secrets and monopolising His favours;
for had not the Lord entered into a solemn and everlasting covenant
with Abraham? It was they whom the Lord had selected to be a holy and
special people unto Himself, above all peoples that are upon the face
of the earth: “Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servants
whom I have chosen.” It was for them that the laws of Nature had been
suspended; that the sea was made dry land; that the heavens rained
manna, and the rocks gave forth water; that mounts had quaked; that the
sun and moon had stood still, and the walls of cities fallen down flat
at the sound of the trumpet. It was for them that prophets and inspired
men had revealed the oracles and the will of God.
If the Pagan was ready to forgive Jewish eccentricity, no man could
tolerate Jewish intolerance; and the resentment which the Jew’s
aloofness aroused in the breast even of the educated Gentile is
palpable in the pages of many ancient authors. Only three Greek
writers make a favourable mention of the Jews, the most eminent among
them being Strabo the geographer. He, curiously enough, speaks with
admiration of the spiritual worship of Jehovah as contrasted with the
monstrous idolatry of Egypt and the anthropomorphic idolatry of Greece.
Less curious, but no less rare, is the writer’s appreciation of the
moral excellence of the Mosaic Law and his reverence for the Temple
of Jerusalem. Strabo’s liberal attitude, however, was not shared by
the Romans. They are emphatic and unanimous in their condemnation of
Judaism--Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Pliny, and, above all, Tacitus.
The great historian seems to give utterance to a common sentiment in
denouncing the rites of the Jews as “novel and contrary to the ideas of
other mortals.” He accuses the followers of Moses “of holding profane
all things that to us are sacred; and, on the other hand, of indulging
in things which to us are forbidden.”[24] The Hebrew horror of the
worship of images and of the deification of ancestors and Emperors,
as exemplified by the fierce storm which Caligula’s mad order to have
his own statue set up in the Temple raised, gave great offence to the
Romans; while the Jewish marriage laws, which permitted a brother to
wed his deceased brother’s wife and an uncle his own niece, could
not but be considered by the Romans as a sanction of incest. It is,
therefore, not to be wondered at that the severe moralist should brand
Mosaic institutions as “evil and disgusting, owing their prevalence
to their very depravity.” Likewise, the national movement which, as
already mentioned, under the splendid leadership of the Maccabees
resulted in the liberation of the Hebrew mind from the tyranny of
Hellenism to Tacitus is nothing more than a wicked rebellion against
the Macedonian Kings’ laudable efforts to improve the morals of their
subjects by the introduction of Greek civilisation. It cannot be denied
that the victory of the national party was brought about by “expulsions
of citizens, destructions of cities, massacres of brothers, wives and
parents,” and other atrocities in which the leaders freely indulged;
but it certainly is less than the whole truth to assert that the
movement had for its selfish object the restoration to authority of a
royal family which, when restored, fomented superstition with a view to
“using the influence of the priesthood as a prop of its own power.”[25]
Even the good points in the character of the Jews, “their unswerving
loyalty to their own kith and kin and their prompt benevolence,” which
the truthful Tacitus acknowledges, are in his eyes vitiated by “their
hostility and hatred towards all aliens,”[26] and to him, as to so
many of his compatriots and contemporaries, the Jews are “a most vile
race,” and the Christian sect of them, at all events, “the enemies of
mankind.”[27]
This common estimate of the Jew was, of course, very largely based
on an ignorance of Jewish life and religion that would be ridiculous
but for its terrible consequences. As early as 169 B.C. we hear of
the blood accusation which is still brought against the Jews by their
enemies. When Antiochus Epiphanes desecrated the Temple of Jerusalem,
among other fables that he and his partisans promulgated, it was
rumoured that there was found in the sanctuary a Greek kept for a
sacrificial purpose by the priests who were said to be in the habit
of killing a Greek every year and of feeding on his intestines. On
the other hand, the Jews never did anything to dispel the ignorance
which rendered such grotesque myths credible. If the advocate of the
Jew is inclined to charge the Gentile with intolerance, the advocate
of the latter is amply justified in retorting the charge. A race
which avoided the places of public amusement as scenes of immorality
and idolatry could not but be considered morose and unsocial; a race
which, especially after the destruction of the Temple, banished mirth
and music even from its wedding feasts, would naturally be shunned as
sullen and suspected as fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; a
race which would “neither eat nor sleep nor intermarry with strangers”
might expect to be represented as “most prone to lust” and as holding
“nothing unlawful amongst themselves.” The outward signs of Jewish
aloofness were evident to the most careless gaze; the inward, spiritual
beauty, and the moral worth of Judaism were not so easily recognised.
Thus, prejudiced views, born of Pagan ignorance and nourished by Hebrew
intolerance, created a volume of animosity which, as has already been
seen, cost its object many sorrows. But worse things were yet to come.