The first and most essential condition for the political
and national levelling of the empire was the preservation and extension
of the two nations destined to joint dominion, along with the absorption
as rapidly as possible of the barbarian races, or those termed barbarian
existing by their side. In a certain sense we might no doubt name
along with Romans and Greeks a third nationality, which vied with them
in ubiquity in the world of that day, and was destined to play
no insignificant part in the new state of Caesar. We speak of the Jews.
This remarkable people, yielding and yet tenacious, was in the ancient
as in the modern world everywhere and nowhere at home, and everywhere
and nowhere powerful. The successors of David and Solomon were of hardly
more significance for the Jews of that age than Jerusalem for those
of the present day; the nation found doubtless for its religious
and intellectual unity a visible rallying-point in the petty kingdom
of Jerusalem, but the nation itself consisted not merely of the subjects
of the Hasmonaeans, but of the innumerable bodies of Jews
scattered through the whole Parthian and the whole Roman empire.
Within the cities of Alexandria especially and of Cyrene the Jews
formed special communities administratively and even locally distinct,
not unlike the "Jews' quarters" of our towns, but with a freer position
and superintended by a "master of the people" as superior judge
and administrator. How numerous even in Rome the Jewish population
was already before Caesar'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; the Jewish trader moved everywhere with the conquering Roman
merchant then, in the same way as he afterwards accompanied the Genoese
and the Venetian, and capital flowed in on all hands to the Jewish,
by the side of the Roman, merchants. 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 nevertheles