s
a historical element developing itself in the natural course of things,
which the statesman could neither ignore nor combat, and which Caesar
on the contrary, just like his predecessor Alexander, with correct
discernment of the circumstances, fostered as far as possible.
While Alexander, by laying the foundation of Alexandrian Judaism,
did not much less for the nation than its own David by planning
the temple of Jerusalem, Caesar also advanced the interests of the Jews
in Alexandria and in Rome by special favours and privileges,
and protected in particular their peculiar worship against the Roman
as well as against the Greek local priests. The two great men
of course did not 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 moreover 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 somewhat abstract and, from the outset, toned-down nationality.
Even in the ancient world Judaism was an effective leaven
of cosmopolitanism and of national decomposition, and to that extent
a specially privileged member in the Caesarian state, the polity
of which was strictly speaking nothing but a citizenship of the world,
and the nationality of which was at bottom nothing but humanity.

Hellenism

But the Latin and Hellenic nationalities continued to be
exclusively the positive elements of the new citizenship.
The distinctively Italian state of the republic was thus at an end;
but the rumour that Caesar was ruining Italy and Rome on purpose
to transfer the centre of the empire to the Greek east and to make
Ilion or Alexandria its capital, was nothing but a piece of talk--
very easy to be accounted for, but also very silly--of the angry
nobility. On the contrary in Caesar's organizations the Latin
nationality always retained the preponderance; as is indicated
in the very fact that he issued all his enactments in Latin,
although those destined for the Greek-speaking countries were
at the same time issued in Greek. In general h