The Greek was an egoist. He disliked uniformity. Although in the direction of his private life he voluntarily submitted to a variety of state regulations such as the citizen of a modern country would resent as an irksome interference with the liberties of the individual, yet, judged by the standard of antiquity, the Greek was anything but amenable to control, and, as time went on, his attitude became little better than that of a highly civilised anarchist. There were limits beyond which the Greek would never admit his neighbour’s right to dictate his conduct any more than his thoughts. He suffered from an almost morbid fear of having his individuality merged in any social institution. He would rather be poor in his own right than prosper by association with others. Discipline was the least conspicuous trait in his character and self-assertion the strongest. The Greek knew everything except how to obey. The Jew, on the other hand, found his chief happiness in self-effacement and submission. His everyday life, to the minutest details, was regulated by the Law. He was not even allowed to be virtuous after his own fashion. The claims of the individual upon the community were only less great than the claims of the community upon the individual. The strength of Hebraism always lay in its power of combination, the weakness of Hellenism in the lack of it.

Equally striking is the contrast discerned between the aesthetic ideals of the two races. Much in Hebrew imagination is couched in forms which would lose all their beauty and freshness, if expressed in colour or marble; much that would look grotesque, if dragged into the daylight of pure reason. Its effect depends entirely on the semi-darkness of emotional suggestion. Now the Greek hated twilight. He had no patience with the vague and the obscure in imagination any more than in thought. Hence artistic expression was nothing to the Jew; everything to the Greek. Judaism shunned pictorial representation; Hellenism worshipped it. And, as art in antiquity was largely the handmaid of religion, this diversity of the aesthetic temperament led to an irreconcilable religious antagonism. The Jew looked upon the pagan’s graven images with abhorrence, and the pagan regarded the Jew’s adoration of the invisible as a proof of atheism.

Not less repugnant to the Hebrew was the Hellenic moral temperament as mirrored in literature, in social life, and in public worship—that temperament which, without being altogether free from pessimism, melancholy, and discontent, yet finds its most natural expression in a healthy enjoyment of life and an equally healthy horror of death. “I would rather be a poor man’s serf on earth than king among the dead!” sighs Achilles in Hades, and the sentiment is one which his whole race has echoed through the ages, and which, despite nineteen centuries of Christianity, is still heard in the folk-songs of modern Greece. The Greek saw the world as it is, and, upon the whole, found it very good. He tasted its pleasures with moderation and bore its pains with a good grace. He perceived beauty in all things; adoring the highest and idealising the meanest. Even the shrill song of the humble grasshopper held sweet music for the Greek. He revelled in the loveliness and colour of life. He was inspired by the glory of the human form. He extolled the majesty of man. The Hebrew mind was nursed by meditation; the Hellenic drew its nourishment from contemplation. Nature was the Greek’s sole guide in taste as well as in conduct; from nature he learnt the canons of the beautiful as well as the laws of right and wrong. Hence no country has produced greater poets than Greece, or fewer saints.

How could this view of things, so sane and yet so earthy, be acceptable to a race oppressed by the sense of human suffering as the fruit of human sin? “Serve the Lord with joy; come before him with singing,” urged the Psalmist in a moment of optimistic cheerfulness. But it was only for a moment.[6] The true note of Hebraism is struck in another text: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” The Greek understood the meaning of the sad refrain; but he did not allow it to depress him. To the Greek life was a joyous reality, or at the worst an interesting problem; to the Jew a bad dream, or at the best an inscrutable mystery. To the Hebrew mind the sun that shines in the sky and the blossoms that adorn the earth are at most but pale symbols of Divine Love, pledges for a bliss which is not of this world. And yet Socrates emptied the cup of death with a smile and a jest, where Job would have filled the world with curses and bitter lamentation. Laughter came as spontaneously to the Greek as breath, and the two things died together. The Jew could not laugh, and would not allow any one else to do so. The truth is that the Greek never grew old, and the Jew was never young.

Another lively illustration of the gulf which separated the two races is offered by the Greek games. These were introduced into Palestine by the Greek rulers and colonists, were adopted by the Hellenizing minority among the Jews themselves, and were denounced with horror by the Conservative majority. Nudity, in the eyes of the latter, was the colophon of shamelessness, while by the Greeks the discarding of false shame was regarded as one of the first steps to true civilisation. Thucydides mentions the athletic habit of racing perfectly naked as an index to the progress achieved by his country and as one of the things that marked off the Hellene from the Barbarian.[7] The Greeks were free from that morbid consciousness of sex which troubled the over-clothed Asiatics. Nor were they aware of that imaginary war between the spirit and the flesh which gave rise to the revolting self-torments of Eastern aspirants to heaven.

The peculiar characteristics of the Hebrew mind found their supreme manifestation in the sect of the Essenes—the extreme wing of the Pharisaic phalanx. The strictness of the Pharisees was laxity when compared with the painful austerity of their brethren. The latter aimed at nothing less than a pitiless immolation of human nature to the demands of an ideal sanctity. Enamoured of this imaginary holiness, the Essenes disdained all the real comforts and joys of life. Their diet was meagre, their dwellings mean, their dress coarse. Colour and ornament were eschewed as Satanic snares. The mere act of moving a vessel, or even obedience to the most elementary calls of nature, on the Sabbath, was accounted a desecration of the holy day. Contact with unhallowed persons or objects was shunned by the Essenes as scrupulously as contact with an infected person or object is shunned by sane people in time of plague. They refused to taste food cooked, or to wear clothes made, by a non-member of the sect, or to use any implement that had not been manufactured by pure hands. Their life in consequence was largely spent in water. For whosoever was not an Essene was, in the eyes of these saints, a source of pollution. Thus godliness developed into misanthropy and cleanliness into a mania. Thus these holy men lived, turning away from the sorrows of the earth to the peace of an ideal heaven; deriving patience with the present from apocalyptic promises of future glory; and waiting for the day when the unrighteous would be smitten to the dust, the dead rise from their graves, and the just be restored to everlasting bliss under the rule of the Redeemer—the Son of Man revealed to the holy and righteous because they have despised this world and hated all its works and ways in the name of the Lord of Spirits. Celibacy, seclusion, communion of goods, distinctive garb, abstinence, discipline and self-mortification, ecstatic rapture, sanctimonious pride and prejudice—all these Oriental traits, gradually matured and subsequently rejected in their exaggerated form from the main current of Judaism, marked the Essenes out as the prototypes of Christian monasticism, and as the most peculiar class of a very peculiar people. Could anything be more diametrically opposed to the genius of Hellas? Despite Pythagorean asceticism and Orphic mysticism, enthusiastic ritual, symbolic purifications and emotional extravagances, Greek life was in the main sober, Greek culture intellectual, and the Greek mind eminently untheological.

Those who delight in tracing racial temperament to physical environment may find in the contrast between the two countries an exceptionally favourable illustration of their theory. There is more variety of scenery in a single district of Greece than in the whole of Palestine. Grey rocks and green valleys, roaring torrents and placid lakes, sombre mountains and smiling vineyards, snow-clad peaks and sun-seared plains, glaring light and deep shade alternately come and go with a bewildering rapidity in the one country. In the other, from end to end, the plain spreads its calm, monotonous beauty to the everlasting sun, and the stately palms rear their heads to the blue heavens from year’s end to year’s end, severe, uniform, immutable. It is easy to understand why the one race should have drawn its inspiration from within and the other from without; why the one should have sunk the individual in the community and the other sacrificed the community to the individual; why the one should have worshipped the form and the other the spirit. It is especially easy to understand the Greek’s inextinguishable thirst for new things and the Jew’s rigid attachment to the past. Everything in Greece suggests progress; everything in Palestine spells permanence.

The result of this fundamental discrepancy of character was such as might have been foreseen. The intense spirituality of the Jew was scandalised at the genial rationalism and sensuousness of the pagan; while the pagan, in his turn, was repelled by the morose mysticism and austerity of the Jew. History never repeats itself in all particulars. But, so far as repetition is possible, it repeated itself many centuries after, when Puritanism—representing the nearest approach to the sad and stern Hebraic conception of life that the Western mind ever achieved—declared itself the enemy of Romanism, mainly because the latter retained so much of the pagan love for form and delight in things sensuous. Cromwell’s Ironsides illustrated this attitude by marching to battle singing the Psalms of the Hebrew bard. It is given to few mortals, blessed with a calm and truly catholic genius, to reconcile the rival attitudes, and, with Matthew Arnold, to recognise that “it is natural that man should take pleasure in his senses. It is natural, also, that he should take refuge in his heart and imagination from his misery.”

CHAPTER II
THE JEW IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE

The animosity between Jew and Gentile grew in intensity and bitterness under the Roman rule, and its growth was marked by various acts of mutual violence which finally resulted in the disruption of the Jewish State and the dispersion of the Jewish race over the inhabited globe. Already in the first half of the second century B.C. we find a praetor peregrinus ordering the Jews to leave the shores of Italy within ten days. This was only the commencement of a long series of similar measures, all indicative of the repugnance inspired by the Jewish colonists. ♦63 B.C.♦ The hostility was enhanced by Pompey’s sack of Jerusalem and his severity towards the people and the priests of Palestine. Even in Rome, the hospitable harbour of countless races and creeds, there was no place for these unfortunate Semitic exiles, and their sojourn was punctuated by periodical expulsions. History is silent on the first settlement of Jews in the capital of the world, though the origin of their community may plausibly be traced to the embassy of Numenius.[8] In any case, at the time of Pompey’s expedition they already had their own quarter in Rome, on the right bank of the Tiber, and their multitude and cohesion, even then, were such that a contemporary writer did not hesitate to state that a Governor of Palestine, if unpopular in his province, might safely count on being hissed when he returned home.