GOAT-SKIN WATER BOTTLES.
CHAPTER VI.
IN THE DIASPORA.
Having brought our story to the close of an epoch, we will pause and glance at the status of the Jew in other lands. The dispersion of Israel in a voluntary way had already begun, though Judea was still the centre of gravity. So the sway of the High Priest reached not only to the Palestinian provinces—Phœnicia, Samaria, Galilee, Gilead, Edom and Philistia—but extended through parts of Asia Minor and to lands on both banks of the Mediterranean Sea. These lands of Jewish settlement outside of Palestine are called the Diaspora.
Egypt.
The land that next to Judea contained the largest number of Jews was Egypt. Our narrative has been moving to and fro between these two lands. In no country outside of Greece itself was the Greek spirit so completely diffused as in Egypt. Alexandria, its new capital, displacing Athens as the intellectual centre of the world, was second in importance only to Rome. While the Greek civilization at its worst was tinctured with an enervated orientalism and had much in it debasing, yet the Greek spirit at its best also found its way to Alexandria, and its influence was intellectually broadening and elevating on the Jews resident there. Look back to Chapter ii.
Under this Greek regime the Jews were given equality at least officially, in Egypt, and also in Cyrene (on the coast of the adjoining country, Lybia). The Greek Egyptian royal house was called the Ptolemaic, from Ptolemy, the family name of its kings. Ptolemy Philometer was a contemporary of Antiochus Epiphanes, and many Jews fled from Palestine to take refuge under his benevolent sway. What a contrast for Israel between Egypt under the Ptolemies and Egypt under the Pharaohs a thousand years earlier!
When settling in lands where they would find themselves a small minority, Jews have usually concentrated in large cities. This has been a source both of strength and of weakness. Of strength—for when scattered in twos and threes in country places, the maintenance of their religion and their historic consciousness would become imperilled; while numbers closely grouped offer power of achievement. Cities too, are the intellectual centres of a land. Of weakness—for city dwellers lose the simplicity that goes with country life in close contact with nature, which deepens faith; and work on the soil in the open, aids in the building of character. So here, in a land outside of Israel, we find Jews settling in one of the great cities of the world.