However, there were others who brought the glad tidings of the Old Testament to Rome long before there existed a New one. And this is, on the other side, what makes Rome a sort of Terra Sancta even to the Jew. It is true that we have not to look for the footprints of the prophets, for whom even tradition never claimed “the gift of missionary-travelling.” But might not the ground there have received a sort of consecration by the fact that it was traversed by the ambassadors of Judas Maccabæus (about 161 b.c.) “to make a league of amity and confederacy” with the Roman Senate? Of the embassy of Simon the Maccabee (about 140 b.c.) there is actual historical evidence that they began to propagate in Rome the Jewish [pg 339] religion. Some seventy or eighty years later the Jews had already their own quarter in Rome, with their own synagogues, which they were in the habit of visiting, “most especially on the sacred Sabbath days, when they publicly cultivate their national philosophy.” That many of the oldest teachers of Israel, the Tannaim, went to Rome as deputies, and that one of them (R. Mathia ben Chares) founded a school there early in the second century, is also an authenticated fact. One would like to know what they taught, and in what way they expounded their national philosophy. Most of all one would like to know what were the spiritual means they employed in their proselytising work, in which they were, according to the testimony of history, so successful. Did they preach in the streets? Or did they hold public controversies? Or did they even send out Epistles which, in form at least, served as a model to apostles of another creed? How many a problem would be solved; how many a miracle would disappear; how many a book would become superfluous, if we could obtain certainty about these points! The Talmud tells us little, almost nothing, about these important things, whilst we get from the Roman writers only sneers and raillery. To these respectable Romans the Jews were only a mob of unlettered atheists. Indeed, to a good orthodox heathen, a religion without images and statues, with a God without a pedigree and without a theogony, was an impossible thing. Those poor metaphysicians!
However, why dwell so long on a past world? A famous Rabbi once exclaimed: “If a man would ask thee, ‘Where is thy God?’ answer him: ‘In the great city of Rome.’ ” The underlying idea was the mystical notion [pg 340] that wherever Israel had to migrate, they were accompanied by the Divine presence. And Rome was, in the times of the Rabbis, the point to which the streams of Jewish migration from the Holy Land chiefly converged. But now, instead of to Rome, might we not point to London and New York as centres of Jewish migrations?
Index
This Index contains the most important names of persons, titles of books, technical terms and Hebrew words occurring in the text. In the notes to the text, the Hebrew words are for the most part given also in Hebrew characters.
Abarbanel, Isaac, [173], [174]
Abaye, [311]
Ab Beth Din, [84]