"And he shall possess the nations of the heathen to serve him beneath his yoke; and he shall glorify the Lord in a place to be seen of the whole earth;
"And he shall purge Jerusalem and make it holy, even as it was in the days of old.
"So that the nations may come from the ends of the earth to see his glory, bringing as gifts her sons that had fainted,
"And may see the glory of the Lord, wherewith God hath glorified her."
So runs one of the Psalms of Solomon written between 70 and 40 B.C.[[2]] Parallel passages might be multiplied, but one may suffice, written perhaps in the lifetime of Jesus.
"Then thou, O Israel, wilt be happy, and thou wilt mount upon the neck of the eagle, and [the days of thy mourning] will be ended,
"And God will exalt thee, and he will cause thee to approach to the heaven of the stars, and he will establish thy habitation among them,
"And thou wilt look from on high, and wilt see thine enemies in Ge[henna], and thou wilt recognize them and rejoice, and wilt give thanks and confess thy Creator."[[3]]
No people in the Mediterranean world had such a past behind them, and none a future so sure and so glorious before them—none indeed seems to have had any great hope of the future at all; their Golden Ages were all in the past, or far away in mythical islands of the Eastern seas or beyond the Rhine. And if the Christian doctrine was true, that great past was as dead as Babylon, and the Messianic Kingdom was a mockery—Israel was "feeding on the east wind," and the nation was not Jehovah's chosen. At one stroke Israel was abolished, and every national memory and every national instinct, rooted in a past of suffering and revelation, and watered with tears in a present of pain, were to wither like the gardens of Adonis. No man with a human heart but must face the alternative of surrendering national for Christian ideals, or hating and exterminating the enemy of his race.
So much for the nation, and what Christianity meant for it, but much beside was at stake. There was the seal of circumcision, the hereditary token of God's covenant with Abraham, a sacrament passed on from father to son and associated with generations of faith and piety. Week by week the Sabbath came with its transforming memories—the "Princess Sabbath," for Heine was not the first to feel the magic that at sunset on Friday restores the Jew to the "halls of his royal father, the tents of Jacob." Every one of their religious usages spoke irresistibly of childhood. "When your children shall say unto you 'What mean ye by this service,' ye shall say...," so ran the old law, binding every Jew to his father by the dearest and strongest of all bonds. To become a Christian was thus to be alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, to renounce a father's faith and his home. If the pagan had to suffer for his conversion, the Jew's heritage was nobler and holier, and the harder to forego. Even the friendly Jew pleads, "Cannot a man be saved who trusts in Christ and also keeps the law—keeps it so far as he can under the conditions of the dispersion,—the Sabbath, circumcision, the months, and certain washings?"[[4]]