SECOND LETTER.
Antiquity of the Jews.
Gentlemen: I have ever agreed, having read a few historical books for amusement, that you are a very ancient people, and your origin may be dated much farther back than that of the Teutones, the Celts, the Slavonians, the Angles, and Hurons. I see you assembling as a people in a capital called, sometimes Hershalaïm, sometimes Shaheb, on the hill Moriah, and on the hill Sion, near a desert, on a stony soil, by a small torrent which is dry six months of the year.
When you began to-establish yourselves in your corner, I will not say of land, but of pebbles, Troy had been destroyed by the Greeks about two centuries.
Medon was archon of Athens. Echestratus was reigning in Lacedæmon. Latinus Sylvius was reigning in Latium; and Osochor in Egypt. The Indies had been flourishing for a long succession of ages.
This was the most illustrious period of Chinese history. The emperor Tchin-wang was reigning with glory over that vast empire; all the sciences were there cultivated; and the public annals inform us that the king of Cochin China, being come to pay his respects to this emperor, Tchin-wang, received from him a present of a mariner's compass. This compass might have been of great service to your Solomon, for his fleets that went to the fine country of Ophir, which no one has ever known anything about.
Thus, after the Chaldæans, the Syrians, the Persians, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Indians, the Chinese, the Latins, and the Etruscans, you are the first people upon earth who had any known form of government.
The Banians, the Guebers, and yourselves, are the only nations which, dispersed out of their own country, have preserved their ancient rites; if I make no account of the little Egyptian troops, called Zingari in Italy, Gypsies in England, and Bohemians in France, which had preserved the antique ceremonies of the worship of Isis, the sistrum, the cymbals, the dance of Isis, the prophesying, and the art of robbing hen-roosts.
These sacred troops are beginning to disappear from the face of the earth; while their pyramids still belong to the Turks, who perhaps will not always be masters of them—the figure of all things on this earth doth so pass away.
You say, that you have been settled in Spain ever since the days of Solomon: I believe it, and will even venture to think that the Phœnicians might have carried some Jews thither long before, when you were slaves in Phœnicia, after the horrid massacres which you say were committed by the robber Joshua, and by that other robber Caleb.