For the understanding of Judaism as a whole between Cyrus and Titus it is necessary constantly to bear in mind three facts, of which scholarship is quite aware, but which, owing to philological and theological _parti pris_, it refuses to admit as factors in its discussions. First, the Jews are a “nation without a land,” a _consensus_, and in the midst, moreover, of a world of pure nations of the same type. Secondly, Jerusalem is indeed a Mecca, a holy centre, but it is neither the home nor the spiritual focus of the people. Lastly, the Jews are a peculiar phenomenon in world-history only so long as we insist on treating them as such.

It is true that the post-exilic Jews, in contradistinction to the pre-exilic Israelites are--as Hugo Winckler was the first to recognize--a people of quite new type. But they are not the only representatives of the type. The Aramæan world began in those days to arrange itself in a great number of such peoples, including Persians and Chaldeans,[323] all living in the same district, yet in stringent aloofness from each other, and even then practising the truly Arabian way of life that we call the ghetto.

The first heralds of the new soul were the _prophetic religions_, with their magnificent inwardness, which began to arise about 700 B.C. and challenged the primeval practices of the people and their rulers. They, too, are an essentially Aramæan phenomenon. The more I ponder Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah on the one hand, Zarathustra on the other, the more closely related they appear to me to be. What seems to separate them is not their new beliefs, but the objects of their attack. The first battled with that savage old-Israel religion, which in fact is a whole bundle of religious elements[324]--belief in holy stones and trees, innumerable place-gods (Dan, Bethel, Hebron, Shechem, Beersheba, Gilgal), a single Yahweh (or Elohim), whose name covers a multitude of most heterogeneous numina, ancestor-worship and human sacrifices, dervish-dancing and sacral prostitution--intermixed with indistinct traditions of Moses and Abraham and many customs and sagas of the Late Babylonian world, now after long establishment in Canaan degenerated and hardened into peasant forms. The second combated the old Vedic beliefs of heroes and Vikings, similarly coarsened, no doubt, and certainly needing to be recalled to actuality, time and again, by glorifications of the sacred cattle and of the care thereof. Zarathustra lived about 600 B.C., often in want, persecuted and misunderstood, and met his end as an old man in war against the unbelievers[325]--a worthy contemporary of the unfortunate Jeremiah, who for his prophesying was hated by his countrymen, imprisoned by his king, and after the catastrophe carried off by the fugitives to Egypt and there put to death. And it is my belief that this great epoch brought forth yet a third prophet-religion, the Chaldean.

This, with its penetrating astronomy and its ever-amazing inwardness, was, I venture to guess, evolved at that time and by creative personalities of the Isaiah stature from relics of the old Babylonian religion.[326] About 1000, the Chaldeans were a group of Aramaic-speaking tribes like the Israelites, and lived in the south of Sinear--the mother tongue of Jesus is still sometimes called Chaldean. In Seleucid times the name was applied to a widespread religious community, and especially to its priests. The Chaldean religion was an astral religion, which before Hammurabi the Babylonian was _not_. It is the deepest of all interpretations of the Magian universe, the World-Cavern[327] and Kismet working therein, and consequently it remained the fundamental of Islamic and Jewish speculation to their very latest phases. It was by it, and not by the Babylonian Culture, that after the seventh century there was formed an astronomy worthy to be called an exact science--that is, a priestly technique of observation of marvellous acuteness.[328] It replaced the Babylonian moon-week by the planet-week. Ishtar, the most popular figure of the old religion, the goddess of life and fruitfulness, now became a planet, and Tammuz, the ever-dying and ever-revived god of vegetation, a fixed star. Finally, the henotheistic feeling announced itself; for Nebuchadnezzar the Great Marduk[329] was the one true god, the god of mercy, and Nebo, the old god of Borsippa, was his son and envoy to mankind. For a century (625-539) Chaldean kings were world-rulers, but they were also the heralds of the new religion. When temples were being built, they themselves carried bricks. The accession-prayer of Nebuchadnezzar, the contemporary of Jeremiah, to Marduk is still extant, and in depth and purity it is in nowise surpassed by the finest passages of Israelite prophecy. The Chaldean penitential psalms, closely related in rhythm and inner structure to those of the Jews, know the sin of which man is unconscious and the suffering that contrite avowal before the incensed god can avert. It is the same trust in the mercy of the Deity that finds a truly Christian expression in the inscriptions of the Bel temple of Palmyra.[330]

The kernel of the prophetic teachings is already Magian. There is _one_ god--be he called Yahweh, Ahuramazda or Marduk-Baal--who is the principle of good, and all other deities are either impotent or evil. To this doctrine there attached itself the hope of a Messiah, very clear in Isaiah, but also bursting out everywhere during the next centuries, under pressure of an inner necessity. It is the basic idea of Magian religion, for it contains implicitly the conception of the world-historical struggle between Good and Evil, with the power of Evil prevailing in the middle period, and the Good finally triumphant on the Day of Judgment. This moralization of history is common to Persians, Chaldees, and Jews. But with its coming, the idea of the localized people _ipso facto_ vanished and the genesis of Magian nations without earthly homes and boundaries was at hand. The idea of the Chosen People emerged.[331] But it is easy to understand that men of strong blood, and in particular the great families, found these too spiritual ideas repugnant to their natures and harked back to the stout old tribal faiths. According to Cumont’s researches the religion of the Persian kings was polytheistic and did not possess the Haoma sacrament--that is, it was not wholly Zoroastrian. The same is true of most of the kings of Israel, and in all probability also of the last Chaldean Nabu-Nabid (Nabonidus), whose overthrow by Cyrus and his own subjects was in fact made possible by his rejection of the Marduk faith. And it was in the Captivity that circumcision and the (Chaldean) Sabbath were first acquired, as rites, by the Jews.

The Babylonian exile, however, did set up an important difference between the Jews and the Persians, in respect, not of the ultimate truths of conscious piety, but of all the facts of actuality and consequently men’s inward attitude to these facts. It was the Yahweh believers who _were permitted_ to go home and the adherents of Ahuramazda who _allowed_ them to do so. Of two small tribes that two hundred years before had probably possessed equal numbers of fighting men, the one had taken possession of a world--while Darius crossed the Danube in the north, his power extended in the south through eastern Arabia to the island of Sokotra on the Somali coast[332]--and the other had become an entirely unimportant pawn of alien policy.

This is what made one religion so lordly, the other so humble. Let the student read, in contrast to Jeremiah, the great Behistun inscription[333] of Darius--what a splendid pride of the King in his victorious god! And how despairing are the arguments with which the Israelite prophets sought to preserve intact the image of their god. Here, in exile, with every Jewish eye turned by the Persian victory to the Zoroastrian doctrine, the pure Judaic prophecy (Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah) passes into _Apocalypse_ (Deutero-Isaiah,[334] Ezekiel, Zechariah). All the new visions of the Son of Man, of Satan, of archangels, of the seven heavens, of the last judgment, are _Persian presentations of the common world-feeling_. In Isaiah xli appears Cyrus himself, hailed as Messiah. Did the great composer of Deutero-Isaiah draw his enlightenment from a Zoroastrian disciple? Is it possible that the Persians released the Jews out of a feeling of the inward relationship of their two teachings? It is certain at any rate that both shared one popular idea as to last things, and felt and expressed a common hatred of the old Babylonian and Classical religions, of unbelievers generally, which they did not feel towards one another.

We must not, however, forget to look at the “return from captivity” also from the point of view of Babylon. The great mass, strong in race-force, was in reality far removed from these ideas, or regarded them as mere visions and dreams; and the solid peasantry, the artisans, and no doubt the nascent land-aristocracy quietly remained in its holdings _under a prince of their own_, the Resh Galutha, whose capital was Nehardea.[335] Those who returned “home” were the small minority, the stubborn, the zealots. They numbered with their wives and children forty thousand, a figure which cannot be one-tenth or even one-twentieth of the total, and anyone who confuses these settlers and their destiny with Jewry as a whole[336] must necessarily fail to read the inner meaning of all following events. The _little world of Judaism lived a spiritually separate life_, and the nation as a whole, while regarding this life with respect, certainly did not share in it. In the East apocalyptic literature, the heiress of prophecy, blossomed richly. It was a genuine native poetry of the people, of which we still have the masterpiece, the Book of Job--a work in character Islamic and decidedly un-Jewish[337]--while a multitude of its other tales and sagas, such as Judith, Tobit, Achikar,[338] are spread as motives over all the literatures of the “Arabian” world. In Judea only the Law flourished; the Talmudic spirit appears first in Ezekiel (chs. xl, et seq.) and after 450 is made flesh in the scribes (Sopherim) headed by Ezra. From 300 B.C. to A.D. 200 the Tannaim (“Teachers”) expounded the Torah and developed the Mishnah. Neither the coming of Jesus nor the destruction of the Temple interrupted this abstract scholarship. Jerusalem became for the rigid believer a Mecca, and his Koran was a Code of laws to which was gradually added a whole primitive history compounded of Chaldeo-Persian motives reset according to Pharisaic ideas.[339] But in this atmosphere there was no room for a worldly art, poetry, or learning. All that the Talmud contains of astronomical, medical, and juristic knowledge is exclusively of Mesopotamian origin.[340] It is probable, too, that it was in Mesopotamia, and _before_ the end of the Captivity, that there began that Chaldean-Persian-Jewish formation of sects which developed into the formation of great religions at the beginning of the Magian Culture, and reached its climax in the teaching of Mani. “The Law and the Prophets”--_these two nouns practically define the difference between Judea and Mesopotamia_. In the late Persian and in every other Magian theology both tendencies are united; it is only in the case here considered that they were separated in space. The decisions of Jerusalem were recognized everywhere, but it is a question how widely they were obeyed. Even as near as Galilee the Pharisees were the object of suspicion, while in Babylonia no Rabbi could be consecrated. For the great Gamaliel, Paul’s teacher, it was a title to fame that his rulings were followed by the Jews “even abroad.” How independent was the life of the Jews in Egypt is shown by the recently discovered documents of Elephantine and Assuan.[341] About 170, Onias asked the King for permission to build a temple “according to the measurements of the Temple in Jerusalem,” on the ground that the numerous non-conforming temples that existed were the cause of eternal bickerings amongst the communities.

One other subject must be considered. Jewry, like Persia, had since the Exile increased enormously beyond the old small clan-limits; this was owing to conversions and secessions--_the only form of conquest open to a landless nation and, therefore, natural and obvious to the Magian religions_. In the north it very early drove, through the Jew State of Adiabene, to the Caucasus; in the south (probably along the Persian Gulf) it penetrated to Saba; in the west it was dominant in Alexandria, Cyrene, and Cyprus. The administration of Egypt and the policy of the Parthian Empire were largely in Jewish hands.

But this movement _came out of Mesopotamia alone_, and the spirit in it was the Apocalyptic and not the Talmudic. Jerusalem was occupied in creating yet more legal barriers against the unbeliever. It was not enough even to abandon the practice of making converts. A Pharisee permitted himself to summon the universally beloved King Hyrcanus (135-106) to lay down the office of High Priest because his mother had once been in the power of the infidels.[342] This is the same narrowness which in the primitive Christian brotherhood of Judea took the form of opposing the preaching of the Gospel to the heathen. In the East it would simply never have occurred to anyone to draw such barriers, which were contrary to the whole idea of the Magian nation. But in that very fact was based _the spiritual superiority_ of the wide East. The Synedrion in Jerusalem might possess unchallenged religious authority, but politically, and therefore historically, the power of the Resh Galutha was a very different matter. Christian and Jewish research alike have failed to perceive these things. So far as I am aware, no one has noticed the important fact that the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes was directed not against “Jewry” but against Judea. And this brings us to another fact, of still greater importance.

The destruction of Jerusalem hits only a very small part of the nation, one moreover that was spiritually and politically by far the least important. It is not true that the Jewish people has lived “in the Dispersion” since that day, for it had lived for centuries (and so too had the Persian and others) in a form which was independent of country. On the other hand, we realize equally little the impression made by this war upon the real Jewry which Judea thought of and treated as an adjunct. The victory of the heathen and the ruin of the Sanctuary was felt in the inmost soul,[343] and in the crusade of 115[344] a bitter revenge was taken for it; but the ideal outraged and vindicated was the ideal of Jewry and not that of Judaism. Zionism then, as in Cyrus’s day and in ours, was a reality only for a quite small and spiritually narrow minority. If the calamity had been really felt in the sense of a “loss of home” (as we figure it to ourselves with the Western mind), a hundred opportunities after Marcus Aurelius’s time could have been seized to win the city back. But that would have contradicted the Magian sense of the nation, whose ideal organic form was the synagogue, the pure _consensus_--like the early Catholic “visible Church” and like Islam--and it was precisely the annihilation of Judea and the clan spirit of Judea that _for the first time completely actualized this ideal_.

For Vespasian’s War, directed against Judea, was a liberation of Jewry. In the first place, it ended both the claim of the people of this petty district to be the genuine nation, and the pretensions of their bald spirituality to equivalence with the soul-life of the whole. The research, the scholasticism, and the mysticism of the Oriental academies entered into possession of their rights; so, for instance, the judge Karna--the contemporary, more or less, of Ulpian and Papinian--formulated at the academy of Nehardea the first code of civil law.[345] In the second place, it rescued this religion from the dangers of that pseudomorphosis to which Christianity in that same period was succumbing. Since 200 B.C. there had existed a half-Hellenistic Jewish literature. The “Preacher” (Ecclesiastes, Koheleth) contains Pyrrhonic ideas.[346] The Wisdom of Solomon, 2 Maccabees, Theodotion, the Aristeas Letter, etc., follow; there are things like the Menander collection of Maxims, as to which it is impossible to say whether they ought to be regarded as Jewish or as Greek. There were, about 160, high priests who were so Hellenistic in spirit that they combated the Jewish religion, and later there were rulers like Hyrcanus and Herod who did the same by political methods. This danger came to an end instantly and for good in A.D. 70.

In the time of Jesus there were in Jerusalem three tendencies which can be described as generally Aramæan, represented respectively by the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. Although the connotations of these names varied, and although both in Christian and in Jewish research most diverse views are held about them, it may at any rate be said that the first of these tendencies is found in greatest purity in Judaism, the second in Chaldeanism, the third in Hellenism.[347] Essene is the rise of the cult (almost the Order) of Mithras in the east of Asia Minor. The Sadducees, although in Jerusalem they appear as a small and distinguished group--Josephus compares them with the Epicureans--are thoroughly Aramæan in their apocalyptic and eschatological views, in virtue of a certain element which makes them, so to say, the Dostoyevskis of this Early period. They stand to the Pharisees in the relation of mysticism to scholasticism, of John to Paul, of Bundahish to Vendidad[348] in the Persian world. The Apocalyptic is popular, and many of its traits are spiritually common property throughout the Aramæan world; the Talmudic and Avestan Pharisaism is exclusive and tries to rule out every other religion with uncompromising rigour.

The Essenes appear in Jerusalem as a monastic order like the Neopythagoreans. They possessed secret texts.[349] In the broad sense they are representative of the Pseudomorphosis, and in consequence they disappear from Jewry completely after A.D. 70, while precisely in this period Christian literature was becoming purely Greek--not in the least of the causes of this being that the Hellenized Western Jews left Judaism to retreat into its East, and gradually adopted Christianity.

But also Apocalyptic, which is an expression-form of townless and town-fearing mankind, soon came to an end within the Synagogue, after a last wonderful reaction to the stimulus of the great catastrophe.[350] When it had become evident that the teaching of Jesus would lead not to a reform of Judaism, but to a new religion, and when, about A.D. 100, the daily imprecation-formula against the Jew-Christians was introduced, Apocalyptic for the short remainder of its existence resided in the young Church.