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imitation in the nations among whom the Jews were dispersed. Josephus, in a treatise written to answer the attacks made upon the Jews by a scholar named Apion, says that there is no city, Greek or barbarian, nor any single nation 'in which the custom of abstention from work on the seventh day and other Jewish customs have not become a matter of common use.'[1] We may regard this statement as having some pardonable exaggeration, but it is confirmed to a considerable extent by more disinterested writers. Thus we find Seneca[2], when he wishes to give examples of superstitious ritual, mentioning the practice of 'lighting lamps on the Sabbath.' So too Juvenal[3], when he describes how the son of the 'Sabbath-fearer' and abstainer from pork becomes himself a complete Jew, sets it down as the fault of the father, who had kept every seventh day as a day of idleness. Here we seem to have two grades of Judaizers, the second a complete proselyte, the former observing the Sabbath and refusing to touch swine's flesh, but otherwise remaining an ordinary pagan. A few passages suggest a looser connexion than even this—that there were Romans, who felt no real attraction to Judaism, but still had some superstitious regard for the Sabbath. Ovid in his amatory exhortations three times couples the Sabbath with other days of leisure or inactivity.
