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,[1] 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[2] — 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[3] — 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.[4] About 1000, the Chaldeans
- ↑ The name Chaldean signifies, before the Persian epoch, a tribe; later, a religious society. See p. 175 above.
- ↑ A. Bertholet, Kulturgeschichte Israels (1919), pp. 253, et seq. [Clear and useful English manuals are G. Moore, Literature of the Old Testaments. R. H. Charles, Between the Old and the New Testaments. See also the article "Hebrew Religion" in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.]
- ↑ According to Williams Jackson's Zoroaster (1901).
- ↑ Research has treated the Chaldean, like the Talmudic, as a stepchild. The investigator's whole attention has been concentrated on the religion of the Babylonian Culture, and the Chaldean
