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,[1] and in the crusade of 115[2] 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 Kama — the contemporary, more or less, of Ulpian and Papinian — formulated at the academy of Nehardea the first code of civil law.[3] 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
