Topic: "Jewish" Bible as source for Christianity (and Islam) 1911 Eduorad DuJardin

[Prometheus]

N
 178 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPERIALIST REVIVAL

And as, at this time, the Jerusalem aristocracy had just
put forth the name and theory of the people of Israel,
gathering together under the name the whole of the
populations which it meditated ruling and assimilating,
the famous programme “ Israel in the Promised Land ”
represented the whole imperialism of the time.

Confronted with the irruption and the menace of
Hellenism, Hosea and Amos strive to recall the people
to their duties; and, like Deuteronomy, they merely
offer their contemporaries the promise of happiness at
home.

Jeremiah, in the dread of the danger that nearly
wrecks Judaism in the days of the successors of
Alexander, is a mild soul, haunted only by the threat
of the catastrophes that are about to fall again upon
Jerusalem, if Jerusalem is unfaithful. After the threat,
however, Jeremiah does not fail to tell and to repeat the
promise. But it suffices for him to tell of the flourishing
of the Jewish State, the replanting of their vines and
fig-trees, the dancing of the daughters of Jerusalem, on
peaceful evenings, to the sound of zithers and tam-
bourines. Jeremiah often addresses foreign nations;
though by foreign nations, in Jeremiah, we must under-
stand the States which surround Judaea. Never (except,
perhaps, once) does Jeremiah turn to the Islands; in the
Bible the Islands are the Greek world, and Jeremiah does
not look so far.

Ezekiel, in his sombre visions of the future, was hardly
attentive to anything but his country. He had put his
particular formula on the ancient promises; but had he
enlarged it ?

Isaiah is the first to turn to the Islands.

The dream of a universal conquest is the stroke of
genius of the First Isaiah, though it is foreshadowed in
the authors of the last Mosaic narratives.

We know what the situation of the Jewish people is at
the time. In Judaea it is subject to foreigners ; a corrupt
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179

aristocracy oppresses it; constant wars burden the land
of Israel. In the colonies it vegetates miserably ; the son
dies after the father without having seen once more the
sky of his country. They are far from counting on the
old hopes of peace, glory, and happiness; faithfulness has
not had its reward. And it seems to the most optimistic
that the fulfilment of the divine promises is very far off,
very difficult, if not quite chimerical. The free and
peaceful possession of Palestine ; Israel prospering in
the promised land! The reality was very far removed
from the dream.

What could be said to the Jewish people to restore its
confidence and courage ?

In a sublime invention the First Isaiah, refusing to
preach a perilous defensive, suddenly turns round, and,
taking the offensive against the enemies of his country
and his party, he teaches the Jews that they have nothing
to fear, and that not only will every promise be fulfilled,
but Jahveh will give his people, at one stroke, a hundred
times more than he promised.

Of the increase of his government and peace there shall
be no end, about the throne of David, and about his
kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment
and with justice from henceforth even for ever. The zeal
of Jahveh of the Hosts will perform this.1

The golden age that other poets had put at the begin-
ning of time is foreseen in the future by the First Isaiah.

And on that day the shoot of David shall be an ensign
for the nations; to it shall the nations turn ; and his rest
shall be glory.2

On that day Philistia will be conquered, Edom and
Moab will be the prey of the children of Israel, and the
sons of Ammon will be subject to them.3 To Dumah
(probably Edom) it shall be said:—Submit.4 Tyre will
be destroyed, but it will rise again after seventy years in

1 Isaiah ix. 7.   2 Isaiah xi. 10.   8 Isaiah xi. 14.   * Isaiah xxi. 12.
 180 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPERIALIST REVIVAL

order that its wealth may be offered to the temple at
Jerusalem.

And it shall come to pass in that day, that Tyre shall
be forgotten seventy years, according to the days of one
King; after the end of seventy years shall Tyre sing as
an harlot:—

Take thy guitar,

Run through the town,

Eorgotten courtesan;

Dance thou for ever,

Sing without end,

That men recall thee!

And it shall come to pass, after the end of seventy years,
that Jahveh will visit Tyre, and she shall return to her
hire, and shall commit fornication with all the kingdoms
of the world upon the face of the earth.

And her merchandise and her hire shall be consecrated
to Jahveh; it shall not be treasured, nor laid up; for
her merchandise shall be for them that dwell before the
face of Jahveh, to eat sufficiently and for magnificent
clothing.1

The Ethiopians shall be conquered, but they will submit
and will bring offerings to the temple of Jahveh;2 the
Egyptians shall be chastised, but they will turn to
Jahveh, and he will hear them;3 Syria will accept the
god of Jerusalem; there will be a road from Egypt to
Syria, and Jahveh will bless the submission of the Syrians
and the Egyptians.4 What is the meaning of the con-
version of the Syria of the Seleucids, and the Egypt of
the Ptolemies, if not the submission of all that the Jews
of the third century know of Hellenism ? And all these
victories will have for prelude the reconciliation; that is
to say, the definitive union of Judah and Ephraim;6 that
is to say, of Jerusalem and all the ancient Palestinian
towns—in other words, the final constitution of the Israel
which symbolises the Jewish ideal.

And it shall come to pass in the last days that the
mountain of Jahveh’s house shall be established in the

1 Isaiah xxiii. 15-18.   2 Isaiah xviii. 7.   3 Isaiah xix. 21-22.

4 Isaiah xix. 23.   s Isaiah xi. 13.
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181

top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills ;
and all nations shall flow unto it.

And many peoples shall come and say: Come ye, and
let us go up to the mountain of Jahveh, to the house of
the god of Jacob ; and he will teach us of his ways, and
we will walk in his paths.

For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of
Jahveh from Jerusalem.

And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke
many peoples.1

The submission of the world is the necessary and
logical consequence of the covenant. Provided Israel
observes the conditions, Jahveh will observe them on his
side; and the work of Jahveh will be, not only to make
Israel powerful and prosperous, but to bring the whole
world to kneel before it. For the first time in the story
of Judaism, the First Isaiah says it explicitly. It is a
momentous event. Until that time they thought only
of obtaining from Jahveh the peaceful enjoyment of
Palestine; now they dream of becoming masters of the
world. The history of the Jews will be nothing else but
the conflict of this ambition with the reality.

The whole is interconnected as cause and effect. The
grandeur of the future held out to the Jews has magnified
beyond measure the god who is capable of making such
promises; while, by a reaction of the effect on its cause,
the greatness of the god enlarges the splendour of his
promise. To the First Isaiah belongs the glory of first
magnifying Jahveh, the god of Israel, to the proportions
of the god of the universe.

We know the Jahveh of the early nomads settled in
Palestine, a tribal god, becoming later the patron-god of
the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Ephraim, entirely
similar to Camos, the patron-god of Moab, or Milkom,
the patron-god of Ammon. In the days of Esdras the
Jewish soul had needed, if it were to rise again and
endure, to hold itself aloof in a proud patriotism. At

1 Isaiah ii. 2-4.
 182 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPERIALIST REVIVAL

the same time it necessarily isolated Jakveh amid the
congenital and neighbouring gods; and from that time
Jahveh had begun to play a separate part, with a pride
equal to the pride of his people, in the crowd of Pales-
tinian gods.

Then, persevering in a pretension that gave it greater
strength, the Jewish soul had come to regard itself as
chosen for an extraordinary destiny among other peoples.
And at the same time Jahveh became, for the Jews, a
higher god among the other gods. That is the period of
Deuteronomy. There are plenty of texts showing Jahveh
as a god above the other gods. Does not Moses sing, after
the crossing of the Eed Sea:—

“ Who is like unto thee among the gods, O Jahveh ? ” 1

For the First Isaiah Jahveh becomes the supreme god;
beside him there are but demons and angels. The demons
are the strange gods, the hostile gods, the gods of foreigners
and foes, who will all disappear on the day of the victory
of Jahveh; the angels are the servants of Jahveh, encircling
his throne in the heavens. Jahveh is the one god, the
true god. Deuteronomy and Jeremiah himself proclaimed
that the worship of other gods was the greatest of crimes.
The First Isaiah is not more indulgent, but he recognises
a new sentiment; he feels that the strange gods are
inferior gods, that they are doomed to perish, and will
perish.

In that day man shall cast their idols of silver, and
their idols of gold, which they made each one for himself
to worship, to the moles and to the bats.2

The moment will come presently when the Second
Isaiah will add irony to malediction, and, railing at these
idols of wood or gold, made by the hand of man, will make
it plain that Jahveh alone is god, and that the other gods
are nothing.

With the history of Jahveh corresponds the history of

1 Exodus xv. 11.

2 Isaiah ii. 20.
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183

the old word elohim. It is the Hebrew word which we
translate “ god.” What precisely is the elohim ? A fetish
that becomes an idol, an idol that becomes a national god,
a national god that becomes the god of the universe,
awaiting the time when the god of the universe becomes
a metaphysical god. The First Isaiah is at the stage of
the god of the universe.

But the history of the word elohim and the history of
the god Jahveh are, at the same time, the history of the
Jewish soul that is faithfully reflected therein. A Syrian
tribe that becomes a small people; a small people that
holds aloof in an extreme and fierce patriotism, finding in
it the strength to live and endure; and now a handful of
men, a brotherhood almost, hardly a nation, rather a
church, that thinks itself destined to rule the world, and
believes so strongly in its destiny that it will eventually
accomplish it.

That again is in the First Isaiah.

Until then the Jewish soul is in a state of preparation ;
it exists only potentially. Even in Jeremiah it is as yet
only concentrating, or forming. Jeremiah had been
only a strenuous return to the policy of Esdras and
Deuteronomy, become democratic as it confronted the
Hellenisation of the aristocracy. With the First Isaiah
Judaism opens out towards the world. The prophecy of
Jeremiah had been the cry of alarm of a man who saw
the foundations of the Judaic edifice give way. Now the
Jewish soul revives; Hellenisation has not disappeared from
the aristocracy, but the Jewish people have renewed their
tradition. Now, for the first time in the Bible and in
Jewish history, the eyes of the men of Jerusalem are
about to turn beyond Palestine. For the first time the
Jewish soul appears, in the First Isaiah, of the character
in which it will, under a Christian form, conquer the
world, by faith in its election.

And already the First Isaiah tells, without ambiguity,
how this extraordinary conquest will be accomplished.
 184 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPERIALIST REVIVAL

Before him Deuteronomy, the early prophets, and
Jeremiah have, one after the other, developed the
formula of the famous covenant. The First Isaiah
deduces its full consequences; he expounds it in its full
amplitude. There is a synallagmatic bargain between
Jahveh and Israel; if Israel is faithful to Jahveh, Jahveh
will give it the world. But Israel is only a small people
amid the great peoples of the earth. Syria and Egypt
crush it with their formidable power. What armies will
Israel lead out to conquer such foes ? What general
will lead them to the battle ? The armies will be the
hosts of heaven, and Jahveh will be their general.
Edom, Moab, and Ammon in subjection, Tyre giving up
its gold like an aged prostitute, the Ethiopians bringing
their tribute, Egypt and Syria on their knees, the peoples
of the earth crowding to the mountain of Jerusalem—
all that will be the personal task of Jahveh.

[Prometheus]

Behold, the day of Jahveh cometh, cruel both with
wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate and
destroy the enemies.

The stars of heaven, even the Orions, shall not give
their light; the sun shall be darkened in his going forth,
and the moon shall not cause her light to shine..

Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall
remove out of her place, in the wrath of Jahveh of the
Hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger.

And it shall be as the chased gazelle and as a sheep
that no man taketh up: they shall every man turn to his
own people, and flee every one into his own land.

Every one that is found shall be thrust through, and
every one that is seized shall fall by the sword.

Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before
their eyes ; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives
ravished....

For Jahveh will have mercy on Jacob, and will yet
choose Israel...

And the house of Israel shall possess the peoples for
servants and handmaids; and they shall take them
captives whose captives they were, and they shall rule
over their oppressors.1

1 Isaiah xiii. 9-16 and xiv. 1-2.
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185

And it shall come to pass in that day that Jahveh shall
punish the host of the high ones that are on high, and
the kings of the earth upon the earth.

And they shall be gathered together as prisoners are
gathered in the pit, and shall be shut up in the prison,
and after many days shall they be punished.1

And the multitude of thy foes shall be like small dust,
and the multitude of the terrible ones shall be as the chaff
that passeth away; yea, it shall be at an instant
suddenly.

Thou slialt be visited of Jahveh of the Hosts with
thunder, and with earthquake, and with great noise, with
storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire.

And the multitude of all the nations that march against
thee, and all they that fight against thee, shall be as a
dream, a vision of the night.

And it shall even be as when an hungry man dreameth,
and, behold, he eateth; but he awaketh, and his soul is
empty : or as when a thirsty man dreameth, and, behold,
he drinketh; but he awaketh, and, behold, he is faint,
and his soul is athirst: so shall the multitude of all the
nations be that march against mount Zion.2

When such a hope becomes, not the theme of rhetorical
effusions, not the outworn phrase of a materialistic clergy,
but the flesh and blood of a people, however lowly it be
in the heart of the hills, it is a formidable people.

§ 3. The Second Isaiah.

The work of the prophets, however, was not yet
complete. Another voice was to be heard, introducing a
new aspect of the evolution of Judaism. This is the
Second Isaiah, the best known, the most Christian, of the
prophets.

A connecting link between the prophets and the
psalms, the Second Isaiah is already the consoler of the
downcast. The imperialism of the Second Isaiah is an
imperialism of the downcast.

The book of the Second Isaiah is a collection of odes.

1 Isaiah xxiv. 21-22.

2 Isaiah xxix. 5-8.
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The writer, however, was unable to speak in his own
name; pseudonymity is the invariable condition of
Hebrew literature. He presented his work as a continu-
ation of the work of the old prophet Isaiah. A book that
had not the paternity of some ancient name would not
have been received at Jerusalem. The literary artifice
he used was this : the aged prophet Isaiah, in the time of
Hezekiah, king of Judah, is represented as consoling the
Jewish people in its misfortunes, and prophesying the
end of the Babylonian captivity and the restoration of
Jerusalem by Cyrus, in the time of Zorobabel. In reality,
however, it is not to the misfortunes of the days of
Hezekiah or of the Deportation that the writer offers his
consolation, but to the evils of the present time. It is
not the end of the Babylonian captivity that the writer
announces, but the return of the exiles from all parts of
the Dispersion; it is not the throwing off of the yoke of
the king of Babylon, but the end of the Egyptian and
Syrian servitude; it is not the restoration of Jerusalem in
the days of Zorobabel, but its future glorification, when
the day of Jahveh shall come.

Like all the prophets and all the Jewish writers, the
Second Isaiah develops in an almost unique way the
classic theme of the evils which are the chastisement
inflicted by Jahveh on the guilty Jews, and the rewards
which the god promises to his people when it returns to
fidelity. But the evils deplored by the Second Isaiah are
no longer the same as those that the early prophets
lamented, and of which they held the threat over the
head of their contemporaries. Formerly they spoke of
invasion, burning, and deportation: now the theme is
that Jerusalem, with all its pride, is a slave, that the
Jewish colonies are humbled in the midst of the goim, and
that the heads of the Jerusalem aristocracy are bad
shepherds who betray the flock.

To whom, indeed, is the Second Isaiah speaking ? To
“him whom man despiseth, to him whom the nation
 THE SECOND ISAIAH

18?

abhorreth, to the servant of rulers,” to “the prisoners,”
to “ them that are in darkness,” to those that hunger and
thirst, to those whom the mirage and the sun cause to
suffer.1

What does he say to them ?

Fear ye not the reproach of men, neither be ye afraid
of their revilings : for [he adds] the moth shall eat them
up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool.2

Elsewhere there is question of the oppressors of Israel,
who said to it:—

Bow down, that we may go over; and Israel made of
its back as the ground, and as the street to them that
went over.8

This people is robbed and spoiled, he says again.4

Later he speaks to those “ that thirst ” and to those
“ that have no money.”6

The Second Isaiah belongs to the end of the third
century, and is contemporary with the king of Syria
Antiochus the Great. The abominable Joseph, son of
Tobias, is dead, but his sons amply fill his place; one of
them, Hyrcanus, commits the scandals of his father
tenfold worse. One of the odes of the Second Isaiah6 is
evidently a diatribe, with transparent allusions, against
the new farmer of the taxes, the “ son of the sorceress,
the seed of the adulterer and the whore,” who enriches
himself “at the cost of Israel,” which has “rebelled”;
who builds himself “ a strong place on the mountain,”
offers “ presents to the king [of Egypt] and sends
messengers,” and angers Jahveh by “the iniquity of his
covetousness.”7

The prophet returns unwearyingly to the exactions of
the aristocracy.

But the Second Isaiah addresses himself to the exiles
as much as to the Jews who remain in Jerusalem. The

1 Isaiah xlix. 7, 9, and 10.   2 Isaiah li. 7-8.   8 Isaiah li. 23.

4 Isaiah sin. 22.   5 Isaiah lv. 1.   6 Isaiah lvii.

7 Isaiah lvii. 3-5,7, 9, 17.
 188 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPERIALIST REVIVAL

third century is the period of the great departure of the
Jews for the towns of the Mediterranean, and the thought
of the poet goes out unceasingly to the miserable
emigrants who languish, in the depths of the ghettos, as
they turn towards the city of their god. The originality
of the Second Isaiah is that he is a consoler of the
afflicted even more than a judge threatening the guilty.

Comfort, comfort my people, saith your god.1
Thus does he open the series of his poems.

The famous poem of the “ Man of Sorrows ” is a
summary of the lamentable picture, on which the Second
Isaiah chiefly dwells, of the humiliations of the Jewish
people; the passage is one of the best known in the
Bible, yet it is still one of the least understood.

We must imagine the men of Jerusalem gathering
round the temple, swathed in their loose mantles, during
long days that are filled only with meditations in common,
prayer, political agitation, anger against the oppressors,
and dreams of the future. What do the great odes of
the prophetic writers do, in this gloomy Asiatic forum,
but legitimise with the authority of the national god
their anger and their desires ? -

One day the poem of the “ Man of Sorrows ” spreads
among this crowd, already become fanatical. It is, it
seems, the work of the old prophet Isaiah. They do not
think of disputing it; the brain of the ancient Jews was
not open to critical questions. And this old poem—
several centuries old, they say—seems to harmonise
marvellously with all the restlessness of their souls..

He hath grown up as a shoot, as a tender plant out of
a dry ground ; he hath no form, nor comeliness ; he hath
no beauty that we should desire him.

Despised and the least of men, a man of sorrows and
acquainted with grief, like unto him from whom we turn
our faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Surely he hath borne our maladies, and carried our

1 Isaiah xl. 1.
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189

sorrows; yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of god,
and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our rebellions, he was bruised
for our iniquities; the chastisement, the price of our
peace, was upon him ; and with his stripes we are healed.

And we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned
every one to his own way; and Jahveh hath laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

He is maltreated, and he humbles himself; he opens
not his mouth; as a lamb that is brought to the slaughter,
and as a dumb sheep before her shearers, he openeth not
his mouth.

He is delivered to captivity and judgment, and, of his
generation, who understandeth that he is cut off out of
the land of the living, and stricken for the rebellions of
my people.1

This poem has been the successive theme of all
theologies. Traditional theology has seen in it a predic-
tion of the Messiah, Jesus; liberal Protestant interpreters
have read in it the doctrine of „ redemption; even the
most independent of the critics have agreed to recognise
in it Israel atoning for the sins of the world. The
Hebrew text, however, does not say that Israel was
smitten for the iniquities of other peoples, but for its own
iniquities. We will give an example of the incredible
errors into which the best commentators may be led by
preconceived ideas. The Man of Sorrows is smitten,
says Isaiah, “ for our iniquities,” and the critic explains:

“ Yes, our iniquities......but it is the goim who are

speaking; only the prophet has forgotten to tell us.”

The iniquities expiated by the Man of Sorrows are the
iniquities of Israel; the Man of Sorrows, that is to say,
Israel itself, atones for its own faults. The idea of Israel
atoning for the sins of the world will occur to no one
before St. Paul; it is impossible before the Christian era.
Israel is humbled because it has sinned against Jahveh ;
if the Man of Sorrows, if Israel, is a redeemer, he is a

1 Isaiah liii. 2-8.
 190 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPERIALIST REVIVAL

redeemer only of himself; we return once more to the
old familiar idea of the covenant.

But Jahveh now smites his people with a new humilia-
tion. The evils with which the early prophets threatened
Israel were those of a vanquished people ; those deplored
by the prophet of the end of the third century are the
ignominies of oppression. In Jeremiah the sword was
held over the head of Israel: now it is the stick.

Such is the meaning of the “ Man of Sorrows.”

Bound the humiliation of the Jews the prophet brings
again the series of ancient ideas. He enumerates the
faults, the desertions, the apostasies of Israel. Then, to
the men of Jerusalem who are listening to him, he
promises, if Israel returns and keeps faithful, the same
rewards that the First Isaiah has already conjured up
like a mirage before their eyes, and he opens out the
perspective of the glories to come.

Some have seen in the Second Isaiah a tender soul who
dreams of pacific conquest, and summons all peoples to
share the delight of the kingdom of Jahveh. Alas! this
is how the tender soul of the Second Isaiah invited the
Jews gathered in the precincts of the temple to fraternise
with the goim :—

Come down, and sit in the dust, 0 virgin, daughter of
Babylon! Sit on the ground; there is no throne, 0
daughter of the Chaldseans ; for thou shalt no more be
called tender and delicate.

Take the millstones and grind flour ; uncover thy locks,
and make bare the leg, uncover the thigh, pass over the
rivers.

Thy nakedness shall be uncovered, yea, thy shame shall
be seen. I will take vengeance, and I shall spare none.

These two things shall come to thee in a moment, in
one day: the loss of children, and widowhood; they shall
come upon thee, in spite of the multitude of thy
sorceries....

There shall come an evil upon thee of which thou shalt
not know the rising; and mischief shall fall upon thee
that thou shalt not be able to put off; and desolation
 THE SECOND ISAIAH

191

shall come upon thee suddenly which thou shalt not
foresee....

Behold, they are as stubble, the fire burns them : they
shall not deliver themselves from the power of the flame.1

Elsewhere:

And I will feed them that oppress thee with their own
flesh, and they shall be drunken with their own blood as
with the juice of the grape.2

[Prometheus]

Later :—

Behold, I have taken out of thine hand the cup of
dizziness, the cup of my fury; thou shalt no more drink
it again, but I will put it into the hand of them that
afflict thee.3

Jahveh hath put on the garment of vengeance, and
hath clad himself with jealousy as a cloke.

According to their deeds, accordingly he will repay; to
the islands he will repay recompense.

So they shall fear the name of Jahveh from the west,
and his glory from the east; when the enemy shall come
in like a flood, the spirit of Jahveh shall put him to flight.4

I have trodden the peoples in my anger, and trampled
them in my fury, and their blood hath been sprinkled
upon my garments, and I have stained all my raiment.

For the day of vengeance is in mine heart.5

And the Jews enfevered, with anger and despair,
repeated with their prophet, as they saw pass the proud
aristocrats whom they accused of denying their god and
their country:—

I number you to the sword, saith Jahveh, and ye shall
all bow down to the slaughter; because when I called, ye
did not answer; when I spake, ye did not hear; but did
evil before mine eyes, and did choose that wherein I
delighted not.

Therefore thus saith the lord Jahveh:—Behold, my
servants shall eat, but ye shall be hungry; behold, my
servants shall drink, but ye shall be thirsty; behold, my
servants shall rejoice, but ye shall be ashamed; behold,
my servants shall sing for joy of heart, but ye shall cry
for sorrow of heart, and shall howl for vexation of spirit.6

1 Isaiah xlvii. 1-14.   2 Isaiah xlix. 26.   3 Isaiah li. 22.

4 Isaiahlix. 17-19.   6 Isaiah lxiii. 3-4.   6 Isaiah lxv. 12-14.
 192 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPERIALIST REVIVAL

The hero of the Second Isaiah (who will also be the hero
of the psalms) is designated by the words ebed Jahveh,
which the Christian translations have rendered the
“ Servant of God ”—that is to say, the servant of Jahveh.
It is important to determine the precise meaning. The
Hebrew word ebed has, in the Bible, a meaning which
varies between slave, serf, servant, and domestic. The
Mosaic law distinguishes between the Hebrew ebed, who
is a kind of half-serf and half-servant, and the Canaanite
ebed, who is a pagan slave; but Moses is at the same
time said to be the ebed of Jahveh. In the Second Isaiah
ebed of Jahveh evidently means the Jewish people.
Jahveh is the sovereign, the supreme king, of the Jewish
people, and the expression, ebed of Jahveh, means simply
subject of Jahveh; the Jewish people is the subject of
Jahveh, as all peoples of the East are the subjects—that is
to say, the slaves—of their monarch. The subject of
Jahveh is the slave of Jahveh. The ebed Jahveh is the
sombre group of the men of Jerusalem who wander
about the temple, poor, downcast, and proud. The
Second Isaiah means that the Jewish people, the slave of
its king Jahveh, will become master of the world.

Even more precisely than the First, the Second Isaiah
predicts, to the audience which he fills with his halluci-
nation, the submission of the world to the Jews. He
admits no escape from the dilemma: to submit or perish.
It is a pacific ideal, on condition that the world comes to
its knees. And to his unhappy fellows, oppressed and
humbled a dozen times, the poet repeats mercilessly these
maddening promises:—

The sons of strangers shall build up thy walls, and their
kings shall minister unto thee..

The nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall
perish, yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted.

The glory of Lebanon shall come unto thee, the fir tree,
the pine tree, and the box together, to beautify the place
of my sanctuary; and I will make the place of my feet
glorious...
 THE SECOND ISAIAH

m

The sons of them that afflicted thee shall come bending
unto thee ; and all they that despised thee shall bow
themselves down at the soles of thy feet...

Thy people shall inherit the land for ever......I am

Jahveh, and I will hasten these things in their time.1

Indefatigable, the fierce tribune lashes his miserable
audience into fanaticism:—

And strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and the
sons of the alien shall be your plowmen and your vine-
dressers.

But ye shall be named the Priests of Jahveh; men
shall call you the servants of your god; ye shall eat the
riches of the nations, and in their glory shall ye boast
yourselves.

For your shame ye shall have double, and for confusion
ye shall rejoice in your portion.2

You ask how all that will come about ?

Behold, Jahveh will come with fire, and with his
chariots like a whirlwind ; he maketh a fire of his anger,
and of his threat a flame.

For Jahveh will render his judgment with fire; he will
smite all flesh with his sword; and the slain of Jahveh
shall be without number.3

In that day all the Jews, scattered in the humiliation of
the colonies amid the goim, will be brought back in
triumph to Zion. It is expressed in the figure of the
return from the Deportation; but the Second Isaiah is so
far from thinking of the Babylonian captivity that he
summons the exiles, not merely from the banks of the
Euphrates, but from the west and the south4—that is to
say, from Phoenicia and Egypt, and from the midst of all
nations.5 The imperialist promises are for the Jews of
the Dispersion just as much as for those of Judaea.

The world will be subject to the Jews, and the nations
will pay tribute.

They shall bring gold and incense........the ships of

Tarshish shall come with their silver and their gold.6

1 Isaiah lx. 10-22.   2 Isaiah lxi. 5-7.   3 Isaiah lxvi. 15-16.

4 Isaiah xliii. 5-6.   5 Isaiah lxvi. 20.   G Isaiah lx. 6-9.

O
 194 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPERIALIST REVIVAL

The Jews shall be masters of the earth.

The time is come to gather all nations and tongues,
that they may come, and see my glory.

And I will set a sign among you, and I will send those
that escape of you unto the nations, to Tarshish, Pul, and
Lud, that draw the bow, to Tubal, and Javan, to the isles
afar off, that have not heard my fame, neither have seen
my glory ; and they shall declare my glory among the
nations.

And they shall bring all your brethren, for an offering
unto Jahveh, out of all nations upon horses, and in
chariots, and in litters, and upon mules, and upon
dromedaries, to my holy mountain, to Jerusalem, saith
Jahveh.1

And the last touch is:—

They shall look upon the carcases of the men that have
rebelled against me; for their worm shall not die, neither
shall their fire be quenched, and they shall be an abhorring
unto all flesh.2

§ 4. The Internationalisation of the Prophetic Books.

The Age of the Prophets.

We now know the work of the writers whose voice was
to sound in the ears of humanity for so many ages, and
we see that all they did was to reconstitute, democratising
it, the Jewish nationalism, or imperialism, that had been
created before them by Esdras and the Mosaic books.

As we have said, we attack no religion, and we defend
none. The aim of the historian is to discover why and
how certain books arose, which afterwards became sacred
books. We have explained how the books of Moses,
which were national and nationalist works, became
international books; we have now to explain how the
books of the writers called prophets—democratic as well
as national and nationalist books—were internationalised
in their turn.

1   Isaiah lxvi. 18-20.

2 Isaiah lxvi. 24.
 NTERNATIONALISATION OF PROPHETIC BOOKS 195

Twenty-four centuries ago there arose, in one of the
smallest States of Western Asia, certain men, an outcome
of the most pressing need of the circumstances, who
preached to their contemporaries the cult of their country
and hatred of their aristocracy.

Internationalism has converted these men into:—

1.   The apostles of the conversion of the world to
monotheism ;

2.   The protagonists of justice.

History, however, shows that:—

1.   The Jewish prophets preached, not the conversion
of the world, but its conquest and submission;

2.   The Jewish prophets were the protagonists, not of
justice, but of the claims of their people and their political
party.

The work of the Jewish people, say the Jewish and
Christian orthodoxies, was to teach true religion to the
world.1 Recently Isidore Loeb, in a work published after
his death,1 2 and M. Maurice Yernes, in most of his later
works, have revived the theory of the “ proselytism of the
prophets.” According to them, the Jews dreamed, not of
conquest and submission, but of the conversion of foreign
nations.

The analysis of the prophecies of the two Isaiahs has
fully shown, and the analysis of the psalms and apocalypses
will constantly show, what kind of “ conversion ” there
was in the minds of the Jews.

In what did the “ conversion ” of foreign nations
consist ? First, to obey the Jews; secondly, to pay
tribute to them. One must not be deceived by the
religious form that the Jewish claims took. The Jewish
State is a State ruled by priests, in which the prophets
aspire to replace the old clerical aristocracy by a clerical
democracy. Though framed by the priests, the Jewish

1   See Munk, La Palestine, commencement of Book III.

2   La literature despauvres dans la Bible ; Paris, 1892.
 196 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPERIALIST REVIVAL

law is a national law; the taxes paid to the Jewish
clergy are taxes paid to the Jewish Government. A
purely religious law, in the sense that we give to the
expression—that is to say, a purely moral law—is an
impossible idea in Judaea. So monstrous an anachronism
robs Jewish history of its real features; the glory of the
Jewish people is that it, the lowest people of the East,
came to dream, like the Roman people, of material
conquest, of the political submission of the world.

The Romans sent legions and administrators to
conquer the world. The Jews relied on Jahveh and the
hosts of heaven, Jahveh Sebaot. Jewish “ proselytism ”
differs from Roman “proselytism” only in the choice of
means. On both sides the design is to conquer foreign
nations; and the same dilemma is proposed to the world
—submission (conversion, if one insists on the word) or
extermination. There is no ambiguity; the two Isaiahs
and, later, the psalms and apocalypses repeat it invariably;
if the nations be not “ converted,” they shall be exter-
minated.

In the period of the Isaiahs, as in the time of Deutero-
nomy, Jewish nationalism, surrounded by the most
formidable dangers, drew itself up ferociously to face
other peoples. In the latter case the horizon is limited,
in the former case it is broad; but in the third century
just as much as in the fourth the idea is to reduce
foreign nations, or to perish. Nothing is more human;
nothing is simpler. Internationalism, reading “ conver-
sion” where it finds “conquest,” puts a dogma in the
place of history.

That the prophets were the protagonists of justice in
the world is another error that we have exposed. Even
the most independent commentators of to-day praise the
prophets for having claimed justice; some for having
created justice. Did not James Darmesteter, in 1891,
propose to France and the world a return to the Jewish
prophets? History should expose this effect of inter-
 NTERNATIONALISATION OF PROPHETIC BOOKS 197

nationalisation, for the idea of justice was never more
cruelly denied than by the men of the Jerusalem
democracy.

In what does justice consist ?

In this: to render to every man what belongs to him.

Suum cuique.

Justice has been represented with scales in her hands.
She is devoid of passion, and disinterested; without
passion, that is to say, she obeys neither hatred, nor love,
nor anger, nor fear, nor vengeance, nor envy; dis-
interested, that is to say, the thought of his own
advantage never whispers in the ear of the judge.

Whence comes the sentiment of justice? From an
equal consciousness of rights and duties; of duties that
come of rights, and rights that impose duties.

A human, contingent thing, depending on place and
time, differing in different places, overturned by circum-
stances, speaking one language one side of the Pyrenees
and another language the other, justice has nothing but
the name in common with the metaphysical idol imagined
by certain philosophers, and especially worshipped since
the days of Kant. Justice, a quality of an essentially
practical order, a purely political virtue, an empirical and
relative fact, is a Roman conception ; the allegory of the
scales is Roman; suum cuique is a Roman device;
“ Justitia est constans ac perpetua voluntas jus suum
cuique tribuendi.”

The Romans found the sentiment of justice in the
consciousness of their rights and their duties. Masters
of the world (that is their right), they owe justice to the
world (that is their duty). The ideal Roman is the judge
without hatred and without love, without anger or fear,
without vengeance or envy. The ideal Roman, did we
say? More correctly, the ideal of the Roman. The
definition of justice remains, after two thousand years,
the definition of the word justitia.

The Romans arose to that height because they were a
 198 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPERIALIST REVIVAL

[Prometheus]

military people, and therefore subject to a hierarchy and
a discipline, and a political people, and therefore careful
to establish their domination on unshakable bases. The
Jews, a people of exalted fanatics, impassioned by unin-
terrupted humiliations, were eternally incapable of that
effort of serene moderation which justice implies.

The prophets are the spokesmen of a people and a
party; they demand every advantage for this people and
party. The idea of rendering to the goim what belongs
to the goim, or to the aristocrats what belongs to the
aristocrats, is at the very antipodes of the thought of the
prophets. Suiim cuique, say the Latins; everything for
us, say the prophets. Is there a single passage in which
the prophets do not demand the condemnation of their
opponents ?

Justice renders even to the enemy that to which he
has a right. The prophets are impassioned tribunes who
devote the goim and the aristocrats to extermination,
unless they come to their knees. As patriots and dema-
gogues they were true to their parts. But what common
measure is there between the demands of a people and a
party and the serene concession of his right to every man ?

The very idea did not enter their heads. The transla-
tions, which always have a pious bias, render as “ justice ”
a certain number of Hebrew words, not one of which has
that meaning.

Mishpat properly means judgment, sentence; when the
prophets invoke mishpat, they purely and simply call
upon their opponents the sentence of Jahveh—in other
words, chastisement.

Let judgment, says Amos, roll on like the waves of a
river, and justice flow like an unceasing torrent.1 He
means the judgment that will condemn our opponents—
the justice that will grant us all our claims.

Sadiq, the just, means the man who lives honestly or

1 Amos v. 24.
 NTERNATIONALISATION OE PROPHETIC BOOKS 199

piously; it has nothing in common with the meaning of
justus.

Mishar and nakohah, straightness, are much the same
as honesty and piety; here, again, there is nothing of
justitia.

The goim and the aristocrats who oppress and despoil
the Jewish people stand for the rich man oppressing and
despoiling the poor. The prophets who dream of exter-
minating or bringing to their knees the aristocrats and
the goim are the poor man oppressing and despoiling the
rich. Behind neither the one nor the other do I perceive
the august shade of justice.

It may be objected that justice is employed in protecting
the weak. But is it also employed in exterminating the
powerful, in making outlaws of those who dissent ?
Serenity, disinterestedness, gravity, the stifling of hatred,
the overcoming of anger, the abandonment of vengeance,
a generous concession of rights in correspondence with
duties—not one of these characters of justice is found in
the prophetic books. Everything in them is national and
democratic ; it is the glory and the inspiration of the
books.

At the root of the Jewish books is the eminently
nationalist idea of the choice of Israel. Jahveh, the
most unjust of gods, has chosen the Jewish people, not
on account of their merits, as the Bible says unceasingly,
but by his own free choice; he has chosen the Jewish
people, and rejected the others. Christian theology will
convert this iniquity into the dogma of predestination and
grace. The eminently democratic idea that the popular
party alone represents Israel is not less fundamental in
the prophets. Among the Jews the prophets separate the
men of their party from the men of the opposite party;
the choice of Israel becomes in the prophets the choice of
the democratic party of Jerusalem; Israel represents, in
the prophets, merely the Jews of the prophetic party.

We must not read it “justice”; we must read it
 200 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPERIALIST REVIVAL

“ claims ”—claims that are more or less authorised;
claims of a people, the Jewish people; of a party, the
democracy.

Internationalisation is, as we said, the art of appro-
priating words that had a concrete meaning in their time
and place, and investing these words with a general, and
purely moral, signification.

The history of ancient Judaism and primitive Chris-
tianity may be summed up thus : a national and nationalist
fact which becomes an international fact. The task of the
historian of Judaism is to detect the ancient national and
nationalist fact under the modern international fact. The
evolution of the Jewish people should be studied just as
coldly as the evolution of any other people of ancient
Asia.

On whatever side we look, we cannot find in the
prophets, any more than in the rest of the Bible, anything
else but national works, the outcome of the need of a
definite period. At the root of the prophetic books there
is the covenant agreed upon between Jahveh and Israel.
The obligation of Israel is that it be faithful to Jahveh;
the obligation of Jahveh is, on account of this fidelity, to
give the world to Israel.

But in what does this fidelity to Jahveh, which is
demanded of Israel, consist ?

If we are to believe the majority of commentators and
historians, Jahveh asks of Israel, before he will give it the
kingdom of the world, the practice of the whole of what
are called the Christian virtues.

Nothing of the kind. Jahveh merely demands that his
people shall form an absolute nationalism in opposition to
foreigners. The laws relating to the social order and
fraternal life are only promulgated from Jew to Jew, not
from Jew to foreigner. We have seen that the “ neigh-
bour ” of a Jew is another Jew; a pagan is not the neigh-
bour of a Jew. We have seen that the “ foreigner ” who
 NTERNATIONALISATION OF PROPHETIC BOOKS 201

is protected by law is the mercenary or the proselyte who
lives on Jewish soil under the law of Jahveh. The
Jewish law is only for the Jews and the Jndaisers.

Even when Jahveh becomes a universal god he is the
prototype of a national god; the Jewish law, even if it
become universal law (by conquest), will remain Jewish
law. An absolute nationalism—that is the gist of the
prophets; and it is the gist, too, of the psalms and
apocalypses.

A statistic will show this.

The covenant concluded between Jahveh and Israel is
set forth or recalled in about five hundred passages of the
prophetic books. About two hundred of these passages
do not give the conditions with any exactness; they
merely recall the covenant. But the conditions are stated
in about three hundred passages. We may distribute
these three hundred passages in groups.

In four cases out of ten the condition is that they shall
not worship foreign gods;

In one case out of ten, that they shall not represent
Jahveh in a material form;

In one case out of ten, that they shall not practise his
cult anywhere but in the temple at Jerusalem;

In a little less than one case in ten, that they shall
observe the Sabbath—a supreme commandment;

In a little more than one case in ten, that they shall
not kill or steal; these are precepts of ordinary law;
fornication and adultery are almost always, in the pro-
phets, symbolical expressions for the worship of foreign
gods;

Lastly, in two cases out of ten, it is enjoined that they
do not violate justice, despoil the weak, or oppress the
orphan, the widow, and the mercenary stranger residing
in Judaea and observing the Jewish law; but it is quite
understood that there is question only of justice due to
the Jew, of protection due to the Jewish or Judaising
weak, widow, or orphan,
 202 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPERIALIST REVIVAL

Hence, in only one case in ten is there question of the
rules of ordinary morality; these, moreover, either im-
plicitly or explicitly, apply only between Jew and Jew;
twice the covenant imposes a law of democratic equality
and protection of the lowly in Israel; in seven cases out
of ten it aims merely at concentrating Jewish nationalism
round Jahveh.

The same statistical procedure would yield analogous
results from the Mosaic books.

Seven-tenths of the prophetic prescriptions and three-
fourths of the Decalogue and the Mosaic law are devoted
to religious questions; this frightful preponderance of the
cult over civil, political, and moral law means simply that
the Jewish soul, in order to live and last, has concentrated
in a fanatical nationalism, and given to its country the
name of Jahveh, god of Israel.

The men of Jerusalem had not to formulate the
principles of a subjective religion for future ages; and
the historian, in removing from the Jewish writers the
false appearance of an impossible spirituality, instead of
lowering their grandeur really restores to them their native
truth.

What is there left when we have studied the develop-
ment of Jewish nationalism in the prophetic books and
the Mosaic law, pointed out the democratic tendency, and
noted certain principles of right and morals that are
common to all peoples ? Nothing.

Nothing, unless it be this:—

The malediction of politics; to make alliances and
organise armies is a mockery of Jahveh.

The malediction of luxury; luxury is an outrage on
Jahveh.

The malediction of commerce ; agriculture and pastoral
work alone are permitted to the children of Jahveh;
commerce is for the goim.

Reprobation of the joy of life and of pleasure; chastity
 NTERNATIONALISATION OE PROPHETIC BOOKS 203

is erected to the level of a virtue for the first time in
history; love becomes a shameful necessity, of which one
is ashamed.

And then the malediction of the great, the noble, and
the strong. Greatness, strength, and nobility are so many
outrages on Jahveh. Jahveh, it is said a hundred times,
has no deeper joy than in humbling the powerful, felling
the strong, and flouting the noble.

And then the irrevocable condemnation of all that is
intellectual, of art and science; never were the “intel-
lectuals ” so much hated as they were by Jewish nation-
alism.

There will be a day of Jahveh on every one that is
proud and every one that is lifted up;

And upon all the cedars of Lebanon, and upon all the
oaks of Bashan ;

And upon all the high mountains, and upon all the hills
that are lifted up ;

And upon every high tower, and upon every fenced
wall;

And upon all the ships of Tarshish, and upon all that
charms the eye.1

There will be a day of Jahveh upon all that charms
the eye ! Jahveh, the national god, was the sublime
creation that gives rise to an imperialism that would
conquer the world. What an admirable reward the god
has given to the people who invented him ! But this
god, who in ancient times bore, among other names, the
name of Moloch, remains the terrible god to whom
children are sacrificed. If he has given the world as a
reward to his people, he has exacted in return the first
born of the human sentiments.

Such is the meaning of the covenant, the basis of
Judaism.

It is a commonplace to say that the legendary books
and the prophetic books are resplendent with literary
beauty. If Genesis, and the romances of the two Isaiahs,

1 Isaiah ii. 12-16,
 204 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPERIALIST REVIVAL

Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, had not been full of pages that
attract our admiration even in an irreligious age, they
would never have accomplished the work that they have
done. They would have put no enthusiasm into the
men of Judaea; they would not have overthrown the
pagan world; they would not agitate souls to-day. We
find in them nothing of the perfectly harmonious beauty
which Greece created; what we find are strong souls, that
see strongly, and, to express their vision, use strong words.

Jerusalem has, by a piece of fortune that I had almost
called miraculous, given birth to a moral dynasty of men
of genius, men of iron, men of dreams, men of fire, who
have made it live for ages—in scecula sceculorum, as the
pride of triumphant Judaism will afterwards sing. But
men of genius are not merely the summary of a period
or a tradition; the sight of the things around them
awakes in them an understanding, a divination, an idea,
that it does not awaken in the men about them. They
flare up, like torches, in the sombre night. A great
shadow, undefined, mortally vague, spreads on every side;
and suddenly the lightning comes, and they appear, they
blaze, they are lighthouses, they are the star over a sea
where all was chaos, and which becomes in their light a
broad road towards the future.

The anonymous writers who, in idealising the figure of
the ancient dervishes of Palestine, created the characters
of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah, to meet the most
pressing needs of their country and their time, stand out
in the history of the world. And the century, the third
century, which witnessed their appearance, should be
known as the century of the prophets.

Two hundred years earlier there had been, across the
sea, a prodigious outpouring of disinterested splendour.
The Greek genius gave birth to art and science. The
brains of men learned at Athens to be in harmony, and
humanity may develop on the education created by the
age of Pericles.
 NTERNATIONALISATION OF PROPHETIC BOOKS 205

Later there will be the age of Augustus, and its
successor, the age of the Antonines. It will be the
Roman epoch. And humanity will learn from Rome
law, the art of living in society, of commanding and
obeying, of being peoples.

The moment when humanity will awake at the light
of Greek culture, after a thousand years of stumbling in
the dark, will be the age of Leo X.; it will assuredly be
the Renascence, for the world will be born again to
thought and to joy.

[Prometheus]

But there was an age when certain men, in the
wildest corner of the universe, founded, in poems, dis-
courses, and frightful imprecations, something new,
something unknown to either Greek or Roman civilisa-
tion, something that will in turn be called Judaism, then
Christianity, then, in a general word, Religion, and that
will, in the days when evolution reaches its limit, become
Socialism. Whether we bless or curse that age, let us
recognise its greatness; it is the age of the prophets.

Judaism may now spread throughout the world. We
have seen it radiate from Jerusalem across Judaea, then
through the whole of Palestine; from there it has
infiltrated into cognate and neighbouring lands, Moab,
Edom, Ammon, and Syria; then colonies have gone out
and settled in Asia Minor: in Egypt, in the islands of the
Mediterranean, even on Greek soil. The Jews take with
them everywhere the words of their prophets, consoling
them in their weakness, their humiliations, promising
them the victory in an assured time. They can bear
distress and oppression, mockery and insults; they have
with them this viaticum of enduring hopes and intimate
certainties that Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the two Isaiahs
have given them. The survival of Judaism amid so
many causes of ruin could not be explained without the
work of these writers of genius.

In the west, meantime, the power of Rome is growing;
Carthage, its great enemy, is vanquished. Presently
 206 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPERIALIST REVIVAL

Greece will become a Roman province; for the moment she
wears herself out in intestine war. Her political agony
will not, indeed, lessen her intellectual domination;
intellectual Greece will triumph, in proportion as the
policy of Rome triumphs. The third century is the
time of the great philosophic schools that take their rise
in Plato, Aristotle, and the time of the first Scipios. But
amid these mountains of Judaea, of which the scholars of
Greece and the Senate of Rome hardly know the name,
there are men who have prepared the revolution that will
one day destroy the Graeco-Roman world.
 PART THIRD

THE APOCALYPSES

Chapter I.

HYMNS IN THE SYNAGOGUES

The prophecies of the Second Isaiah date from about the
year 200; the apocalypse of Daniel from about the year
164. The Second Isaiah closes the century of the
prophets; Daniel inaugurates the era of the apocalypses.
There is no breach of continuity between them. The
apocalypse follows the prophets logically no less than
historically. The last of the minor prophets, especially
Zechariah, the most significant of them, are witnesses of
the filiation. Before passing from one period to the other,
from the prophets to the apocalypses, we must consider
the psalms. A vast collection of short national poems,
beginning in the third century and continuing during
half of the second, the psalms will enable us to
characterise the state of soul of the Jewish people at the
time when, the voices of the prophets having ceased, the
apocalypses appear.

Beuss, the great Biblical scholar, has called the psalms
the hymn-book of the Synagogue.

In point of fact, the synagogue had arisen, and was
developing in Judaea and in the Jewish colonies. Judaism
had only one temple, that of Jerusalem; so the Mosaic
law had enjoined. But the one temple that had sufficed
during the fifth and fourth centuries, when the Jewish
State comprised only Jerusalem and its outskirts, and
even sufficed when Judaism had spread about Jerusalem

207
 208

HYMNS IN THE SYNAGOGUES

over the territory of Palestine, could not suffice now that
Israel had settlements in the whole of Palestine, in Syria,
Egypt, Asia Minor, the islands, and in Greece itself. On
the other hand, it was impossible to infringe the pri-
mordial law of Judaism; and the sacerdotal aristocracy
at Jerusalem would not have tolerated rivals.

The Jerusalem temple remained the one temple of
Jahveh. There only could holocausts be offered to him;
there only did the series of official rites proceed. Offerings
and tithes continued to flow to the Jerusalem temple;
and, from all the Jewries of the world, it was to that alone
that the pilgrimages brought the tribute of the piety of
the faithful. The Jerusalem temple remained the centre
of the Jewish fatherland. But there arose houses of
prayer, preaching, and patriotic gatherings; even in
Jerusalem there were, round the temple, pious shelters
for the pilgrims of various nationalities; and these were
called synagogues.

No cult was practised in the synagogues; no sacrifices
were offered in them; they were meeting-places. There
one listened to the reading of the Law and, later, of the
prophets; men were strengthened in the love of their
country ; and, with the reading of the national books,
the commentaries, and the exhortations of those who
speak, they loved to sing in common, in long-drawn
sombre melody, hymns in which their souls found
expression.

The psalms were the hymns they sang in the
synagogues.

Who composed these hymns ?

The old ecclesiastical exegesis did. not hesitate to
declare that the psalms were the work written in the
tenth century by the pious King David and other
venerable characters of antiquity. We cannot take a
single step in Jewish literature without finding pseude-
pigraphy. The psalms were composed by the poets of
the third and second centuries. The form, which is
 HYMNS IN THE SYNAGOGUES

209

suggested by various passages in the prophets, was
probably borrowed from ancient Babylonian poetry;
here again, however, the Jews, in appropriating a foreign
thing, succeeded in making it eminently Jewish.

Just as the authors of the prophetic books had sought
in ancient Israelitic history the situations in relation to
which they had created the discourses they wished to
address to their contemporaries, so the authors of the
psalms took their situations from ancient history,
especially from the legends of King David; and, by a
similar artifice, they represented the songs which they
would have sung to their contemporaries to be the
antique work of certain heroes of their national history.
Most of the psalms thus composed remained discon-
nected and independent of each other, and formed the
collection known as the book of psalms; others, how-
ever, were inserted in the historical books, and even in
the prophetical books, purporting to be lyrical fragments
uttered on special occasions by Moses or his sister Mary,
by David, or by Hezekiah.

As an outcome of the misfortunes of the end of the
third and beginning of the second centuries, the hymns
of the synagogue have a certain prayer as their constant
refrain:—

“ Jahveh, save us from our enemies; avenge us on our
enemies ; annihilate our enemies.”

The celebrated psalm cxxxvii., Super jiumina Baby-
toms, must be quoted in full:—

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we
wept, when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows of the land.

For there they that carried us away captive required of
us a song ; and they that wasted us required of us mirth,
saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How should we sing the songs of Jahveh in a strange
land?

If I forget thee, Jerusalem, let my right hand forget
her cunning.

If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the

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root of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my
chief joy.

Remember, Jahveh, the children of Edom, who said, in
the day of Jerusalem: Rase it, rase it, even the founda-
tion thereof.

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed, happy
shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.

Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little
ones against the stones.

Psalm xxi. 8-10 :—

Thine hand shall find out all thine enemies ; thy right
hand shall find out those that hate thee.

Thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of
thine anger; Jahveh, thy wrath shall swallow them up,
and the fire shall devour them.

Their fruit shalt thou destroy from the earth, and their
seed from among the children of men.

Psalm xxxv. 26 :—

Let them be clothed with shame and dishonour.

Psalm lv. 15 and 23 :—

Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick
into the home of the dead.

But thou, 0 god, shalt bring them down into the bottom
of the pit, and they shall not live out half their days.

Psalm lviii. 6-10 :—

Break their teeth, O god, in their mouth; break the
jaw of the young lions, 0 Jahveh.

Let them melt away as waters which run continually ;
let the arrows they put to the bow be as if broken.

As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass
away; let them be like the untimely birth of a woman,
which hath not seen the sun.

Before your pots can feel the thorns, let the whirlwind
take them away, both green and aflame.

Let me rejoice in seeing my vengeance; let me bathe
my feet in their blood.

Psalm lxviii. 23 :—

Let the tongue of thy dogs have its share of the enemy,
saith Jahveh.

Psalm lxxix. 6, 10, and 12:—

Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have known
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211

not thee, and upon the kingdoms that have not called
upon thy name.

Let it be known among the heathen in our sight that
there is vengeance for the blood which is shed.

Render unto our neighbours sevenfold into their bosom
their reproach.

Psalm lxxxiii. 9-17 :—

Do unto them as unto the Midianites, as to Sisera, as
to Jabin, at the brook of Kison ;

Which perisheth at Endor, and were as dung for the
earth.

Make their nobles like Oreb, and like Zeeb, and their
kings as Zebah, and as Zalmunna;

My god, make them like a whirlwind, as the stubble
before the wind, as the fire that burneth the forest, and
as the flame that setteth the mountains on fire.

So persecute them with thy tempest, and make them
afraid with thy storm.

Fill their faces with shame, and they will seek thy
name, O Jahveh.

Let them be confounded and troubled for ever; yea,
let them be put to shame and perish.

Psalm xciv. 1-3 :—

God of vengeance, Jahveh, god of vengeance, show
thyself.

Lift up thyself, thou Judge of the earth ; render them
their reward.

How long shall they be glad ?

At times the Jew of the psalms boasts of loving his

enemies......We find, again, in psalm cix. 6-15, how he

loves them:—

Set thou a wicked man over him ; and let Satan stand
at his right hand.

When he shall be judged, let him be condemned; and
let his prayer become sin.

Let his days be few; and let another take his office.

Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.

Let his children be vagabonds, and beg; let them seek
their bread far from their ruined homes.

Let the extortioner cast his net on all that he hath,
and let the strangers spoil the fruit of his labour.

Let there be none to extend mercy unto him, neither
let there be any to favour his fatherless children.
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Let his posterity be cut off; and in another age let
their name be blotted out.

Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with
Jahveh, and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.

Let them be before Jahveh continually, and let him
cut off the memory of them from the earth.

And later, 18-19 :—

He clothes himself with cursing like as with his
garment, and it comes like water into his bowels, and
like oil into his bones.

Let it be unto him as the garment which covereth him,
and for a girdle wherewith he is girded continually.

And, by way of conclusion, 21:—

And do thou, for me, lord Jahveh, for thy name’s sake,
because thy mercy is great.

Psalm cxxxix. contains the avowal (22) without
disguise:—

I hate them with perfect hatred.

Who are these enemies on whom the vengeance of
Jahveh is called ?

They are the “ wicked that is to say, for the tradi-
tionalist Jews, foreigners and Hellenising Jews.

The “ wicked ” are, first, foreigners, the men who, both
in Judsea and the Jewish colonies, “oppress the Jewish
people,”1 “ the nations that have not known thee, the
kingdoms that have not called upon thy name,”2 “the
neighbours who have outraged Jahveh,”3 those “ who
have burned up the synagogues of god,”4 those “ who
have sought to cut them off from being a nation, that the
name of Israel may be no more in remembrance,”5 “all
nations that compassed it about,”6 etc.

The “wicked” are also the Hellenising Jews, the
aristocrats who live in opulence, the proud priests who
exploit the poor, “those who glorify themselves,”7 who
“are inclosed in their own fat,”8 who “render not

1 All the psalms, passim.   2 Psalms Ixxix. 6.

3 Psalms Ixxix. 12, and passim.   * Psalms Ixxiv. S.

5 Psalms lxxxiii. 4.   6 Psalms cxviii. 10.

7 Psalms lxxiii. 8.   8 Psalms xvii. 10.
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213

justice,” 1 who are “ powerful they are, nevertheless,
the “ brothers ” of the poor, “ sons of the same mother,” 2
and—it is said quite literally—“ the princes of the Jewish
people.” 3

While the enemies of the traditionalist Jews are called
the “ wicked,” the traditionalist Jews are called the “ just ”
(sadiq), the “pious” (hasid), the “holy” (qadosh), the
“ poor ” (cini), the “ humble ” (anav), the “ needy ” (ebion).

The procedure is elementary. Everything of the tradi-
tionalist Jew is good; all that is hostile to him is wicked.
Good, wicked; just, unjust; holy, perverse—the use of
the words is absolute.

The traditionalist Jews, the puritans, the men of the
people, have all the virtues that are gathered up in the
words “holiness” and “humility.” The others, on the
contrary, their enemies, are “violent,” “sanguinary,”
“ pitiless,” “ persecutors,” “ tyrannical,” “ thieves,”
“exploiters,” “impudent,” “insolent,” “their mouths
full of insults,” “proud,” “braggarts,” “liars,” “calum-
niators”; they have “vipers’ tongues”; they are “ knavish,”
“ treacherous,” “ doing evil for its own sake,” “ impious,”
“blasphemers,” “hardened sinners”; they are—it is the
great crime—“ rich,” “ contented,” “ happy,” “ tranquil,”
and, to crown the whole, “ senseless.”

At the root of the psalms, as of all the Judaic books,
is the celebrated covenant agreed upon by Jahveh and
Israel. Jahveh has promised victory to Israel, Israel
claims from Jahveh the fulfilment of his promise.

“If thou art powerful, Jahveh, show it.......Since thou

hast made us promises, Jahveh, keep them...........If thou

wouldst be honoured, protect us, Jahveh.”

Frequently the Jew of the psalms admits that he has
“ sinned ”; frequently he denies it. He has not offended
Jahveh ; it was his fathers who offended.

Sometimes the argument is mixed with quibbling.

1 Psalms, every page.   2 Psalms 1. 20 and Ixix. 8.

3 Psalms cxiii. 8.
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In psalm lxxxix. (30-37) the following reasoning is put
to Jahveh:—

“Thou hast promised us thy alliance. If we offend
thee, by not fulfilling thy law, chastise us. But that does
not justify thee in not fulfilling thy promise. Strike, but
pay.”

The payment is, for the Jew of the psalms, the “ enjoy-
ment of his inheritance.” 1 Palestine was the inheritance
promised by Jahveh to his people in the days of Deutero-
nomy ; now, ever since the two Isaiahs, it embraces the
whole world.

I will give thee the nations for thine inheritance, and
the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.

Thou shalt break them with a sceptre of iron; thou
shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.2

He shall send the rod of my strength out of Zion, and I
shall rule in the midst of mine enemies.8

The lord shall crush kings ; he shall fill the nations with
dead bodies; he shall crush the heads of the earth.4

They will bind their kings with chains, and their
ministers with fetters of iron.5

The nations that have not been destroyed will be
subject, and will pay tribute. The dilemma proposed to
the goim by the two Isaiahs is still there—to submit or
perish.

Jahveh will make us princes in all the earth.6

Jahveh will bring the nations under our feet.7

Kings shall bring presents unto thee; they will come to
cast themselves at thy feet with pieces of silver.8

They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him;
and his enemies shall lick the dust.

The kings of Tarshish and the isles shall bring presents;
the kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts.

Yea, all kings shall fall down before him; all nations
shall serve him.9

The miserable Jews scattered among the foreign
peoples will return in triumph to Judaea.

1 Psalms xvi. 5-6.   2 Psalms ii. 8-9.   3 Psalms cx. 1-2.

4 Psalms cx. 5-6.   6 Psalms cxlix. 8.   6 Psalms xlv. 16.

7 Psalms xlvii. 3.   8 Psalms Ixviii. 29-30.   9 Psalms lxxii. 9-11.
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215

Jahveh will redeem the exiles, and gather them out of
all lands, from the east and from the west, from the
north and from the south.1

Then there shall reign over the world a king descended
from David, who “ will have dominion from sea to sea,
and from the Euphrates to the ends of the earth.”..2 It
will be a kingdom in which the face of Jahveh shall
shine; in which there will be a “fullness of joy and
pleasures for evermore”;8 in which the Jew will be
“glorified and satisfied with days”;4 and “ so heaped up
with good things in his age that his youth will be
renewed like the eagle’s.”8

Such is the dream. Here is the reality:—

Have mercy upon me, Jahveh, for I am weak ; heal
me, Jahveh, for my bones are vexed.6

I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I
my bed to swim ; I water my couch with my tears.7

Consider my trouble which I suffer of them that hate
me.8

Hear the humiliation of the afflicted, the cry of anguish
of the poor.9

I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men and
despised of the people. They that see me laugh me to
scorn.10

Have mercy upon me, Jahveh, for I am in trouble;
mine eye is consumed with grief, yea, my soul and my
belly.

My life is spent with grief, and my years with sighing;
my strength faileth, and my bones are consumed.

I am a reproach, even among my neighbours; I am a
great reproach and a fear to mine acquaintance; they
that see me without flee from me.

I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind; I am like
a broken vessel.11

Elsewhere:—

My wounds stink and are corrupt....

I go mourning all day long.

1 Psalms cvii. 2-8, and
3 Psalms xvi. 11.

6 Psalvis vi. 2.

9 Psalms xii. 5.

many other places.

4 Psalms xci. 16.

7 Psalms vi. 6.

10 Psalms xxii. 6-7.

2 Psalms Ixxii. 8.

6 Psalms ciii. 5.

8 Psalms ix. 13.

11 Psalms xxxi. 9-12.
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My loins are filled with inflammation, and there is no
soundness in my flesh.

I am feeble and sore broken; I roar by reason of the
disquietness of my heart.1

Psalm xlii. begins with a famous lyric movement:—

As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth
my soul after thee, 0 god...

But if the soul of the psalmist pants after his god, it
is because he is oppressed by his neighbours, and awaits
vengeance of his god. I quote :—

Mine enemies reproach me and break my bones........0

my soul, hope thou in god........may my god be my

salvation.2

Let us continue :—

We are like sheep appointed for meat....

A reproach to our neighbours, a scorn and derision to
them that are round about us.

We are a byword among the nations.......

My confusion is continually before me, and the shame
of my face covereth me.8

Tacitus and Juvenal will, at a later date, speak of the
Jew just as he speaks of himself:—

Be merciful unto me, O god; for man would swallow
me up; he fighting daily oppresseth me.4

Save me, 0 god; for the waters are come in unto my
soul, and I sink in deep mire.5

When I take as a garment the garment of affliction, I
become a mockery to them.

They that sit in the gate speak of me, and I am the
song of the drunkards.6

Deliver me out of the mire.7

Thou knowest my reproach, and my shame, and my
dishonour.

Reproach breaketh my heart, and I am full of heaviness ;
and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none.8

And the psalmist adds :—

1 Psahns xxxviii. 5-8.   3 Psalms xlii. 10-11.   8 Psalms xliv. 11-15.

4 Psalms Ivi. 1.   5 Psahns lxix. 1-2.   6 Psahns lxix. 11-12.

7 Psahns lxix. 14.   8 Psahns lxix. 19-20.
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217

Mine enemies gave me gall for my meat, and in my
thirst they gave me vinegar.1

One can thus understand the cry of these men, when
they turn upon their enemies:—

Let their table become a snare before them, and trap in
the midst of their welfare.

Let their eyes be darkened that they see not; and make
their loins to shake.

Pour out thine indignation upon them, and let thy
wrathful anger take hold of them.

Let their habitation be desolate, and let none dwell in
their tents...

Add iniquity unto their iniquity, and let them not come
into thy justice.

Let them be blotted out of the book of the living, and
not be written in it with the just.2

The just man always means the Jew; the wicked, the
enemy of the Jew. And the just man, the Jew, is now
the humiliated:—

We are a reproach to our neighbours, a scorn and
derision to them that are round about us.3

My bones cleave to my skin.

I am like a pelican of the wilderness; I am like an owl
in the ruins.

I have lost sleep, and am as a sparrow alone upon the
house top.

Mine enemies reproach me all the day......

I eat ashes like bread, and mingle my drink with tears.4

I am gone like the shadow when it lengtheneth; I am
tossed up and down as the locust.5

I am small and despised.6

We are exceedingly filled with contempt; our soul is
exceedingly filled with mockery.7

Jahveh, attend unto my cry; for I am brought very
low; deliver me from my persecutors, for they are
stronger than I.8

We dwell in darkness, as those that have been long
dead.

Therefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me; my
heart within me   is desolate.9

1 Psalms lxix. 21.   2 Psalms lxix. 22-28.   3   Psalms Ixxix. 4.

4 Psalms cii. 5-10.   5 Psalms cix. 28.   6   Psalms cxix. 141.

7 Psalms cxxiii. 3.   8 Psalms cxlii. 6.   9   Psalms cxliii.   3-4.
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But the counterpart of the humility of the Jew is the
omnipotence of his god.

Jahveh, the little local god worshipped by David, the
national god created by the patriotic spirit of the early
priests of Jerusalem, the saviour who has brought Judah
back from exile and raised up again the walls of the city,
the protector of the ardent Jewish congregation, has
gradually become the unique strength of these wretched
men; and his praise flows unceasingly through the
psalms. Jahveh alone can award the victory to his
people. All power belongs to Jahveh. Not only can the
enemies of the Jews do nothing against Jahveh ; not only
can the Jews themselves do nothing against Jahveh; but
all that the Jews do, or can do, does not count, and is
nothing.

I trust not in my bow, neither shall my sword save me ;
it is thou alone that dost save us from our enemies.1

Except Jahveh build the house, they labour in vain that
build it; except Jahveh keep the city, the watchman
watcheth in vain.

In vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late; Jahveh
giveth just the same to his beloved during sleep.2

Never were perseverance and tenacity pushed so far;
but never, at the same time, was contempt of personal
action, of virile energy, human liberation, and bold front
proclaimed so ferociously. In the prophets the Jewish
soul had not pushed to the extreme the idea that Jahveh
alone can do things. Jahveh was the great figure that
dominated the history of Israel; but, if it were only in its
rebellions and blasphemies, Israel still existed beside
Jahveh. The struggle was still on between Jacob and
the god. Now the full consequences of the Judaic spirit
appear. The covenant produces its effects.

Jahveh is strong in direct proportion to the weakness
of his people; powerful in proportion to its humiliation.

1 Psalms xliv. 6.

2 Psalms cxxvii. 1-2.
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219

The lowliest of people needed, if it were to live and
triumph, the most powerful of gods.

What is to be done by such feeble men in the hands of
so strong a god ?

Give themselves to him, entirely and unreservedly.

Expect everything from him.

Expect nothing of themselves.

Expect no result of their efforts.

Yield like the leaf that is borne in the wind, the stick
that drifts on the stream, the stone that is flung from the
sling.

And, simply, observe the commandments.

The Jew has made a covenant with his god. Each
must give something. The Jew has promised his god
that he will observe his law; he looks to him for
everything.

All they that see me, laugh me to scorn; they shoot out
the lip, they shake the head.

He trusteth to Jahveh, they say; let him bring him
forth, let him deliver him, seeing he delights in him.

Thou art he that took me out of the womb ; that made
me rest in safety when I was upon my mother’s breasts;
I was cast upon thee from the womb ; thou art my god
from my mother’s belly.

Be not far from me, when trouble is near, when there
is none to help...

Be thou not far from me, Jahveh ; 0 my strength, haste
thee to deliver me from the sword...

And I will tell thy glory everywhere; I will celebrate
thee; I will glorify thee; I will pay my vows before thee.1

“ Heaven helps those who help themselves ” is a pagan,
not a Jewish, precept. It means, first, that you must
help yourself, make an effort, be active, will; you must
be the wind, not the leaf—the current, not the stick—the
sling, not the stone. Heaven will then help you; but it
matters little, because by your own effort you have
deserved to be helped.

Israel, on the contrary, expects its salvation and victory

1 Psalms xxii. 7-25.
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HYMNS IN THE SYNAGOGUES

from Jahveh. He waits in a ferocious and invincible
obstinacy, but he waits in prayer. And the weaker he
makes himself, the more he will rely on the favour of
Jahveh; and the more he relies on Jahveh, the weaker
and more lowly he will become.

Thus is faith defined, in religious language. The Jews
had a glowing faith, for they believed simply in their god.
They had also the virtue of love; that is to say, by the
very fact of their concentration they had the love of one’s
nation which engenders hatred of the rest of the human
race, odium generis humani, as Tacitus will say. They
had also hope, besides faith and hatred—the hope that
their god will give them what they desire. Thus they
created the trinity of the three theological virtues: Faith,
Hope, and Hatred.

Such is the hymn-book in which the Jews sang their
ideal at the beginning of the second century. Some of
the psalms are earlier, and date from the time of the later
prophets; some are later, and seem to have been written
during the guerilla warfare of the Machabees. But they
have a great future. Composed by the lowliest among
the sons of this lowly people, they will become more and
more a national book, in proportion as the Jewish nation
becomes humbler—until the day when the book of faith,
hope, and hatred of the oppressed Jews becomes the book
of faith, hope, and hatred of all the oppressed in the
world.

To make it the book of pious souls in modern times
one has only to forget its historical origin. Let the
terminology be taken literally; let it be unknown that
the “ just ” of the psalms are the Jews of the popular
traditionalist party, and the “ wicked ” are the Jews of
the Hellenising party and the goim; let the “just” stand
for believers, and the “wicked” stand for unbelievers;
and this book that has arisen, at the beginning of the
second century, out of the struggle of the two political
parties that divided Jerusalem, will have experienced the
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221

lot of the other Jewish books—it will be internationalised.

The psalms were the hymns sung in the Jewries already
scattered over the Oriental world by the lowly and poor
who were obsessed with the thirst for vengeance, and
who, too weak to rise in revolt, began to expect from their
god alone the fulfilment of their sanguinary dream. They
were born in the lower depths of a people oppressed by
its aristocrats, who found comfort in their wealth, as
well as by the pagan peoples who environed them with
their power and their disdain. The prophets had
anathematised those of the Jews who were abandoning
the national traditions for Hellenic novelties. The psalms
are the book of the traditionalist Jews; but the tradition-
alist Jews are now the humble, the poor, the wretched,
the men who thirsted for vengeance. They call them-
selves the “ meek and it means that they accept their
reproach, and count, not on their own arms, but on their
god, to avenge them. The tenacious and obstinate main-
tenance of their confidence will ensure its success. It is
the monstrous imperialism of these eternally vanquished,
who cease not to dream of universal dominion.

The religious sentiment of modern nations has not
been deceived. It sufficed to moderate certain expressions
that were too obviously abominable for pious souls to find
in the psalms, from St. Paul to Luther and on to our
own time, the hymn of humiliation that knows no refuge
but in the supernatural.

We have, in fact, reached the time when the pheno-
menon of religious faith is born in the history of the
world. Through exaggerating its powerlessness, Jewish
imperialism has come to the despairing surrender of itself
into the hands of the supernatural. And that is, in the
last analysis, the definition of religious faith.

When a man, a people, a world, has known the greatest
pride, the vastest ambition, and the wildest hopes, and
some pitiless reality persistently mocks the pride, un-
ceasingly thwarts the ambition, and indefinitely rebukes
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HYMNS IN THE SYNAGOGUES

the hope, this man, people, or world can do no more, if it
has the strength not to surrender, if it persists in willing,
if it abandons nothing of its soul, than rely on and await
the supernatural occurrence that will realise its hopes,
crown its ambitions, in spite of a coalition of the universe,
and, breaking the power of the enemy at one stroke, bring
its pride to triumph.

Religious faith is the soul of man expecting nothing
save by the action of a god. It is based on two facts :
the powerlessness of man, the all-powerfulness of god.
Faith is the reliance of man’s powerlessness on the divine
omnipotence.

The Greek and Roman religions were cults; but,
properly speaking, they never knew this element of
religious feeling. Never did Greeks or Romans, however
superstitious they may have been, yield themselves to the
supernatural. To create religious faith there was needed,
on the one hand, the immeasurable persistence of the
Jewish soul, and, on the other, the extraordinary series of
situations that kept it in ceaseless oppression. Religious
faith is the creation of Judaism.
 Chapter II.

THE FIRST APOCALYPSES

It would be useless to seek in the strong serenity of
Greek and Latin literatures anything that recalls the
prophets, the psalms, and especially the apocalypses.

In the Graeco-Roman world nature rules. There is
no supernatural, because there is only nature symbolised
in human forms. From the earliest beginning the gods
of Homer are heroes, and his heroes are gods. Energies
unfold amid the harmonious development of myths; they
bear the names of deities, just as to-day they bear
scientific names; but they are never more than natural
energies. While the orientals kneel before a god who is
outside nature, a god who rules them as a sultan rules
his enslaved people, the pre-Socratic philosophers study
the secret of the physical laws by which the cosmos is
organised. Socrates discovers the human soul. The
metaphysic that Plato builds up is the masterpiece of
dialectics. Aristotle lays the foundation of all the
sciences, and writes, four centuries before the present
era, two thousand three hundred years ago:—

“All that occurs proceeds from one principle to
another.” 1

Seneca, heir of the Greek scholars, will say later :—
“What is destiny? The necessity of all things and
all actions (necessitatem rerum omnium actionumque).”2
The Greek tragic poets had known nothing finer in the
thoughts of the people than the spectacle of heroic souls
struggling against the fatality of the eternal future.

1   On the Parts of Animals, 1. 1-13.

2   Qucestiones naturales, ii. 36.

223
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THE FIRST APOCALYPSES

Rome appears. She brings into the world the highest
type of humanity, strength, and self-possession, “homo
moderatus et gravis”—man master of himself and the
universe. To contemplate the world, to detect its rhythm,
to love life, to rejoice in the sun, to cultivate pleasure, to
turn to neither of those excesses which men call debauch
and asceticism, fear or rashness, and that lessen oneself,
to be a strong and calm soul, to gather the fruit that the
earth offers you—that was the wisdom of Greece and the
virtue of Rome.

To expect of an omnipotent god the fulfilment of their
exaggerated dreams—that was Jewish piety; and that
we find praised in the prophets and the psalms. When
these dreams had reached the stage of paroxysm, when,
after waiting several centuries, their patience and anger
were exhausted, the apocalypse appeared. That the Jew
might still live on, it said to him :—

“ Know in what wise thy god will ensure thy triumph
to-morrow.”

The apocalypse is a revelation; but it is a different
revelation from those that abound in the prophets and
psalms. The prophets and the psalms had said to the
Jews:—

“ Jahveh has promised you revenge and victory: count
on revenge and victory.”

The apocalypse says :—

“ The event will happen in so many days, in such and
such a way.”

After the death of Simeon the Just the hostility
between the popular traditionalist party and the Hellenis-
ing aristocracy had increased constantly at Jerusalem.
The episodes of the struggle are not found in history
until the time when it degenerates into civil war—that
is to say, a little after the year 175, the date of the
accession of Antiochus Epiphanes in Syria. This civil
war is called by modern histories—Israelite, Protestant,
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225

or Catholic—the “ persecution ” of Antiochus Epiphanes,
and the “ war of independence ” of the Machabees. Our
authorities, the historian Flavius Josephus (“ Jewish
Antiquities ” and “ The Jewish War ”) and the first two
Books of the Machabees (especially the second) do not
agree in their account of the events; they agree, how-
ever, in representing the Hellenising party as appealing
to King Antiochus to crush the traditionalist party.

A certain Onias (or Menelaus), whether or no he was
brother to the high-priest Jesus (or Jason), takes the lead
of the Hellenising party; it must be noted that at this
time the Jews have two names, a Jewish and a Greek
name. Menelaus is beaten. He then goes, “with the
chief men of his party, to King Antiochus, and begs him
to enter Judaea.”1

The first Book of the Machabees is not less explicit.
“In those days,” it says, “there went out of Israel
children of iniquity who counselled thus: Let us go and

make alliance with the nations........Then some of the

people went and sought the King Antiochus.”2

Antiochus easily made himself master of Jerusalem,
“ because the faction of Menelaus opened the gates to
him”;3 he killed several of the opposite party, and, of
course, profited by the opportunity to sack the town.

Now masters of Jerusalem, the partisans of Menelaus
give free rein to their Hellenistic tendencies. They had
told Antiochus, says Josephus, “ that they had determined
to embrace his religion and the Greek way of living, and
they asked him to let them build a gymnasium in Jeru-
salem. He allowed them. Then they took from them-
selves the marks of circumcision, so that they could not
be distinguished from the Greeks, even when they ran
and wrestled naked; and, thus forsaking the laws of their
fathers, they differed in nothing from foreigners.” 4

1 The Jewish War, i. 1.   2 1 Machabees, i. 12-14.

3 Jewish Antiquities, xii. 7.   4 Jewish Antiquities, xii. 6.

Q

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THE FIRST APOCALYPSES

It would be impossible to carry Hellenising further.

The trouble continued. The orthodox Jews saw with
horror the triumph of Greek ways, and the gymnasium
was not the smallest source of scandal to them. The two
parties came to blows, and there were battles on the
streets of Jerusalem.

After two years the Hellenising party, gravely threatened
by the popular party, again summoned the king of Syria
to help them. He had just been stopped in the midst of
an expedition against Egypt by the Roman legate Popilius;
the famous anecdote of the circle of Popilius will be
remembered. Did Antiochus wish to vent his impotent
anger on Jerusalem, as has been said? It is possible.
But he certainly wanted to restore peace in a town in
which there were disturbances daily, by exterminating
the anti-Hellenising Jews and abolishing Judaism; and
he was invited by the Hellenising Jews.

The moderate Hellenising Jews wanted only a certain
modification of the rigours of the Mosaic law; they thought
only of adjusting the cult of Jahveh to fresh needs. But
when we recollect the spirit of ferocious exclusiveness, the
intolerance, the quarrels and furies of the rigourist party,
when we picture these demagogues roaring after the rich
and powerful, invoking at every moment the vengeance of
Jahveh, the more fanatical as they spoke in the name of
their god, we are not astonished that aristocrats who were
bent on luxury and pleasure, captivated with Greek ways,
and ready to take any measure to secure the continuance
of their privileges, could in their exasperation dream of
ruining for ever the popular fanaticism, even if it involved
the destruction of the very name of the god which it
perpetuated. Moreover, what did it matter whether they
worshipped Jahveh or Jupiter, if they gained tranquillity
by the change ? Let us remember that certain children
of Israel had tried to obliterate on themselves the marks
of circumcision. Had they not opened a Greek gymnasium
in the holy city ? Did they not day after day flout the
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227

precepts of the Mosaic law ? Were they not presently
about to “ sacrifice to the idols and violate the Sabbath ” ?1
Finally, had they not offered to embrace the religion of the
pagan Antiochus ?

Whether or no he went beyond the desires of the
Hellenisers, Antiochus was terrible. The Syrian army
entered Jerusalem a second time, and massacred thousands
of Jews. Looting was universal. The city was brought
under an iron yoke. The king of Syria planted a Mace-
donian garrison in it, and built a fortress that commanded
the temple. Lastly, whether or no he went beyond the
demands of his inviters, he set up everywhere altars to the
pagan gods, forbade the celebration of the Mosaic festivals
and ceremonies, ordered the destruction of the sacred
books, and—supreme abomination—he had a statue of
Jupiter Olympus raised in the temple of Jahveh. This
took place on the 15th of kislev, the month of November
of the year 168 before the present era.

Never had such a danger threatened Judaism before.
The hopes of three centuries seemed to be abortive. An
interruption of the Jewish cult meant the destruction of
the Jewish nation; the raising of a statue of Jupiter in
the temple of Jahveh meant the defeat of the Jewish soul
by the Greek world. The miseries and humiliations of
the preceding centuries had not abolished one jot of the
ancient promises, so long as Jerusalem remained a heart
from which Judaism continued to draw life; now it
seemed that the heart was destroyed.

The hour of the apocalypses had struck. The first was
that of Daniel.

For some time a rumour spread among the people
about the temple and in the synagogues. It was said
that they had found the writings of an ancient prophet of
the time of Nabuchodonosor and the Deportation; his
name was Daniel; god had directed that his prophecies

1 Daniel himself (xi. 30) relates that Antiochus is acting with those of
the Jews who “were forsaking the holy alliance.”
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THE FIRST APOCALYPSES

should remain sealed until the day when the events he
foretold were about to happen; and this day had come.
Some pages of the prophecy had already been read in
pious gatherings; how the prophet and two of his com-
panions, although honoured with the favour of the king
Nabuchodonosor, had resisted his orders, and refused to
pollute themselves with food forbidden by the Mosaic law,
and how God had rewarded them.1

It seems possible to discover in what circumstances
each part of the book of Daniel was successively composed
and published. The first chapter is evidently earlier than
the profanation of the temple. What do we find in it ?
Young Jews who occupy a high position at the court of
king Nabuchodonosor and reconcile the duties of their
office with the duties of their religion. There is no doubt
that this piece was written to teach the Jews that they
must never sacrifice the one to the other; the persecution
has not yet broken out, but it is difficult for the tradi-
tionalist Jews to be faithful to their cult amid the advance
of Hellenism.

Now the era of tragedy begins. The army of Antiochus
has invaded the city; the Hellenisers triumph; there is
general consternation among the men of the traditionalist
party. A second book then spreads.2

It is said to be a new chapter of the prophecies of the
ancient Daniel; and the wretched Jews, who are sur-
rounded by the Hellenisers, learn with astonishment that
king Nabuchodonosor once had a dream, and the prophet
Daniel foretold to him that his empire would pass away,
and that another empire after him (that of the Medes)
would pass away, and that a third (that of the Persians)
would likewise pass away, and that a fourth (that of the
Greeks) would in turn be broken by the hand, not of man,
but of Jahveh.

And in those days the god of heaven shall set up an

1 Daniel i.

Daniel ii.
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229

empire which shall never be destroyed, and of which the
kingdom shall not be left to other people; it shall break
in pieces and consume all other empires, and it shall stand
for ever.1

The worse the trouble becomes, the more splendidly do
the old promises resound in the ears of the Jerusalemites.

At each new blow that strikes Judaism, the author of
the prophecies of Daniel replies with a new book. The
statue of Jupiter Olympus rises in the middle of the
temple, on the altar of Jahveh ; and, wonderful to relate,
a third mashal of the ancient Daniel appears. What do
they learn from it? That once, four hundred years
before, king Nabuchodonosor had ordered that a great
idol, a golden statue of sixty cubits, should be set up, and
every one should worship it; that all—peoples, nations,
and tongues—had fallen on their knees and obeyed ; that
three Jewish young men alone refused; that Nabu-
chodonosor in a rage had them thrown into a seven-times
heated furnace, and the fire did not hurt them ; that they
walked about unhurt amid the flames.2

Who could fail to recognise the allusion ? Is not the
idol erected by Nabuchodonosor the idol erected by
Antiochus Epiphanes? Is not the poet, in telling how
the three Jewish young men resisted the king of Babylon
and were rewarded for it, teaching his contemporaries
that they must resist the king of Syria, and they in turn
will be rewarded for their holy rebellion ?

The persecution becomes more terrible. The soldiers
of Antiochus further the Hellenisation of Judaea with
implacable zeal. Not only is the altar of Jahveh
abolished and his cult forbidden, but the cult of the
Greek gods is enforced. Many Jews who had hitherto
been faithful to the old national traditions now fall away
through fear; the more stubborn conceal themselves; a
flood of shame and blood rises about the temple; the

1 Daniel ii. 44.

2 Daniel iii. 1-30.
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THE FIRST APOCALYPSES

traditionalist Jews seem to be lost; Hellenism seems
definitely to have triumphed. At this time the fourth
prophecy appears. The new book is brought to the
synagogues where the Jews meet in secret. It says that
king Nabuchodonosor was, for not recognising the god of
the Jews, driven from among men for seven years, “ and
did eat grass, as oxen, and his body was wet with the
dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’
feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws.”

Other prophecies follow. There is a festival of king
Balthasar, son of Nabuchodonosor, to which a thousand
lords are invited, with their wives and concubines, with
the vessels of gold and silver stolen from the temple at
Jerusalem; and suddenly “ came forth the fingers of a
man’s hand, and wrote over against the lamp on the
plaster of the wall,” and Daniel explains it:—

Numbered! God hath numbered thy kingdom, and
finished it. Weighed ! Thou art weighed in the balances,
and art found wanting. Divided! Thy kingdom is
divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.1

The sixth prophecy of Daniel2 teaches the Jews, as the
third does but less happily, that they should refuse to
worship any other god than Jahveh. Thus, one after the
other, like a succession of defiances to the awful calamities
and threats, the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth
prophecies of Daniel had arisen from the depths of the
proscribed old party.

At this time there is a reign of terror in Jerusalem ;
surrounded by the troops of Antiochus, the Hellenisers
triumph, possibly, beyond all that they had desired.
Menelaus, the abominable high-priest, lets the
impure blood of swine pollute the courts consecrated to
Jahveh. From that day, even before the next four
prophecies had appeared, the first six had an immediate
effect. The old Judaic party draws together, finds a
leader, and lifts up its head.

1 Daniel v. 5 and 25-28.

8 Daniel vi.
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231

One day, in a small town of Judaea, some Jews of the
rigourist party, a certain Mathathias and his sons, slew a
Hellenising Jew and a company of Syrians who came to
his defence. To escape punishment, they fled to the
mountains; other Jews of the oppressed party joined
them; the movement grew. The rebels found their
enemies not strong enough to reduce them. They
gathered strength, organised the revolt, formed a sort of
army ; Judas Machabasus, one of the sons of Mathathias,
took command of it. Antiochus was called elsewhere by
another war; the representative he sent against the
rebellious Jews was beaten; and, in 164, Judas
Machabasus took Jerusalem and solemnly purified the
temple. He could not, however, force the citadel in
which the Hellenisers took refuge. Thus the victory
hung undecided between the two parties, and the struggle
went on with alternating success and defeat.

The last four prophecies of Daniel seem to have been
composed during the first years of the Machabaean
movement. The poet and patriot who hid behind the
mask of the ancient Daniel did not think his work was
complete as long as there was still courage to restore and
to exalt; and he put forth in succession the four great
apocalyptic visions by which Jahveh unveiled to his
spokesman, and he to the Jewish people, the future
destiny of the universe.

We must not forget that with Daniel we are supposed
to be in the days of Nabuchodonosor and the deportation
to Babylon. The literary procedure that had been
adopted by the authors of the books of Jeremiah, Ezekiel,
and the two Isaiahs was followed by the author of the
book of Daniel; that the book is pseudonymous is now
recognised by every single student of any degree of
independence. They unanimously recognise in the
book what it really is—a work born of the upheavals
of the year 168 and of the first efforts at recovery that
followed.
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THE FIRST APOCALYPSES

The four great apocalyptic visions of Daniel are, there-
fore, four series of predictions, which start with the days
of Nabuchodonosor, extend over a period of four hundred
years, and, as their final goal, reach the days of the
writer.

The history of the Jews and of their successive masters
is thus related from Nabuchodonosor to Antiochus Epi-
phanes, under the form of predictions. The predictions,
however, which concern the period after Nabuchodonosor
and the Restoration are vague, and frequently inexact,
the author of the book of Daniel not being a fully-informed
historian. They become more precise gradually as they
approach the year 164; the last events recorded are the
wars of the Ptolemies and Seleucids, the deeds and actions
of Antiochus Epiphanes, the profanation of the temple
and interruption of the cult, and then, in the last, the
revolt, the first successes, and the reverses of Judas
Machabseus. At that point the so-called predictions
necessarily end, and the real predictions, which the event
was unfortunately not to realise, begin. We can imagine
their nature : Jahveh intervenes, the enemies of Israel are
annihilated, the Jewish people is triumphant.

First Vision.—Out of the sea come four great beasts,
which the prophet describes in full; they are the four
empires which were, in succession, to oppress the people
of Jahveh.

But, behold, thrones were set up, and the Ancient of
Days did sit,1 whose garment was white as snow, and the
hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was of fiery
flames, and his wheels a burning fire.

A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him ;
thousand thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand
times ten thousand stood before him; the judgment was
set, and the books were opened.2

I beheld even till the beast was slain, and his body
destroyed, and given to the burning flame.

1 Jahveh himself.

2 The scene of Jahveh’s judgment.
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233

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As concerning the rest of the beasts, they had their
dominion taken away ; for a length of life had been given
them for a season and a time.

I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the
son of man came with the clouds of heaven,1 and came to
the Ancient of Days, and they brought him near before him.

And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a
kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should
serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which
shall not be destroyed.2

Second Vision.—Beasts which occupy the earth fight
with each other, wresting the dominion from each other,
until the last of them destroys the very sanctuary of god.
But let them be patient; the holy place will he restored.8

Third Vision.—While Daniel meditates on the pro-
phecies of Jeremiah, Gabriel, an angel of Jahveh, appears
to him, and explains to him the hidden meaning of the
words that Jahveh had uttered by the mouth of his
servant in the days of Nabuchodonosor and the taking of
Jerusalem. In seventy years, Jeremiah had said/ Jeru-
salem will be restored and glorified. Now, these seventy
years are seventy sabbaths of years, seventy weeks of
years—that is to say, four hundred and ninety years.
The first entry of Nabuchodonosor into Jerusalem was in
the year 599. To reach his figure, the angel of Jahveh
overlaps the first seven sevens, or the first 49 years; 49
years from 490 leaves 441 years; and if we then calculate
441 years from the year 599, we reach the year 158. In
the year 158, therefore—let us say, about the year 158,
as the Jewish books know nothing of mathematical
accuracy—or some years after the profanation of the
temple by Antiochus Epiphanes, the divine promise will
be fulfilled.5

1   The king who descends from David, or the people of Israel itself
symbolised by a man.

2   Daniel vii. 9-14.   3 Daniel viii. * Jeremiah xxv. 12 ; xxix. 10.

8 Daniel ix. We have followed the calculation of Reuss, Bible,

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THE FIRST APOCALYPSES

This vision might be called : The art of adjusting dates.
But let us not smile at the simple fraud that was to
restore the hope of a crushed people.

Fourth Vision.—The last piece put forward by the
author of the prophecies of Daniel was the most explicit.
The war between the traditionalist and the Hellenising
parties dragged on; the traditionalists were suffering
from discouragement; the voice of the prophet Daniel,
announcing a speedy deliverance, must give a supreme
assurance of veracity to the cruelly tried Jews. If a
series of precise predictions, which had been uttered four
hundred years before, seemed to have been fulfilled to the
letter, was it not a proof that the approaching deliverance
would be equally and speedily accomplished ?

This is the prophecy.

In the third year of Cyrus, king of Persia, an angel
appeared to Daniel on the banks of the Tigris. It may
have been an angel, or god himself; for the description
seems to apply to Jahveh.

I saw a man clothed in linen, whose loins were girded
with fine gold. His body was like the beryl, his face as
the appearance of lightning, his eyes as lamps of fire, and
his arms and his feet like the appearance of polished
brass; and the noise of his words like the noise of a
multitude.1

At this vision Daniel is filled with fear, but recovers.
Then he, the pretended contemporary of Cyrus, tells, in
the prophetic style, in fuller and fuller detail, the future
history of the Persians, of Alexander the Great, and of
the successors of Alexander, especially the Ptolemies and
Seleucids.

The king of the north2 * shall come, and cast up a
mound, and take a strong city ;8 and the troops of the
south4 shall not withstand....And he shall give to the

1 Daniel x. 5-6.
3 Sidon.

2 Antiochus the Great, king of Syria.

4 The Egyptians, until then masters of Sidon.
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king of the south a daughter.1..And he shall turn his

face unto the isles;1 2 and shall take many.8

It is easy to understand the admiration of the Jews in
the days of Menelaus for predictions that were so magni-
ficently fulfilled. They would listen with confidence
when Daniel continues:—

And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great
prince which standeth for the children of thy people.4

Among the angels who surround Jahveh, and of which
each one is charged to protect one of the peoples of
the earth, Michael is the angel-protector of the people
of Israel.

Daniel asks how long it will he before the deliverance
comes. The angel replies :—

From the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken
away, and the abomination that maketh desolate5 set up,
there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days.6

That is to say, three years and a half. The capture
and purification of the temple by Judas Machabaeus
took place three years after the profanation. Is Daniel
approximately fixing the victory of Judas Machabaeus, or
promising that six months after this first great success
all their hopes will be realised ? It is useless to press
the passage; let us see the drift of the prediction :—

“From the day when the statue of Jupiter sullies the
temple to the day when Jahveh will hand over the world
to the Jewish people will be a thousand two hundred and
ninety days.”

To his discouraged compatriots, in the midst of
massacre and pillage, of alternating success and defeat,
after the supreme catastrophe of the abolition of the law,
the interruption of the cult, the surrender of the sanctuary
to a hostile god, the apocalypse serenely declares that the
term is fixed and the days are numbered ; that after three

1   Cleopatra, daughter of Antiochus, married to the king of Egypt.

2 The Archipelago.   3 Daniel xi. 15-18.   4 Daniel xii. 1.

6 The statue of Jupiter in the temple of Jahveh.   6 Daniel xii. 11.
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THE FIRST APOCALYPSES

years and a half revenge and triumph will be brought by
the angel of Jahveh. We need not ask if the Jewish
soul will sink into utter despair when the three years and
a half are over; minds that are so terribly hallucinated
will be able at once to invent explanations of the delay,
to adjust the dates, to make the calculation start from a
different point, to interpret the word “week” as “three
months,” and translate the word “month” into “year.”
The book will have done its work.

More than any of the prophetic books, the book of
Daniel is a book of promises. The Jews shall possess
the earth; their empire shall destroy the other empires,
and shall never be destroyed; it shall be a kingdom for
ever. No doubt is tolerated. Like the psalms, the
apocalypses promise the Jews universal dominion. The
translations calls it “ the kingdom of the holy ”; the
“ holy ” are the Qedoshim, men “ consecrated ” to Jahveh
—that is to say, the people of Jahveh. What it really
means is, in the material sense, to take and hold for ever
the place of Nabuchodonosor, Cyrus, and Alexander;
presently they will add Csesar.

Like most of the Jewish books, and better than any
of them, the book of Daniel is a philosophy of history.
The history of the world, or of those peoples who are
known to the writer, is represented as leading up to a
unique goal, the triumph of the Jewish people. The
idea was to have a great future. Christian literature will
adopt it, merely putting Christianity in the place of
Judaism. Bossuet is but reproducing it in his “ Discourse
on Universal History.”

Like the prophets—Ezekiel, Zechariah, and the two
Isaiahs—and even more strongly, the book of Daniel
opens out the perspective, at once terrible and reassuring,
of the period of increasingly cruel calamities which, by
the will of Jahveh, must precede the final triumph of
Judaism. Jahveh means the distress to be at its height
at the time when he will come to save and glorify his
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237

people. What a comfort for the Jew who has been
beaten by Antiochus and the Hellenisers! Later this
period of preliminary terror will be known as the reign
of Antichrist. From this time it becomes the necessary
prologue of the apocalyptic program.

First of all Jewish writers, the author of the book of
Daniel promises the resurrection of the dead. Whether
or no there was an accession of Mazdaean beliefs, the
idea of resurrection was too necessary logically in Judaism
for it to fail, whether imported or not. Until then the
Jews had hardly considered what might come after
death; the rewards and punishments were of this world.
Piety was rewarded with happiness here below; trans-
gression of the law of Jahveh was punished with
unhappiness here below. The extreme calamities from
which the popular party suffered in the time of Antiochus
were so glaring a violation of the doctrine that piety is
rewarded with happiness, that the Jews were bound to
think of happiness beyond this world. Jahveh would
presently deliver the people of Israel, punish its enemies,
and reward his servants; but what about those who had
been slain ? They will rise again in their flesh. It is
not a question of an immortal soul; the Jews did not
conceive that there could be a soul distinct from the
body. It is a question of the resurrection of bodies, in
such wise that all the children of Jahveh “shine as the
brightness of the firmament, as the stars for ever and
ever.”1

Lastly—and this is the chief character of the apocalypses
—the book of Daniel is eschatological.

Theologians make much use of the word “ eschatology.”
Properly speaking, eschatology means the science or the
study or the announcement of last things. If the word
were adopted by scientists, we should give the name of
terrestrial eschatology to the study of the conditions in

1 Daniel xii. 3.
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THE EIRST APOCALYPSES

which the earth is doomed to disappear, either by the
natural action of its chemical components or by the
shock of a heavenly body, or from any other natural
cause; but the word is almost exclusively restricted to
religious questions, and applies generally to the super-
natural conditions in which the actual world was, it was
believed, doomed to perish.

The prophetic books themselves announced that,
through the direct intervention of Jahveh, the pagan
empires would be destroyed, and replaced by an empire
in which the Jews should be masters. The apocalypse
of Daniel has this element of novelty, that it knows the
plan and date of the event, sets forth its course in
advance, and positively fixes the day.

Remember the great vision of the prophet, in which
the heavens open and disclose, amid flames, the thrones
of Jahveh and his angels; then we have the assizes, the
trial of mankind, when Michael, the angel-protector of
Israel, intervenes, and offers to carry out the sentence of
Jahveh with his own hand; the pagans will be exter-
minated, the Jews glorified and rewarded with the
dominion of the world. This great scene will be
developed by the successors of Daniel, and will after-
wards become the Last Judgment of the Christians;
but in the second century before our era it means
simply the taking possession of the world by the Jewish
people.

When will it take place? Must they still wait for
centuries? Daniel has counted the seventy years, or
the seventy times seven years, indicated by Jeremiah,
and has calculated that the term is at hand. But a mere
declaration is not enough; indeed, elsewhere, on two
occasions, the angel declares that the desolation will last
for “ a time, two times, and half a time ”1—that is to say,
a year, two years, and half-a-year, or three years and
a-half.

1 Daniel vii. 25 and xii. 7.
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239

In fine, when Daniel pointedly asks:—

“ Lord, when will these things be ? ”

The angel replies:—

“ From the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken
away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up,
there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days.”
That is eschatology—a precise, categorical announce-
ment of the great final upheaval which will give the world
to the Jewish people. The ancient covenant between the
people of Israel and its god now yields its extreme con-
sequences. In order that Israel may obtain glory of its
god, it is enough to trust him. Israel is faithful; more-
over, how could a people groaning under such misfortunes
listen to restricted promises and conditional consolations ?
The promise has been made absolute; it is to be fulfilled
at once. With its temple profaned, its law destroyed, and
its streets wet with blood, the wretched people can wait no
longer. The apocalypse is the divine promise at the foot
of the walls.

In saving the traditionalist party, the book of Daniel
had saved Judaism. But the victory was not complete,
and the struggle continued. Doubtless it was necessary,
if the Jewish soul were to be permanent, that it should
never know that peace in which energy slumbers.

As we have said, most historians have left to the events
of the year 168 the traditional description of the “ persecu-
tion ” of Antiochus Epiphanes, and to the events of the
following period that of “ war of independence ” of the
Machabees. These descriptions, which are really biassed,
must be explained, if not corrected ; “ persecution ” must
be understood as the oppression of one party by another
party, “ war of independence ” as the revolt of the party
oppressed against the oppressing party. Certainly Judas
Machabseus and his brothers had enemies in the kings of
Syria; when Judas Machabseus took Jerusalem, he took
it from the officers of Antiochus; and afterwards his
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THE FIRST APOCALYPSES

successors wrested the independence of Judaea from the
Syrian kings. But these Syrian kings were the patrons
of the Hellenising Jewish party ; the Syrian armies were
the auxiliaries of that party. On their side the Machabees
sought and obtained the help of the Romans, who were
then penetrating Asia; Judas Machabaeus was, says
Josephus, the first Jew to enter into alliance with the
Roman Senate.1 The Judaic party leaned on the Romans,
just as the Hellenisers leaned on the Syrians.

Mathathias, father of Judas Machabaeus, had traversed
the country “ overthrowing the pagan altars; he forgave
none of those who had worshipped idols and who fell into
his hands, and he caused uncircumcised children to be
circumcised.”a Judas Machabaeus “ put to death the
Jews who had violated the law of Moses.”3 We have
nothing but massacres of populations, with looting and
burning. Judas Machabaeus and his troops threw them-
selves suddenly, by night, on Jewish villages that were
unfaithful to Jahveh ; he set them in flames, and slew
the apostates. Jonathan, his successor, exterminated
the impious from the midst of Israel, in the words
of Deuteronomy, after every victory. Whenever the
Machabees took a non-Israelitic country, they imposed
circumcision on the vanquished. The enemies whom
the Machabees fight are the “impious Jews” rather
than the Syrians. This so-called war of independence
was only a civil war in which each of the two parts
summoned the foreigner to its assistance, a religious war
that witnessed many St. Bartholomews. The Machabees
have no right to the aureole which tradition has been
pleased to grant them; Judaism will have its heroes,
heroes and martyrs of Jewish liberty, two centuries later,
at the time of the great revolt against Rome.

The civil war ended, in the year 141, with the triumph
of the Machabees—that is to say, the victory of the

1 The Jewish War, i. 1.   2 Jewish Antiquities, xii. S.

8 Jewish Antiquities, xii. 9.
 THE EIRST APOCALYPSES

241

traditionalists and the crushing defeat of the Hellenisers.
In 141 Simeon, brother of Judah, took the last place in
which his opponents had found refuge, and they were
slain; he had himself proclaimed high-priest and prince
of the Jews, and was recognised as such, not only by the
Roman Senate, but by the king of Syria. But, although
the defeat of the Hellenisers marks the end of the civil
war, it does not mean the end of the struggle of the
parties which distracted Judaism; a new party at once
took the place of that which had just disappeared.

From this time a schism had occurred among the con-
querors, and the ancient and everlasting antagonism of
the aristocracy and the democracy appeared again in
Judaism, under the form of the Sadducees and Pharisees.

Partly owing to Flavius Josephus, and partly under
the influence of the Talmud, an exaggerated importance
has been given to questions of religious controversy in
connection with the antagonism of the Sadducees and
Pharisees. The historian who proposes to set the work
of Judaism in its historical environment cannot explain a
two-century old antagonism by a divergence of opinion on
the resurrection. The traditionalist party was bound, in
the day of its triumph, to have the fortune of every
victorious party; the powerful, the rich, the “upstarts,”
were sure to form a new aristocracy in it, and this new
aristocracy was, like the earlier one, bound to be a clerical
aristocracy.

The Mosaic law did not suffer any other rich and
powerful persons, beside the prince, except the priests.
The priests ruled in the name of the law; in the name of
the law the tithes and tributes, gathered wherever there
were Jews, put the Jewish fortune in their hands so
exclusively that Simeon had had to have himself pro-
claimed high-priest at the same time as prince of the
Jews. The Sadducees, though originating in the old
popular traditionalist party, took the place of the former
aristocratic party in Jewish society. There were no

R
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THE FIRST APOCALYPSES

longer Hellenisers of the type of Menelaus; but there
was always a clerical nobility, opulent, conservative, and
haughty, while the Pharisees, below and opposed to them,
were a sort of puritan middle-class, poor, devout, and
powerful on account of its numbers and its influence on
the lower classes.

From the day when the Machabees became a settled
dynasty they oscillated between the two parties, relying
now on one, now on the other. Gradually, however, the
old rigourist and democratic party adopted once more the
attitude of opposition-party, never again to abandon it,
and the aristocracy assumed the logical attitude that
befitted a caste interested, above all, in adhering to the
established authority. Always fond of power, the Hellen-
isers had been partisans of the kings of Syria, when they
had been the masters; when the Machabees were the
recognised sovereigns of an independent Judaea, the Sad-
ducees could not fail to be on good terms with them; and
they would not fail, later, to become partisans of the
Roman government.

The Jewish nation might appear to be settled under
the Machabees. Imposing its rule on neighbouring
countries, and at length reducing Samaria, its ancient
enemy, it obtained frontiers that had hardly entered the
dreams of the early moshlim of the Mosaic books—
Lebanon, the Arabian desert, and the Mediterranean.
Jerusalem was in the end capital of all the territory
promised by Jahveh to the patriarchs, the fathers of
Israel; Israel was in the end realised under the authority
of a king reigning at Jerusalem.

But decay followed closely upon this splendour. The
Machabees, who had begun as leaders of bands, ended as
oriental tyrants. No Asiatic dynasty escapes this fatal
development. Crime multiplied in the palace; the
political history of Judaea was directed in the harem ; little
by little all the old miseries fell again on the Jewish people.

There were unfortunate wars, and the soil of Judaea
 THE EIEST APOCALYPSES

243

was once more darkened by invasions, with their devas-
tation and carnage. Civil wars broke out among the
descendants of the Machabees, each summoning to his
aid the neighbouring Egyptians, Syrians, Arabs, and,
finally, Bomans. At Jerusalem, meantime, the dissen-
sions became more and more violent; disturbances spread
disorder through the city, and ended in pools of blood.
After the disturbances came revolts; and the savage
vengeance of the tyrant of Jerusalem had the prisoners
slowly tortured, round the table at which he indulged
his orgies, while their wives and children were slain before
their dying eyes.

It is all over with the momentary splendour. Hence-
forth there opens for the Jews an era of ferocious oppres-
sion, calamity, and wrath, that will last two centuries.
Jewish history is a history of ever-increasing misery. It
began with the rule, not yet a hard rule, of the Persian
satraps ; then the Ptolemies and the Seleucids wrest the
country from each other; when peace is restored, their
rule is as yet tolerable, but dissension rends Judaea and
brings in Antiochus Epiphanes and the civil war ; the
Machabees, national sovereigns, now exercise over the
Jews a tyranny worse than that of its former foreign
masters; soon it will be the turn of Herod, then of the

Bomans.......What a terrible destiny for a people that

declares itself born to rule the world !

From the depths of the Jewish soul rise new apoca-
lypses, in which are expressed the wild hopes of a people
whom no reverse can cast into despair. Little known
works, copying each other, they have an interest on
account of the state of mind that they indicate.

The book of Daniel seems to have been followed first
by a book of Henoch. Henoch is one of the oldest
patriarchs of the Bible, one of the ancestors of Noah.
Like Daniel, he traces the destinies of the Jewish people
in the framework of a universal history. He begins with
the fall of the angels. He ends by announcing the general
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THE FIRST APOCALYPSES

attack of the nations upon Israel, the divine intervention,
the victory of the saints, the resurrection of the martyrs,
and the judgment of Jahveh.

Another apocalypse is written by an Alexandrian Jew.
This time the Jewish writer, being an Alexandrian, makes
use, not of an ancient prophet, but of the pagan sibyl, to
foretell the destinies of the Jewish people. But the frame
constructed by Daniel remains ; universal history is related
from the Judaic point of view. The picture opens with
the tower of Babel; it closes with the final attack upon
Israel of all the nations of the world in coalition, with
the final eschatology and the triumph of Israel.

We have reached the first century. The series of
apocalypses continues among the lower orders of the
Jewish people.

A new book of Henoch appears, with the same
promises and the same eschatology.

Then come the eighteen psalms of Solomon. The
misfortunes of the hour are a punishment of the sins of
Israel, but a glorious future is at hand. Jahveh is about
to raise up a son of David who will fulfil the promises.

The Ascension of Moses, which is possibly later, is a
furious invective against the enemies of Israel. The
historical framework constructed by Daniel is faithfully
reproduced; the destinies of the world are revealed to
Moses down to the day of the expected catastrophe.

Meantime the Machabees had sunk to the lowest depth
of crime and baseness; the hour of Borne was about to
strike. For a century Borne had intervened, with
increasing assiduity, but always from a distance, in the
affairs of Judaea. At last its legions appeared on the
frontiers of Palestine. The eagles that had conquered
the world advanced, slow and terrible, with the calm
strength of an invincible tide.

In the year 63 before our era Pompey took Jerusalem.
Without reducing Judaea to the condition of a Boman
province, he put it under the protectorate of Boifie.
 THE FIRST APOCALYPSES

245

Rome is, at this period, mistress of the world. Her
rule extends even over the east; the few kingdoms that
seem to be independent, such as Egypt, are morally
conquered. Already all obey; to-morrow all will be
Roman provinces. And all submit to the accomplished
fact. The Africans are subject; the Gauls are about to
be; the Greeks have bowed their heads; Asia Minor and
Syria worship their masters ; Egypt aspires to slavery.
Only the lowest of peoples does not yield.

The distinctive character of the Jewish soul was never
to accept defeat; from that it drew its power. The
Hellenist invasion had inflamed, instead of stifling, the
ardour of the Jewish soul. The power of Rome in turn
will not stifle it. While the degenerate sacerdotal
aristocracy bears a yoke which allows it to cling to its
enjoyments, the Jewish soul lives in the party of the
rigourists and puritans, the guardians of the ancient
traditions. The Jew cannot abandon his hopes, the
inheritance of the world which he believes to be promised
to him.

This people, which will not suffer itself to be reduced,
astonishes us ; it astonishes us no less when it puts its
trust in the help of Providence. The Jewish soul dreams
that it has its revenge; but now the minister of justice
must descend from heaven in the midst of thunder and
lightning.

There is now a new character in the apocalypses that
rise, one after another, among the fanatical people. This
character is, in the modern sense of the word, messianism.
We have followed the study of Judaism down to the verge
of the Christian era without pronouncing the words
messiah and messianism. Of the many meanings that
have been given to these two words we have preferred to
retain one only, and that the most recent. It is now time
to define it.

The Biblical books relate that, from the earliest days of
royalty in Israel, the kings had been consecrated in the
 24 G

THE FIRST APOCALYPSES

name of Jahveh by an anointing with oil. Saul, the first
king, had been anointed by Samuel. After the kings, and,
like them, the high-priests, who were now heads of the
State of Jerusalem, were Anointed ones. From that time
the Anointed was the supreme head, king or high-priest,
appointed by Jaliveh to rule. Now in Hebrew to anoint
is mashoah; an Anointed is Masliiah, or Messiah ; a
Messiah is an Anointed. The Greeks translated Mashiali
by the word “ x/xcrroe the Latins said “ Christus.” The
three words “Messiah,” “Christ,” and “Anointed” are
therefore translations of each other, and all originally
mean one who has received consecration by oil. It is
already clear that the two words “Messianism” and
“ Christianism ” are originally synonymous, like the two
words “Messiah” and “Christ”; one is the Hebrew
form, the other the Greek. The Yulgate and Lemaistre
de Saci very properly call Saul, David, Solomon, and
Zarobabel “ Christs.”

The Christ, Messiah, or Anointed, promised by the
Mosaic books to rule the people of Israel when it is finally
established, must be a king descending from David. He
who is then promised by the prophets to reign, in peace
and glory, over the vanquished world is again a Davidic
king; but, although he is the head who will rule in the
name of Jahveh, he is not the one who will conquer the
world. He is merely the future king of the glorious era;
he will enjoy the fulfilment of the prophecies ; he will not
himself fulfil them.

Who, then, will fulfil the promises of Jahveh ? At the
time of the Mosaic books and the early prophets it was
believed that the Jewish people, with the aid of its god,
but advancing itself to the combat, could, under the
auspices of its god seconding its own valour, conquer its
enemies, secure its kingdom, and consolidate it amid the
nations. That was the heroic epoch of Judaism.

In the following epoch the Jewish people despairs of
conquering by itself, even with the aid of its god. The
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247

god must intervene personally; without its god, the
Jewish people can do nothing. That is the doctrine of
the prophets. “ I am Jahveh, thy saviour,” says Isaiah.1
The saviour who will crush the goim and give Israel the
empire of the world is, in Isaiah and Jeremiah, Michah
and Zechariah, always Jahveh. It is the same in the
psalms; Jahveh, in the psalms, is alone able to bring about
the conquest of the world. The king who is a son of
David will receive from his hands the world purged of his
enemies, on its knees before his glory.

Daniel marks a third stage. An angel will do the
work; an angel will destroy the empire of the pagans,
and establish indestructibly the rule of the Jews.

[Prometheus]

In the successors of Daniel the Anointed comes into
full view, but he is identified with the angel of Jahveh.
That is the fourth and last stage of this long evolution.
Though they had all received the sacred unction, the
Machabees had, by their tyranny, their alliance with the
aristocracy, their crimes, and their debasement, made the
people refuse to regard them as Anointed. Herod also
would be consecrated with the holy oil; but the hatred of
the people could not bring itself to grant him the old and
profoundly national title of Messiah.- The earlier meaning
of the word was gradually lost, and the title, which they
refused to grant to sovereigns who were more and more
detested, was fastened upon the expected angel. The
Messiah ceased to be a man; he became a supernatural
being. In the apocalypses which followed that of Daniel
the Messiah is the angel who will deliver Israel, reduce or
exterminate the pagan world, found the Jewish empire,
and fulfil the ancient promises; and they began to expect
his coming amid clouds and thunder in the opened
heavens. Messianism had reached its definitive formula.

We must understand that it was the forlorn hope, the
last card, of the Jewish people, as they clung to the most

1 Isaiah lx. 1G.
 248

THE FIRST APOCALYPSES

chimerical folly in order to hope once more. However
much we may admire the tenacity of a people in refusing
to die, and desperately creating new grounds for hope, let
us realise how such an idea condemns all personal effort,
and represents the abdication of human energy at the feet
of the supernatural.

In the beginning the Jews had, like all great peoples,
asked their god to assist them in triumphing over their
enemies. And gradually, as their oppression became
heavier, their ambition less practicable, and their con-
fidence in themselves more feeble, they had relied the
more on Jahveh. They had ended in relying on them-
selves, their own strength and energy, no longer; they
relied wholly on Jahveh. Then this self-abdication had
sunk a degree lower. The Jews no longer ventured to
think that they would be permitted to co-operate in the
work of Jahveh otherwise than by prayer; an angel must

bring them the victory from heaven.......This angel is now

the Messiah, promised and awaited from the earliest times,
to reign over the universe.

That is the prodigy of the Jewish soul. When all hope
is forbidden it, it still finds ground for hope. It does not
abdicate; it does not renounce ; it persists in its dream of
revenge, even when the foot of the Roman is upon it.
But its indefatigable imperialism now demands that an
angel shall come down from the heights of heaven, in the
midst of the Kerubim, in a flare of thunder and lightning.
 Chapter III.

THE ROMAN PERIOD
§ 1. Hillel and Shammai.

The day on which the Romans took Jerusalem and
Palestine (63 B.c.) marks a new epoch in the history of
Judaism. The genius of Greece had struggled and
failed; in its turn the power of Rome is about to match
itself against the old Jewish soul.

The Greek genius represented the finer achievements
of intelligence, art, science, and philosophy; the power
of Rome, on the other hand, consisted in the achieve-
ments of will, of the military spirit and the spirit of
government. Devoid of all intellectual qualities, devoid
of the least military instinct or political sentiment, the
Jewish soul formulated its invincible craving for life and
rule in so rabid a fanaticism that, after triumphing over
the intelligence of Greece, it could stand erect in face of
the power of Rome.

The wild nationalism of the Jews had opposed itself
in a mass to the Hellenic invasion. Against Rome it had
two methods of fighting. One was open war, which was
condemned in advance to an overpowering check; the
other was subterraneous war, the only warfare that could
succeed.

Two names, two men, living about the last year of
the old era, seem to us fitting symbols of these two
methods: one taught patience, the other preached
violence: they were Hillel and Shammai. The man of
violence, Shammai, was destined to win at Jerusalem,
and his party led the holy city to its doom; but the
Dispersion, that vast field of exile that stretched from

249
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THE ROMAN PERIOD

ghetto to ghetto across the Roman Empire, listened to
the words of the man of patience, Hillel, the master of
St. Paul.

During the twenty-five years which followed the taking
of Jerusalem by Pompey, Judaea was spattered with
blood by the efforts of the last descendants of the Macha-
bees to win back or preserve their royalty. The family
of the Herods comes on the scene. As Idumaeans—in
other words, Edomites—Anti pater and his son Herod the
Great came of a race despised by the men of Jerusalem.
They became, in turn, creatures of Pompey, then of
Caesar after Pharsala, of Cassius after the assassination
of Caesar, of Antony after Philippi, and of Augustus after
Actium. In the year 40 b.c. Herod obtained of the
Senate the title of king of Judaea. With the help of the
legions of Syria he secured his kingdom, and for more
than thirty years he was a terrible and magnificent
tyrant. A lover of splendour, he covered Judaea with
monuments; and he rebuilt at great expense the humble
temple that Zarobabel had raised to the national god
five centuries before, and made it one of the wonders
of the world. He was none the less fanatically hated by
the Jews; but he was able to repress the anger that
rumbled about him. In virtue of his energy, craft, and
crimes, he ruled over the most difficult people to govern
in the whole Roman Empire.

The story is familiar of the frightful agony of Herod,
equally tormented by suspicion and illness, ordering
massacres and, from his death-bed, directing the murder
of one of his sons. Sedition only awaited his end to
break out. One day he was believed to have died; at
once a troop of fanatical Jews went to tear down the
golden eagle, a sacrilegious emblem, from the front of the
temple. The old king awoke to send the rebels to the
executioner. But immediately after his death an era of
trouble and revolt set in, and was destined to culminate
 HILLEL AND SHAMMAI

251

in the great insurrection of the year 06 and the destruc-
tion of Jerusalem in 70.

Augustus soon made a Roman province of Judaea.
From that time it is governed by procurators, whose seat
is Caesarea; their names are Coponius, Ambivius, Rufus,
Gratus, and Pontius Pilate.

The historian Flavius Josephus has given us a cele-
brated picture of the sects that then distracted Judaea;
in it we can discern a picture of the various classes
which formed Jewish society.

At the top were still the Sadducees, the aristocracy of
Judaea, priests living on the temple, rich, sceptical,
powerful, and necessarily hostile to the old Judaic ideas.
Cultivated and intelligent, they understood that it was
impossible to escape the authority of Rome. To preserve
their wealth, they demanded submission to Rome, just
as the Hellenising aristocrats of former days had demanded
submission to Antiochus. Was the old Judaic dream of
revenge still vigilant at the heart of these professions?
It is hardly probable; no trace of it is found, at all
events. Their only aim was to live on good terms with
Rome, with the Idumseans who were in the favour of
Rome, and with the procurators, and to continue to receive
the enormous tithes that still came to the temple every year.

At a lower level, the Pharisees represented the middle-
class. The Pharisees were not poor, but they were not
rich. We have explained several times that in the East,
where the material wants are less than in our climates,
an intermediate situation is possible, in which the
inheritance of some humble house, or some far from
absorbing occupation, is enough to give one leisure to
study the law, to discharge the many practices of the
cult, and to indulge in religious and patriotic meditations.
The Pharisees were the holy people that Jahveh had
consecrated to himself since the Exodus, and, although
they were not really priests, it was to them that the Law
had said:—
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THE ROMAN PERIOD

“ Ye shall be a kingdom of priests.” 1

Putting themselves in the place of a degenerate and
detested aristocracy, the Pharisees were really at the head
of the Jewish people. They occupied, morally, the place
of the old clerical aristocracy of the time of Esdras and
Deuteronomy. They had inherited its ancient virtues,
its patriotism, its uncompromising nationalism. But they
had not its greatness ; being continuers, and not creators,
they made a superstition of observance. The tradition
that is not enlivened by a slow evolution becomes dry;
the legislation that has originated in the most ardent
craving for life becomes a tyranny the moment it ceases
to move ; the heirs of the terrible patriots of the fourth
century are quibbling formalists. But they still have
obstinacy, the old Jewish virtue that stands for all qualities
in these men.

The Sadducees and Pharisees composed the official
Jewish world at the beginning of the first century of the
present era. Below them were the very poor and very
fanatical mass of the people. Very poor, or rather owning
nothing, living from day to day, ready for sordid tasks
when hunger spoke too loud, averse from work at any
other time, clever only in following their old messianic
dream through the idleness of long torrid days. Very
fanatical also, enfevered by the promises of the apoca-
lypses, inebriated with secret ambition and suppressed
anger, regarding themselves as the sole heirs of Israel,
they spent themselves in the silent rage of waiting so
long for their day.

The popular class had an extreme left. Flavius
Josephus, the histiographer of cultivated Judaea and
courtier of the Flavian Emperors, describes in the
darkest colours the lowest class of Jewish society. It
was, he says, a collection of brigands, beggars, thieves,
adventurers, assassins, and all kinds of fomenters of

1 Exodus xix. 6.
 HILLEL AND SHAMMAI

253

disorder. These supposed brigands of Josephus called
themselves the Zealots or Sicaries; pushing fanaticism to
its last consequences, they made it their mission, it seems,
some day to slay every Jew who transgressed the Law.

Finally, we must mention, outside of this passionate
world, the Essenians or Essetes, a sort of devout dreamers,
Illuminati, living in prayer and asceticism.

Such was in the first century—with its extreme right
consisting of aristocratic Sadducees, who remained Jews
externally, but were rightly suspected by the rigourists
and were the allies of the Roman procurators; with its
right consisting of conservative Pharisees; with its left
consisting of miserable fanatics ; and with its little corner
of eccentric Essenians, and its extreme left composed of
uncompromising zealots—the Jewish society which the
doctrines of Hillel and Shammai has just rent into two
parties and two irreconcilable camps.

Hillel and Shammai were Jerusalem doctors of the
Herodian period, whom tradition represents as devoted
to the interpretation of the Mosaic law. Benevolent,
indulgent, and gentle, Hillel is described as a partisan of
the liberal interpretation; Shammai, a partisan of the
strict interpretation, is a sombre, inflexible, violent man.
They are depicted for us in an anecdote. A pagan said
one day to Shammai that he would embrace Judaism if
he would teach him the whole of the Law in the space of
time that he could stand on one leg. For reply Shammai
took up a stick. To the same inquiry Hillel replied:—

“ Do not unto others that that thou wouldst they should
not do unto thee. That is the whole of the Law.”

The Talmud represents them, amid the strong passions
of the time, as exclusively concerned with questions of
interpretation and casuistry. But the Talmud is ignorant
of history, and its silence on the political attitude of the
two great doctors proves nothing. Their fame rather
leads us to think that they had influence on the events of
their time. What man could have isolated himself in the
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THE ROMAN PERIOD

game of scholastic controversies, in the heart of Judaea, at
such a time ? We have no documents as to the political
attitude of Hillel, but tradition relates that Shammai
inspired the zealots. It is probable that Hillel inspired
the opposite party. Were not the Pharisees who after-
wards opposed the revolt against Rome disciples of Hillel?

Moreover, was not the interpretation of the Law an
interpretation of Judaism ? According to the Talmud,
there was question of interpreting the Mosaic laws. That
may be so, but there was also question of interpreting the
prophets, the psalms, and the apocalypses—the whole of
that vast series of books which had already, at the
beginning of the present era, become sacred books,
containing the expression of the development of the
Jewish soul. Did not the interpretation of the Judaic
tradition necessarily involve the framing of a political
programme ?

What was, then, the tradition of Judaism in the first
century ?

The glowing nationalism of the founders of the Jewish
State, in the time of Esdras, had expressed in terms of
the cult of the national god Jahveh the fierce patriotism
which was to them the condition of existence; and this
primitive conception had traced the path for Judaism.
The ancient moshlim who had, in the fourth century,
gradually composed the books of Moses, persuaded them-
selves, by identifying the god Jahveh with the Jewish
fatherland, by repeating that Israel (we know why they
said Israel) was the people of Jahveh, just as Jahveh was
the god of Israel, that a covenant had been concluded
between Jahveh and the Jews; that Jahveh had promised
the Jews the free and peaceful enjoyment of their land if
they observed his law.

In spite of the alternate mastery of Judsea by the
Ptolemies and Seleucids, the prophets had improved upon
the covenant. By a stroke of genius, the two Isaiahs had,
at the time when the greatest misery prevailed and the
 HILLEL AND SHAMMAI

255

[Prometheus]

divine promise seemed to fail, enlarged it so far as to
announce that Jahveh promised, not merely the peaceful
and glorious enjoyment of Palestine, but the dominion of
the world.

The dark soul of the chanters of the psalms had found
comfort in the promise ; and, when fresh evidence was
given of the vanity of such ambition, the apocalypses and
the book of Daniel had appeared. In the apocalypses
there are no longer conditions attached to the promise;
the final event—the submission of the world, the posses-
sion of the earth, the glorification of Jerusalem—is
announced absolutely, at a fixed date, in all its details. The
Jew has now merely to await his time in a devout fulfil-
ment of the works of the Law, and perseverance in his
unconquerable faith. The day when the heavens will
open and the Messiah appear, amid the parting clouds, in
the roar of the thunder and the Keroubim, the work will be
perfected, and the Jews will receive their inheritance from
his hands, without striking a blow, while their enemies
are exterminated or reduced.

To this pitch had the imperialism of the Jewish people
attained when the Romans took Palestine.

Once more the fulfilment of their hope was postponed:
once more the reality pitilessly belied their ambition.

Let us add that the Romans were much harder masters
than the Syrians or the Egyptians had been. Moreover,
while the Egyptians and the Syrians had left the Jews to
govern themselves under their suzerainty, Rome imposed
detested rulers, either as kings or procurators. For the
Romans, though so tolerant toward the peoples whom
they governed, had at last become weary of Jewish
fanaticism; unruly subjects needed tyrannical govern-
ment.

The hopes of the Jews lay dark in an abyss of calamities
that they had never known before.

Then were formed the two great parties of the last
epoch of the Jewish people. There was the party of the
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THE ROMAN PERIOD

insurgent, and the party of those who did not despair.
There were, with Hillel and Shammai, two interpretations
of the Judaic law.

Hillel interpreted it: —

“ Follow the example of our fathers. Be patient. Trust
the divine promises. Confide in god. Wait. Expect
everything from him. Expect nothing of yourselves.
Observe the commandments. Believe and hope.”

Shammai interpreted it:—

“Resist the oppressor. Obey god only. Refuse sub-
mission to the impious.”

Shammai was the leader of those who became at last
tired of suffering, waiting, and bowing the head. But he
was breaking the Judaic tradition ; it was Hillel who was
faithful to it. When they rebelled against the Romans,
the Jews rebelled at the same time against their past,
their books, and their god. They ceased to be “ the
pious ” ; and they became heroes. Nevertheless, while
it drove them to revolt, their despair was still impreg-
nated with Judaism; beliefs that are four centuries old
cannot entirely be abandoned. Though in rebellion, the
Jews continued to await the Messiah who would give
them the victory; but, from the time when they were no
longer content to await him in penance and prayer, the
promise of great help and the hope of a magnificent
victory gave them added strength to sustain them in the
struggle.

The party of revolt had been secretly forming during
the long reign of Herod. When it came to light, in the
time of the procurators, it embraced a considerable part
of the Pharisees, the violent of the Shammai type, those
who are carried out of their way by anger; but it was
chiefly composed of men of the people, and absorbed the
whole of the extreme left of the zealots.

The party of submission had its adherents to the end.
It embraced the whole of the Sadducees. These wealthy,
pleasure-loving aristocrats now expected little of the
 RENASCENCE OE PROPHETISM

257

promises of Jahveh; the Roman domination secured
them a peaceful and pleasant life. The greater part of
the Pharisees formed the nucleus of the party. As dis-
ciples of Hillel, they were men of tradition. It is certain
that a fraction of the lower people also accepted sub-
mission, though they gradually tired of it, and passed to
the opposite party.

Hillel and Shammai were not to be the leaders of the
parties they had inspired. They were both dead when
the period of trouble, violence, and folly, that led to the
ruin of Jerusalem, began. The scene is now about to be
occupied by a series of agitators, some arising in the
school of Hillel, others in that of Shammai. Chief among
them were, on the one side, John the Baptist and similar
men, and, on the other side, Judas the Gaulonite, his
sons, and the insurgents of the year 66.

§ 2. Renascence of Prophetism.

Let us recall what the prophets had been in the course
of the preceding centuries. In ancient Israel, as in the
time of Esdras and in every period in the history of
oriental peoples, we found certain wizards, something like
dancing and howling dervishes, who foretold the future,
healed beasts and men, and wandered, feared and vener-
ated, about the country and the towns of Palestine. It
was believed that the spirit of Jahveh breathed in these
poor fools; and they were called—as simple peoples
always call such men—men of god. By a literary device
that argues the most fertile power of invention, the writers
of the end of the fourth and of the third centuries had
attributed their discourses and dogmatic odes to ancient
and legendary men of god, such as Hosea, Amos, Jeremiah,
Ezekiel, and Isaiah; and, while these wild bone-setters,
with the impress of sacred madness, were still, in the
third century, seen wandering about the towns and fields,

s
 258

THE ROMAN PERIOD

people repeated the hymns, the vociferations, the poems,
and the “prophecies,” which Jahveh was supposed to
have dictated to the ancestors of these wretched beings.

It was still the same in the second century. The
author of the book of Daniel had, like the authors of
the books of Jeremiah and Isaiah, idealised the sombre
figure of the popular diviner into that of the prophet
Daniel. After Daniel a few authors of apocalypses had
maintained the tradition. The inspiration was failing,
however. Moreover, a canon of the sacred books had
been made, and it was more difficult to secure the accept-
ance of new prophets. Men of god still abounded in
JudEea and in the whole of the East. There were still
sorcerers, but there were no longer prophets, in Israel.

We reach the beginning of the first century of our era.
The ancient prophetic books are the beverage that intoxi-
cates the impatience of the Jewish people. At that time
no one, either in Judaea or the Jewish colonies, doubts
that Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel had really
existed, and that they had, at the time of the ancient
kingdoms and the Deportation, written the pages and
done the deeds which their books ascribed to them; it
is regretted that they have had no successors, and that
the voice of prophetism has been so long silent. This
glowing cult of the ancient prophetic books provoked,
under the pressure of events, real rivals of the fictitious
prophets. Was not the ambition to take up afresh the
great work of the ancient tribunes bound to enter some
of these fanatical minds? It is natural to think that
more than one of these Jews, distracted with misery and
ambition, dreamed, in their ecstasies and furies, of sub-
mitting themselves in turn, like a Jeremiah, to the
inspiration of Jahveh. But in the first century the
impatience, anger, and despair were too great to express
themselves in books alone. Something more than words
was wanted—the active work of an Elijah and a
Jeremiah. From the midst of these men of god who
 RENASCENCE OE PROPHETISM

259

still wandered miserably about Palestine, pale vagabonds,
diviners, and healers, bearing the sacred mark of Jahveh,
madness, on their brows, there were bound to come some
who would rise to the effective position of prophets.

Thus at the beginning of the first century, for the first
time in history, the character that had been created by
the fiction of fourth and third-century writers became at
length a reality. There were among the lowly bone-
setters and fortune-tellers of Palestine men who spoke,
preached, and acted in the name of Jahveh. What
literary inventiveness had made of an Elijah or a
Jeremiah, a John the Baptist was in reality. The part
which had been imagined for an Elisha or an Isaiah was
taken up in fact by a Jesus the Nazarene. There were
at length prophets in Israel in some other than a literary
sense.

When we wish to conceive the life of a John the
Baptist, a Jesus the Nazarene, or a Theudas, we must
picture to ourselves wonder-workers, healers of men and
beasts, wandering from town to town, living by begging
or rascality, surrounded by a troop of followers, recruited
from the lower classes of society, and practising divina-
tion as well as healing. Their minds exalted, and
believing themselves to be in close relation with their
god, they call themselves his spokesmen; that is to say,
they give themselves the title of prophets on the same
ground that they grant it to the great classic prophets—
Elijah and Elisha, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah—their
models.

As Judaism is now triumphant in the whole of
Palestine (except in dissident regions like Samaria, which
had just recovered a semi-independence), we shall not be
surprised to find other men than those of Jerusalem
among the new prophets. We do not know the country
of John the Baptist; Theudas probably belonged to
Jerusalem; Jesus is said to have been a Galilaean.
There has been an interminable discussion as to whether
 260

THE ROMAN PERIOD

Jesus the Nazarene was a Jew. The point is without
interest; or, rather, it is very simple. All these men,
John the Baptist, Jesus the Nazarene, Theudas, and
those whose names are not preserved in history, were so
profoundly Judaisers that we must regard them as Jews.

The racial question is insoluble. It is beyond doubt
that there had been a great mixture of populations in
Galilee; but had there not been just as great a mingling
in Judaea itself ? Race is a fugitive, intangible thing;
tradition alone counts. For three centuries, perhaps,
and certainly since the early Machabees—that is to say,
for a century and a half—Galilee had been Judaised.
The Galilaeans of the first century practised Judaism,
and lived the Jewish life; they shared the Jewish soul
unreservedly; they were Jews.1

Coming from the lower ranks of society, the new
prophets remained, like their models, uncompromising
demagogues. Like them, they are ferociously orthodox;
like them, they are feverish with hatred of the goim;
like them, they are hostile to the upper clergy; like
them, they are pitiless enemies of wealth and power.

What do they take to be their mission? The same,
having regard to new conditions and the more recent
apocalyptic ideas, that the classical prophets had assumed
in their day; they are going to proclaim the promises
and threats of Jahveh, and announce the speedy liberation
of Israel and the imminent coming of the judgment of
Jahveh. In a word, they are precursors of the Messiah.
The expected Messiah was to be an angel, not a man.
It is inconceivable that any Jew could at that time call
himself, or be called, Messiah.

Of the two camps of Hillel and Shammai, which
divide Judaea, one ready to fly to arms, the other
advising patience, one fomenting rebellion, the other
promising divine intervention, the prophet-agitators are

1 See Appendix VII.
 JEWISH AGITATORS FROM THE YEAR 1 TO 66 261

disciples of Hillel. Their work is not to preach the holy
war, but to announce the speedy coming of the liberator.
Prudent in regard to the Romans, they avoid compro-
mising words. But the course of things drags them out
of their way. You cannot with impunity preach a great
hope of vengeance among an over-excited people. Their
hearts are inevitably lifted up; trouble begins—not
revolt, but heated movements, sometimes half-seditious.
That is enough, however. The Roman authority is
implacable. Rome suffers everything, except disorder ;
if there are ideas of revolt, it will make a terrible example.
It is not anger, but policy. At the first outbreak the
procurator pronounces sentence of death.

At other times the miserable agitators themselves lose
their heads, and resort to violence. Prom the precepts
of Hillel they pass some day to the violent party. From
that time they are confused with insurgents such as
Judas the Gaulonite ; and the Roman authority, which
has not spared the mere fomenters of trouble, will
certainly not spare the seditious. None of these new
prophets comes to an end save by the sword or the cross.

Let us say a few words on the chief among them.

§ 3. Jewish Agitators from the Year 1 to the
Year 66.

John the Baptist.—Our authorities are Flavius
Josephus1 and the later evangelical legends.

According to Josephus, John, surnamed the Baptist, a
man of great piety, exhorted the Jews to refrain from
sin and receive baptism. Josephus, who was resolved not
to speak of messianism, says no more about him. The
later legends leave no doubt that John announced the
speedy coming of the kingdom of Jahveh. Possibly he
was an Essenian. He had, Josephus says, many followers.

1 Jeivish Antiquities, xviii. 7.
 262

[Prometheus]

THE ROMAN PERIOD

The Herodian authority, which held in the neighbourhood
of the Jordan, and rested on the Roman authority, feared
some seditious movement. It had John imprisoned at
Machera, and decapitated.

Jesus the Nazarene.—Our authorities are the
Epistles of St. Paul, the gospel legends, and a few lines
in pagan writers of the second century.

The existence of Jesus seems to be doubtful. The
Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who wrote fifty years
after the assigned date of his death, says nothing about
him ; or, rather, his work only mentions him in a passage
which is unanimously recognised as an interpolation.1
Another Jewish historian of the same period, Justus of
Tiberias, knows nothing of him. The famous Alexandrian
Jew, Philo, who was born twenty years before Jesus, and
died twenty years after him, and who was the most
enlightened man of his age in the East, knows nothing of
him. The Talmud has not a single authentic detail about
him. No Latin or Greek historian of the first century
had heard of him ; and there is not a single contemporary
official text that indicates his existence. As to the
gospels, they are dogmatic, not historical, works; more-
over, the earliest of them belong to the end of the first
century.

On the other hand, the silence of Josephus may be due
to the suppression, by Christian hands, of lines analogous
to those he devotes to the other agitators; they would be
regarded as blasphemous, and replaced by the interpolated
passage. Again, it is difficult to admit that the gospel
legends, however dogmatic and however late they may be,
had not an historical basis. Finally, that the Latin and
Greek texts know nothing of Jesus is not, perhaps,
unintelligible, if his career was as humble as that of the
obscure prophets who then abounded in Palestine.

1 Jewish Antiquities, xviii. 4.
 JEWISH AGITATORS FROM THE YEAR 1 TO 66 263

If, however, we choose to admit the real existence of
an agitator of the name of Jesus, we have to be content
with the most meagre biographical details. For instance,
that Jesus was born in Galilee; that he worked as a
prophet there in the same conditions as the other Jewish
agitators of the time; that he at last allowed himself to
be led into the misadventure (entrance into Jerusalem
and invasion of the temple) which terminated in his
arrest; and that he was, on that account, condemned to
the cross by the Roman authority (not the Jewish
authority) under the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate.

Theudas.—Consult Josephus.1

Theudas, in the year 47, when Cuspius Fadus was
procurator of Judaea, persuaded a great crowd to follow
him as far as the Jordan, in the expectation that the
kingdom of Jahveh was at hand.

Fadus sent out a troop of cavalry. Theudas was taken
and beheaded, and his head was brought to Jerusalem.

Some Other Agitators.—It is beyond question that
there were many other agitators. John the Baptist,
Jesus the Nazarene, and Theudas—the only names that
have reached us—may be taken as prototypes of the
others.

Josephus speaks of numbers of “enchanters” who,
deceiving the people under the pretext of religion, led
them into solitary places, promising them that god would
show them by miracles that he wished to deliver them
from slavery. The procurator Felix, regarding these
meetings as a beginning of revolt, sent out soldiers, who
slew a great number of them.1 2

A prophet from Egypt attracts a number of Jews to
the Mountain of Olives, assuring them that the walls of
Jerusalem will fall at the sound of his voice. Felix killed

1   Jewish Antiquities, xx. 2.

2   Jewish War, ii. 23, and Jewish Antiquities, xx. C.
 264

THE ROMAN PERIOD

four hundred of them, and took two hundred prisoners;
but the Egyptian escaped.1

An “impostor,” whose profession was thaumaturgy,
leads out a number of people to the desert, promising to
deliver them from all sorts of evils. Festus, the successor
of Felix, dispersed them.2

They all have the same career, both those whose names
history has forgotten and those whose names have sur-
vived, such as John the Baptist, Jesus, and Theudas.
Disciples of Hillel, not of Shammai, they intend to preach
peacefully the speedy coming of the messianic era, as
Elijah, Elisha, Jeremiah, and Isaiah had done, and exhort
the people to prepare for the great event. But the
agitation works its effect; from the very nature of things,
trouble arises; and one fine day, whether they seek it or
are drawn into it, the disturbance breaks out. One of
them, Jesus, makes a sensational entry into Jerusalem at
the time of the Passover, and invades the temple with his
company; another, an unknown agitator, occupies the
Mount of Olives. At once the Roman authority inter-
venes, and the prophet ends on the cross, if he has not
been killed in the affray.

What traces did these ephemeral agitators leave behind
them ? Once the disturbance was over, and the agitator
cut down or crucified, most of his disciples scattered; but
a few remained faithful to the memory of the master.
Flavius Josephus speaks constantly of the disciples of this
or that man; the Jewish books never mention anybody
without saying who had been his master. In point of
fact, we do not know if any disciples survived of Theudas;
but it is said that John the Baptist and Jesus had some
after their execution. They were humble folk, however,
doomed to disappear rapidly. Why should they last?
None of them had been animated by a master of genius.
Jesus had taken up the work of John the Baptist; an
unknown continued the work of Jesus ; Theudas followed.

1 Ibidem.

2 Jewish Antiquities, xx. 7.
 JEWISH AGITATORS FROM THE YEAR 1 TO 66 265

Meantime there were, besides the prophet-disciples of
Hillel, the insurgents, the disciples of Shammai.

Flavius Josephus distinguishes between the two.
“ While,” he says, “ the brigands filled Jerusalem with
murders, the enchanters seduced the people.”1   “ The

former,” he says elsewhere, “were impious men and
disturbers of the public peace, deceiving the people under
the guise of religion; the others were murderers, shedding
human blood.”2 Every day, indeed, the flood of anger
was rising in Judaea; the old lesson of patience was
being lost.

In the year 4 Judas the Gaulonite and Sadoc had
refused to obey Rome, and taken to arms. Then—to
quote only the chief episodes of the story—there was the
affair of the standards. Pontius Pilate had placed the
figure of Tiberius Caesar on the standards of Jerusalem.
It was a sacrilegious violation of the Mosaic laws. The
Jews advanced with such threatening entreaties upon
Caesaraea, where the procurator was, that he yielded.

Pontius Pilate having used the money of the temple on
public works, another sedition broke out. This time he
drowned it in blood.

Caligula wishes to have a statue of himself placed in
the temple. There is the same popular movement as in
regard to the standards.

Later, two sons of Judas the Gaulonite, Jacob and
Simeon, entice the zealots into a fresh insurrection.
They are taken, and suffer the punishment of the rebel:
they are crucified.

The years which precede the great insurrection are
increasingly filled with disorder ; acts of fearful fanaticism
on the part of the Jews, who are more and more exasper-
ated, and of more and more severe repression on the part
of the Romans. So great a terror reigned at Jerusalem,
says Flavius Josephus, that people thought themselves

1 Jeiuish Antiquities, xx. G.   2 Jewish War, ii. 23.
 266

THE ROMAN PERIOD

in no less peril than they would be in the midst of the
most sanguinary war.1

In the other towns of Judaea disturbances break out
between the Jews and the pagans, and are followed by
abominable massacres. The fiercest intolerance predom-
inates among the Jerusalemites; when they cannot
persecute others, the Jews cry out that they are being
persecuted. As the chosen race of Jahveh, they have
rights over the pagans, but the pagans have no rights
over them. Judaic fanaticism thus set an example to the
Churches, which define liberty as the right to privileges,
and regard themselves as persecuted when they are not
permitted to oppress their opponents.

One day, at Jerusalem, the leaders of the active resist-
ance party decide that the sacrifices offered to the temple
by pagans must be rejected, and they refuse the victims
that are offered in the name of the emperor. The men
of the other party, both Sadducees and Pharisees,
endeavour to persuade the recusants to undo their
resolution ; they see the danger that threatens the city.
It is useless; the recusants, trusting to their greater
numbers, think of nothing but revolt.2

The middle of the first century represents, in Judaea,
one of the disturbed periods of history. A tempest of
furious madness blows over Jerusalem, but the national
passion never ceases for a moment to clothe itself in the
form of a religious passion; for the Jews religion is,
to the end, the formula of nationalism.

The great festivals which are celebrated every year at
Jerusalem are always the occasion of trouble. Jerusalem
is not an oriental capital; it is a holy city; it could best
be compared to the Mecca of to-day. The Mosaic law
has enjoined that, on each of the great festivals, the Jews
must come to the temple, the unique temple at Jerusalem,
to present themselves before their god.

1 Jewish War, ii. 23.

2 Jewish War, ii. 30.
 JEWISH AGITATORS FROM THE YEAR 1 TO 66 267

Three times in a year shall all your males appear before
Jahveh, your god, in the place which he shall choose; in
the feast of unleavened bread, and in the feast of weeks,
and in the feast of tabernacles.1

The law, once framed for a country that consisted of
Jerusalem and its outskirts, remains the law of a country
that embraces Palestine, to say nothing of the colonies
scattered on every side. Judaism is maintained, with all
its commandments ; it will not renounce a single verse of
its Thora; it knows that the duties it continues to impose
are a source of strength to be preserved. Hence, at each
of the three great festivals, immense pilgrimages, in
which the national life is sustained in the form of a
religious communion, meet in the holy city.

At ordinary times Jerusalem has thirty thousand souls ;
at the time of the festivals the pilgrims bring up its
population to a million feverish minds, wild-beating
hearts, and howling mouths. All these move restlessly
at the foot of the temple, the centre of the world, the
house of Jahveh. The Roman cohorts watch them ; but
the anger around them rumbles, and the fever rises. No
one knows exactly the extent of the power of Rome.
The prophets preach from the steps; the zealots glide
through the throng, sword in hand; and men repeat the
unforgettable promises of Jahveh.

These promises—the avenging of insults, the conquest
of the world, the triumph of Judaism from the Euphrates
to the gates of the West—should be fulfilled by Jahveh
acting alone, by his Messiah, who will appear in the
heavens above with a train of Kerubim. By forgetting
the old verse : “ It is not on thy bow that thou shalt rely,
nor by thy sword that thou shalt conquer,” by following
Shammai instead of Hillel, the Jews of Jerusalem have
condemned their city. The revolt of the year 66 ended
in the ruin of the city and of Judsea in the year 70. And
in their effort to meet Rome face to face, with open war,

1 Detiteronomy xvi. 16.
 268

THE ROMAN PERIOD

the Jews of Jerusalem would have destroyed Judaism,
together with the city, if it had not been saved by the
men of the subterraneous war, the humble and patient
Jews of the Dispersion.
 Chapter IV.

THE INVASION

§ 1. Notes on the Dispersion.

When, in the year 70 of the present era, the Emperor
Titus, after one of the most terrible sieges that is known
to history, took Jerusalem by assault, burned the temple,
destroyed the city, and put an end to the political destiny
of the Jewish people, Judaism flourished over nearly the
whole extent of the Graeco-Roman world.

The spread of the Jews over the Graeco-Roman world
is called the Dispersion; the Greeks called it the Dias-
pora. We have often, in the course of our study, touched
upon episodes of the Dispersion, and it may be useful to
make a general survey of it before we conclude. But as
the Dispersion did not attain its proper character until
the time when the Jews took the books of the Law with
them over the world, a few lines will suffice for the
emigrations before the fifth century.

It will be remembered how the inhabitants of Samaria
in 721, and those of Jerusalem in 599 and 588, were
deported by the kings of Assur and Babylon to the banks
of the Tigris and the Euphrates. At the time of the
great Assyrian and Babylonian empires conquest was
always followed by deportation. A Salmanasur, king of
Assur, or a Nabuchodonosor, king of Babylon, fell with
his vast army upon the kingdom of Samaria or the
kingdom of Judah. The country was looted, the towns
were sacked, and the conqueror led away, in immense
flocks, the greater part of the vanquished population, as
well as the treasures of their temples and harems. The
lowly, the weak, the powerless, were left in the devastated

269
 270

[Prometheus]

THE INVASION

fields or amid the ruins of the dismantled towns. The
finest part of the population, the soldiers and the agri-
cultural workers, went with their leaders to populate some
distant territory.

The Samaritans had been in Assyria nearly two hun-
dred years, and the Jerusalemites fifty years in Babylonia,
when, in 538, Cyrus, king of Persia, took Babylon, and,
it is said, allowed the exiles to return to their countries.
But we have seen that, contrary to the traditional opinion,
only a very small number of the Jews left the banks of
the Euphrates to return to Jerusalem. The rebuilding
of Jerusalem, the reconstitution of the little Jewish State,
the work of perseverance and passion which is called the
Bestoration, was accomplished by the sons of the men
who had remained in the ruins of the city.

What became of the Jews who remained in Babylonia,
and of the Samaritans who remained in Assyria ?

The Samaritan exiles were lost in the chaos of peoples
that swarmed about the Tigris. Two hundred years of
exile must have erased all trace of their not very pro-
nounced nationality. It was probably too late when the
tolerance of Cyrus permitted them to renew their relations
with their former country.

The Jews of Babylonia, on the other hand, had not had
time, in fifty years, to lose their nationality. But the
Assyriological documents show them to us mingling with
the surrounding population. They would have been
gradually absorbed, like their brothers of Samaria, or of
Elephantine, if emigration had not brought among them
Jews of the new school, the Esdras school, Jews who had
with them the Mosaic law. Instead of the Jews of
Babylon restoring Judaism at Jerusalem, it was the Jews
of the restored Jerusalem who gave new life to Babylonian
Judaism.

There was constant communication between the
Euphrates and Jerusalem. The road from the Eu-
phrates to Jerusalem does not go straight from east to
 THE INVASION

271

west. A straight line from Jerusalem to Babylon would
cross the desert of Syria, which is impracticable. Even
in our time the caravans which leave Jerusalem go straight
north to Damascus. There they at last turn to the east,
and, when they reach the Euphrates, they descend the
bank of the river until they reach the field of ruins which
was Babylon. The road is not more than a thirty days’
journey. It was one of the busiest of ancient Asia. By
it there penetrated into Jerusalem those Babylonian
elements that formed the culture-medium in which the
Jewish soul began to develop. By it, on account of the
constant exchanges between the colony and the metro-
polis, the latter sent to the colony the nationalist spirit it
had itself created, while the colony sent to Jerusalem the
great Babylonian education that would give it its form.

For five centuries the Babylonian Jews will continue
faithfully to send the tithes prescribed in the Mosaic law
to the temple at Jerusalem, and to come thither on pil-
grimage at the time of the great festivals. Afterwards,
when Judaea has been destroyed by Eoman legions, and
the Jewish colonies of the western world will be rapidly
Hellenising, Babylonia will remain a Jewish centre, shel-
tered from dangerous novelties, and the Talmudic growth
will expand there in peace.

The movement from which Christianity was to issue
took place in the Jewish colonies of the western world.
We know what the development of the Jewish people was
from the time of Esdras; but we must not forget that,
although it gave birth to a soul wild enough to dream of
conquering the world, Jerusalem long remained a poor
State, limited to one city and its outskirts. The
expansion first took place in Palestine. It began at the
beginning of the fourth century, shortly after the time of
Esdras. History has not preserved the details of this
emigration, but the earliest Biblical books show the
settling of a certain number of Jewish families outside
the limits of the State of Jerusalem.
 272

THE INVASION

In the middle of the fourth century, about the year
350, shortly before the destruction of the Persian
monarchy, deportation begins its work once more. The
Phoenicians having risen against the Persian emperor
Artaxerxes Ochus, the Jews also rebelled; like his Assy-
rian and Babylonian predecessor, the Persian, after
reducing them, sent a certain number of them to Egypt
and Hyrcania.

A few years later Alexander the Great spread his rule
over the western Asiatic world. He wished to establish,
under the hegemony of Greece, a new world, in which
the small States which Persia had left isolated might be
amalgamated. After his death his successors continued
his work, amid the war which they waged unceasingly
against each other. New provinces had been formed,
new towns were created, and mixed populations were
brought to them from every side. Alexandria in Egypt,
and Antioch in Syria, were the chief of these cities.

It seems that Alexandria and Antioch received a
number of Jewish families almost immediately. Tradition
affirms that Alexander and his successors made it a point
of honour to induce men of Judaea to migrate to their
new capitals. The fact is doubtful; it is better to inquire
to what extent the Jewish expansion at the end of the
fourth century was due to deportation and to voluntary
emigration.

We have seen the frightful misfortunes in which the
Jews struggled during the last part of the fourth century.
Shortly after the rebellion against Artaxerxes Ochus and
the subsequent deportation, the wars of the successors of
Alexander desolate Judaea, while intestine quarrels fling
Jerusalem, Samaria, and Edom against each other. It is
the abominable period reflected in the earlier prophets.

Among the events of this terrible period the fact of the
taking of Jerusalem by assault, followed by a new
deportation, seems to be historical. It is almost certain
that in 320 Ptolemy Soter took Jerusalem by storm, after
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273

a siege, and sent his prisoners to Egypt. The deporta-
tion under Ptolemy Soter, after the deportation under
Artaxerxes Ochus, is enough to justify the imprecations
of the prophets; but it is probable that, in the course of
all these wars, raids brought troops of Jewish prisoners
to both Egypt and Syria. At the very base of the Jewish
expansion round the Mediterranean we are bound to put
the violent removal of Jewish families from their homes,
and their despatch to Egyptian and Syrian towns. The
prophets repeatedly speak of the Jews outside of Judaea
as exiles; and we cannot doubt that a large number owed
their exile to violence.

But there were also voluntary exiles. The soil of
Judaea is not rich enough to feed a compact population;
and the endless misfortunes that fell on it during the
second half of the fourth century were bound to accelerate
the emigration.

Egypt has always been, and is to-day, the country
preferred by Palestinians who are too miserable in their
own land. The road that led from Jerusalem to Alex-
andria was followed by the Jews of the fourth century,
as it has been by the Jews of all periods. About
the year 300 the Greek historian Hecataeus of Abdera
was able to obtain information at Alexandria on Jewish
affairs and certain of the Mosaic laws. An inscription
witnesses that there was a synagogue not far from the
city by the middle of the third century.

On the northern side another road led to Antioch, and
from there to Asia Minor. All these were open paths for
emigrants. The Phoenician ports also, west from Jerusalem,
attracted the poorer Jews who had not the means of sub-
sistence in their own land; Tyre was soon full of them.
The second half 'of the fourth century marks the begin-
ning of the great movement of the men of Jerusalem
toward exile.

We must not, therefore, imagine the Jews of the Dis-
persion as pioneers going out to spread the name of

T
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Jahveh to the ends of the earth. Deportation and
emigration, brutal constraint and misery, had done their
work, and the prophets at Jerusalem unanimously
lamented the brethren who had been torn from their
city; with one voice they sang this one hope and one
consolation, the return of the exiles.

Instead of the exiles returning to the mother country,
new emigrants forsook her unceasingly. Increase and
multiply, the law had said to the men of Jerusalem ; and
the Jewish people increased and multiplied above all
others. Emigration spread into Egypt, the East, Syria,
Asia Minor, the Greek islands, and even beyond. As we
advance in history, more numerous and more precise
documents make plain to us the Jewish expansion round
the Mediterranean. The movement, begun at the end of
the fourth century, continues in the third. The despair,
the regret, the sufferings, and the hopes of the exiles, and
the promises that they will return, fill the two Isaiahs.
The third century is the century of emigration ; the second
will be the same. In the second century the Jewish
colony at Alexandria becomes very large.

The exodus will continue inexorably during the Macha-
baean and the Herodian periods. At the height of the
Machabaean wars deportation will begin again ; Antiochus
Epiphanes and his successors will send a part of their
Jewish prisoners to Greece, where they will settle. A
century later, in 63, Pompey, having taken Jerusalem by
storm, will send a hundred thousand Jewish slaves to
Italy, Flavius Josephus says. But it is emigration rather
than deportation that will fill with Jews the towns of the
Mediterranean basin, and every year vessels will leave the
Phoenician ports with their mournful human herds.

§ 2.

What was to become of all these exiles and emigrants ?
Would they, as they were poured upon the foreign soil,
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275

mingle with the native population and, while influencing
them, insensibly disappear in them ? If they had been
thus assimilated, Judaism would have disappeared after
the fall of Jerusalem, and there would have been no
Christianity. But they were not so assimilated. The
Jewish element resisted mixture ; cast into the depths of
the most varied cities, over the Grseco-Roman world, the
Jews preserved their individuality in them. Their rule
was not to mingle with people whom they regarded as
pagans ; people whom they despised, and who despised
them for their lowliness ; people whom they hated, and
who hated them for their separatist pride. And they
found in the unwearying stubbornness of their soul the
strength to persevere.

In the worst situation in which wretched emigrants
could be placed, they sacrificed nothing of their fierce
nationality. Always grouped together and closely united,
occupying distinct quarters in their towns, they opposed
a wall of iron to every attempt to invade them. They
determined to remain, and they remained, in the midst
of foreign and hostile populations, the same men that they
had been in their own country of Judaea. They retained
their customs, clothing, and religion, secured privileges,
observed their laws, and remained Jews.

But, while they preserved their institutions and
practices, they had not kept their language. In the first
century before the present era Greek (not Latin, as one
might think) was the universal language of the Mediter-
ranean basin. The Jews of the Dispersion gradually
began to speak Greek, and—a notable event—the Bible
was translated into Greek. In this way Judaism, and
Christianity afterwards, found the means of propaganda;
Judaism at Alexandria was renovated by contact with
Hellenic culture; and the only sacrifice that the Jews of
the Dispersion made of their inheritance, the abandon-
ment of the Hebrew tongue, would contribute to their
development.
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The date of the translation of the Septuagint (as the
Greek translation of the Bible is called) is much disputed.
Josephus relates that the “ Book of the Law ” was trans-
lated in the reign and at the command of Ptolemy
Philadelphus, in 277, which we cannot admit. In 277
there was not yet a “Book of the Law there was merely
a series of separate pieces, not yet put together; the latest
Levitic mashal were scarcely finished. On the other
hand, the translation of the Mosaic law was undertaken in
order to meet the needs of the Jews of Alexandria, when
they no longer understood Hebrew, and when they were
numerous enough, and the colony important enough, to
make so large a work indispensable and possible. These
different considerations bring us to the second century
before the present era, and, in point of fact, the first proof
we have of the existence of a Greek Bible is about the
year 130 (the arrival of the grandson of Ben-Sira at
Jerusalem). The Jewish Bible thus became, on its
translation into Greek, an instrument of propaganda
through the whole Grseco-Boman world, instead of being
a document hopelessly closed against western peoples.

Thanks to the laws, customs, and religion to which
they clung, the rule of isolation that they accepted or,
rather, claimed, the hatred they felt for the goim and the
hatred they engendered in the goim, and in spite of their
having forgotten their mother tongue, these wretched
emigrants and exiles remained Jews at all times and in all
places, from father to son. They were bound to become
very numerous. Not one of their colonies disappearing,
or being assimilated, or mixing with the population, they
would necessarily increase in importance. The Graeco-
Boman world ought, logically, to be filled with Jews in
time. Was it so in reality ?

Let us hear the witnesses.

First half of the second century.—The book of Esther,
the most ferociously and sanguinarily Judaic of all the
books of the Bible, shows us the Jews spread over the
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277

whole oriental world, from Egypt to Persia and on to the
islands of the sea, and so numerous, so powerful, and so
dangerous, that the first Antisemite makes his appearance
in history in the person of Haman. Haman speaks
thus :—

There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed
among the people in all the provinces of thy kingdom, and
their laws are diverse from those of all peoples.1

And Haman adds :—

[Prometheus]

Neither keep they the king’s laws, therefore it is not
for the king’s profit to suffer them.

The book of Esther is not history ; it interests the
historian rather by the situations it describes than the
events it relates.

Let us hear the rest of the witnesses.

End of the second century, or beginning of the first.—
The Alexandrian Jew who wrote in the name of the Sibyl
speaks thus :—

Every land and every sea is filled with them.2

About the year 1.—We pass over a century, and reach
the age of Augustus. The world is now Roman. The
witness is a pagan writer, the historian-geographer
Strabo:—

The Jews have penetrated into every town, and it is not
easy to find a single spot in the inhabited world that has
not received this people, and is not dominated by it.3

Middle of the first century of the present era.—Less
than fifty years after Strabo, Philo, the most celebrated
and learned of the Alexandrian Jews, gave fresh testimony
to the invasion of the Graeco-Roman world by his com-
patriots. His words are :—

Jerusalem is not only the metropolis of Judaea, but of
most countries. It has sent colonies into the contiguous
countries, Egypt, Phoenicia, Syria, and Coele-Syria, and
into more distant countries, Pamphilia, Cilicia, most of

1 Esther iii. 8.   2 Oracles of the Sibyl, iii. 271.

3 Strabo, quoted by Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, xiv. 12.
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the Asiatic States, even to Bithynia, to the confines of
Pontus, to Europe, to Thessaly, Boeotia, Macedonia,
Aetolia, Attica, Argos, Corinth, and the most populous
and finest parts of Peloponnesus; and not only has it
opened its settlements on the continent, but also in the
principal islands, Euboea, Cyprus, and Crete; I do not
speak of the lands beyond the Euphrates, because all of
them, including Babylon and the neighbouring satrapies,
have, with few exceptions, Jewish inhabitants.1

It is a text of extraordinary importance, and it is con-
firmed every day by the inscriptions discovered.

End of the first century.—Flavius Josephus, who wrote
in the last years of the first century of the present era,
gives us many indications of the state of the Dispersion in
his time. In Syria the Jewish inhabitants are in the
majority; at Antioch they have a splendid synagogue ; at
Damascus they number more than ten thousand, and
most of the women are Judaisers; they are settled in
Mesopotamia, along the whole coast of Asia Minor, and in
Cyrenaica. In Egypt they number a million.

The New Testament, in fine, is not a less witness, and
the Epistles of St. Paul, especially, assume the existence
of synagogues in all the large towns of the Empire.

It remains only to show how Rome itself was invaded
by Judaism.

It seems that there were Jews at Rome from the second
century before the present era. According to Valerius
Maximus, the praetor Hispalus, in 139, expelled the Jews
from the city on account of their proselytism. Flavius
Josephus relates, as we saw, that Pompey, in 63, sent his
prisoners as slaves to Rome. But the first contemporary
witness to the existence of a Jewish colony in Italy is
Cicero ; and his testimony is decisive.

Cicero pleads for the proconsul Flaccus, who is charged
with exaction in Syria. He comes to speak of sums of
money that the Jews of Asia Minor had sent to the
temple at Jerusalem, according to the practice of their

1 Philo, Lcgatio ad Gaium, letter of Agrippa to Caligula.
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279

religion, which Flaccus is accused of diverting. He then
approaches the tribunal. He reproaches the accuser with
having secured the trial on the Aurelian steps, in the open
Forum, instead of in the enclosure reserved for civic
affairs, and having chosen this spot because of the crowd
of Jews who would be there.

“ Thou knowest,” he says to the accuser, “ how great is
their number, their union, their power.....nl

And he says that he is going to speak law, so that he
will be heard by the judges only. Later he congratulates
his client for having dared to brave these Jews who some-
times disturb public assemblies.

Thus, barely three years after Pompey has sent his
Jewish prisoners to Rome, Cicero speaks, not merely of
the number and unity, but the power, of the Jews at
Rome; and they are regarded as formidable, and can
disturb a proconsul. The settlement of the Jews at
Rome was accomplished more than half-a-century before
the Christian era.

A hundred years later, Seneca, confirming the testimony
of Strabo and Philo, will express a fact historically known
in his time in saying of the Jews that “ this nation [the
most rascally of all, he adds] has done so well that its
practices are now established over the whole earth.”1 2

§ 3.

The Jewish groups, thus scattered throughout the
Grseco-Roman world, had had at first, in point of organi-
sation, the form of foreign settlements. Closed associa-
tions, they had originally represented the effort of the
emigrants to defend and maintain themselves in the
midst of a hostile world. Little by little, as the years

1 Cicero, Pro Flacco, 28.

2 Seneca, quoted by St. Augustine, De Civitatc Dei, vi. 10.
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rolled on, these associations had become permanent; the
hope of returning to their mother country became more
and more chimerical; the emigrants understood that
they must die in the land of exile.

As we have said, the exiled or emigrant Jews had at all
times and in all places preserved their laws, their usages,
their religion, and, in a general way, their cast of mind.
Nevertheless a great evolution of the Jewish soul would
he brought about by the Dispersion. In Judaea the Jews
were devoted exclusively to agriculture and pasture.
Industry and commerce barely existed; the Jewish spirit,
absorbed in its nationalist and religious fanaticism, dis-
liked meddling with business. The Eoman, a soldier and
administrator, hated and despised business; the Jew had
usually the same hatred and contempt out of fanaticism.
Commerce is anathematised in the Bible. The Greeks,
unlike the Romans and Jews, were born merchants; it
was an additional reason why commerce should be odious
to the uncompromising prophets. We must conceive the
Jews of Jerusalem as orientals incapable of any sustained
labour, interested only in politics and religion, using up
their days in controversy about the temple, after doing
the smallest amount of work that would preserve them
from dying of hunger. The formula of Jerusalemitic
Judaism was always that of the Sermon on the Mount:—

Behold the fowls of the air....Consider the lilies of the

field....1

The Dispersion gradually converted the Jews into the
merchants who were familiar to the Middle Ages and
modern times. What enterprise, indeed, was there for
these emigrants and exiles in towns where they infallibly
remained pariahs ? The lowest occupations at first. The
main point was to live. The indefatigable perseverance
that expressed itself at Jerusalem in resisting anti-
national influences found expression, among the Jews

1 Matthew vi. 26 and 28.
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281

of the colonies, first in a determination to remain Jews,
then to ascend the steps that lead from the lowest occu-
pations to high commerce. About the year 6 they are
still, with few exceptions, in the humblest forms of
commerce. But the evolution has begun; there is a
tense activity in the ghettoes. Does not the Mosaic law
permit in the colonies what it forbids at Jerusalem ? Is
not usury permitted in regard to the goim, though for-
bidden between Jew and Jew ? While Jerusalem is the
city of political and religious exaltation, the Jewish colo-
nies are ant-hills, in which a small world of miserable
folk busy themselves in the obscure getting of their daily
bread.

The generations go by. The children, the grand-
children, of the emigrants are now attached to the soil
on which their fathers settled, cursing their destiny.
They remain Jewish in heart, thought, and ways. Never
for a moment do they mingle with the goim. They have
kept their individuality. They belong, however, to the
country ; they become national, from the very nature of
things; in a word, they cease to be foreigners. The
Jewish communities are no longer the associations of
foreigners that they were at first; they become private
societies. It is the second form of their organisation.

But these private societies, formed for the security of
the commercial as well as the religious interests of their
members, have a peculiar character: they have the
appearance of being purely religious societies. The
synagogue is their centre in every city; the governor of
the synagogue is their leader. Religion, in fact, is the
bond and the soul of these communities. The asso-
ciation of interests in the Jewish colonies cannot, any
more than nationalism at Jerusalem, assume any other
form than that of religion. Ajaother characteristic feature
is that the Jewish communities now embrace, not only
Jews, but Judaisers. Natives of the country in the
vicinity of the Jews have begun to Judaise, or to experi-
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ence the Jewish influence. They have learned about
Jewish matters, observe certain Jewish laws, and live the
Jewish life. The great work of propaganda has set in.
And the synagogue opens its doors to the proselytes who
come to it.

As private societies under the form of religious societies,
then, the majority of the Jewish colonies organised them-
selves about the beginning of the present era; thus,
especially, were organised the Jewish colonies at Rome.
In some cities, however, the Jews attained a higher
organisation, and reached a situation not unlike that of
the corporations which the Romans formed in non-
Roman countries. When the Romans settled or travelled
in non-Roman lands, they were in a privileged position ;
they were independent of the municipalities in which
they were, and they kept their own laws and jurisdiction.
It is hardly surprising in men who had conquered the
whole known world ; it is not more surprising in the
Jews, the eternally conquered, if we remember the im-
measurable power of resistance and perseverance that
sustained the miserable and admirable people through so
many trials.

Strabo, in the text that we have quoted above, explains
that the Jews had some such position in Alexandria and
Cyrenaica:—

In Egypt the Jews have received separate quarters to
live in ; at Alexandria an extensive quarter has been set
aside for them. At their head there is an ethnarch who
administers the affairs of the colony, presides at litigation,
and sees to the execution of contracts and regulations, like
the head of an independent State.1

There the Jewish colony no longer needed to take the
form of a religious association in order to maintain itself.
Religion was always the principle of union, but the colony
had become a sort of political federation—a State within
the State ; Strabo says Wvoc, el people apart, a vassal

1   Strabo, quoted by Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, xiv. 12.
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283

rather than a subject of the local government. Let us
hasten to say, however, that this extraordinary state of
things does not seem to have been found outside of Alex-
andria and Cyrenaica. It is due to the great number of
Alexandrian and Cyrenian Jews, and doubtless to the
weakness of the last kings of Egypt.

The Romans exacted only submission and the payment
of taxes; when they took Egypt, they accepted the
accomplished fact. Moreover, all forms of organisation
of the Jewish colonies, from the foreign settlement and
the private society with a religious form to the political
confederation of Alexandria or Cyrenaica, assumed
religious liberty. Roman toleration had given the Jewish
colonies, not merely religious liberty, but privileges. The
Empire recognised all religions. For the Romans a
religion was the symbol of a people; when they opened
the Empire to all peoples, they opened their Capitol to all
the gods. There was only the theory of the supremacy
of the patron-god of the city, Jupiter Capitolinus, and
afterwards of the cult of the Emperor, which similarly
symbolised the dominion of Rome, that was incompatible
with the Jewish religion. Caligula endeavoured to impose
it on the Jews; they resisted, and the Romans had too
deep a political sense to insist. The Roman government
did not set up a priori theories; practical needs and local
considerations preceded abstract principles. The Jewish
communities were, throughout the whole Empire, dis-
pensed from celebrating the cult of Caesar.

Another privilege relieved them of military service.
Military service seemed to the Jews incompatible with the
observance of some of the laws of Moses, especially that
of the Sabbath. Roman policy declined to exasperate
fanatics.

By a third privilege the Jews had the right, as long as
the temple existed at Jerusalem, not only to visit it
from all parts in pilgrimages of thousands at the time
of the great festivals, but to send their tribute to it.
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