We have seen how the exiles in Babylonia kept the Sabbath and went to the synagogue in order that they might continue to be Jews and might not lose their Jewish religion, the worship of Jehovah. As time went on they found it necessary to be more and more strict. As their girls and boys grew up they fell in love with Babylonian young men and young women. But if these young Jews had married Babylonians, the children would have grown up as Babylonians in customs and religion. So all intermarriages were forbidden. =The fight against intermarriages in Judaea.=--When these exiles returned from Babylonia to Jerusalem they were shocked to find that the Jews there had not been strict in this matter. They had taken wives and husbands from the Moabites, and Edomites, and other nations around Judaea. It is hard for us to see that this was wrong, for these people probably became worshipers of Jehovah, like Ruth the Moabitess in the beautiful story in the Bible, who said to her Jewish mother-in-law, "Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God." The exiles from Babylon, however, including so good and wise a man as Nehemiah, fought with all their might against all intermarriages. Without doubt the motive, which was to protect the Hebrews from idolatry, was good, but the matter is certainly open to criticism, especially in the light of our truer knowledge of God. We read that at one time, even under the leadership of Ezra, one of the returned exiles, a large number of the wives from other nations were cruelly divorced and sent away weeping to their own people. All this helped to give the Jews a wrong and unreasonable pride in their own race and a silly and unkind contempt for other races. =The hatred between the Jews and the Samaritans.=--About the time of Nehemiah there was also started a bitter feud between the Jews and the Samaritans. There had always been a good deal of jealousy between the people of Judah in the South, and the Hebrews of the central and northern parts of Canaan. Samaria was the capital of the northern kingdom, which had split off from the kingdom of David and Solomon. This old jealousy flamed up again after Nehemiah. The Samaritans had intermarried with their heathen neighbors, perhaps more than the Jews in Judaea. So the Jews claimed that the Samaritans had no right to call themselves true Hebrews. The Samaritans, on the other hand, claimed that they were true children of Abraham, and they built a temple of their own on Mount Gerizim as a rival to the temple of Jerusalem. This jealousy and hate grew more and more bitter until, in the time of Jesus, the Jews looked upon Samaritans with even more contempt than any Gentiles.