This national catastrophe, commemorated as it was for all time on the imperishable marbles of the triumphal arch of Titus, left an indelible impression on the mind of Israel. It aroused the strongest feelings of the Hebrew nature, and fixed a chasm between Jew and Gentile which even the lapse of long centuries proved unable to bridge. The conqueror’s name was handed down the ages as a synonym for everything that is monstrous and horrible, and his language was tabooed even in epitaphs, the tombs in the Jewish catacombs at Rome bearing few Latin inscriptions, though Greek ones abound. Here we may pause to enquire into the causes of this persistent warfare. CHAPTER III JUDAISM AND PAGANISM OVER and above the two great causes of the unpopularity of the Jew, already adduced, namely, man’s intolerance of dissent, and the antipathy between the European and the Asiatic, there was another and more obvious barrier to a good understanding between the two elements--one sin which the Gentile could not pardon in the Jew: the Jew’s infatuated arrogance--that contempt for all men born outside the pale of the Synagogue, which national humiliation, instead of effacing, had deepened and embittered. It was this provincial spirit that had prevented the message of Moses from spreading abroad, as the message of Jesus and the message of Mohammed spread in after times. It was the same spirit that now forbade the Jew to feel at home in the presence of the Gentile. Judaism has always lacked the magnetic attraction of Christianity and Islam, not because the rule of life which it prescribes is less pure, or the prospect of peace which it holds out less alluring to the heart that yearns for rest, but because, unlike Christianity and Islam, it deliberately repels instead of inviting outsiders. The doors of Moses’s heaven are jealously closed to the stranger; and those who have entered into it have at no time been more numerous than those who have come out of it. When Jehovah ceased to be the God of a clan, he became the God of a nation, but he could not, and would not, become the God of mankind. In spite of periodical attempts made by individual prophets and Rabbis to soar above the barriers of narrow nationalism, and to infuse their own noble spirit into the teaching of their predecessors and into the minds of their contemporaries, in spite, also, of the broadening of the conception of the divine, due to contact with the sublime religion of Babylon, Jehovah, to the ordinary Jew, remained an essentially tribal god. His interests continued to be bound up with the interests of the chosen people. An elaborate fence of ceremonial and custom separated this people from all other peoples. On leaving their native soil the Jews carried away with them all the spiritual pride and all the pious prejudices which distinguished their ancestors. A wider knowledge of the world and its inhabitants failed to broaden their sympathies.