=1. Conquered Jews in the West.=――The first few years after the fall of Jerusalem, by contrast with what had gone before, were not, strange as it may seem, an altogether unhappy time for the Jews in Palestine. The worst had come, and the worst proved hardly so terrible as the waiting for it. The Romans were stern masters, but not vindictive ones. So long as the Jews accepted the new conditions, these were not cruelly enforced, nor were any of the private religious arrangements of the dispossessed people interfered with. The slaves, in many cases, bought their liberty. Their schools supplied an interest to the conquered Jews, and a link between them; and dispersed as they were, and despised to some extent as they were, the Jews did not become degraded. The existence of their Sanhedrin with its dignified literary labourers, chosen from their own ranks, kept up their sense of self-respect. Deep was the loyalty felt towards the president of the Sanhedrin. He became in some sort an uncrowned king of this fallen people. They called him their נָשִׂיא ‘prince’; and, without one inch of territory, a very wide and a very real dominion this spiritual potentate grew to have over the hearts and minds of his brethren. The internal government of the different Jewish communities in the Roman Empire varied. In Alexandria a head and chief, whom the Greeks called ethnarch, presided over a council of seventy elders. In Rome, each of the many synagogues had its own separate administration and its own separate name. Almost every place where Jews congregated had its own little council, a sort of miniature Sanhedrin, which looked after local Jewish matters. But all the various communities of the Western world, widely separated as they were, had one thing in common: they all acknowledged as supreme the authority of the נָשִׂיא or president for the time being of the Sanhedrin in Palestine. He came to be called the patriarch, and his head-quarters were first at Jamnia, then at Sepphoris, and afterwards at Tiberias. =2. Contemporary Jews in the East.=――The exiles and captives in Babylonia and Mesopotamia had led a quiet life for centuries. They, like their brethren, were a captive race, but the Parthian kings, like the Persian kings, were milder masters than the Romans, and perhaps the Babylonian Jews themselves were more patient than the Palestinian Jews. It was, at any rate, an easier thing to be subject in exile than to be subject on native soil. The scattered communities settled between the Tigris and Euphrates had gradually established schools and seats of learning in the Babylonian country. Besides the heads of these schools (רֵישֵׁי כַלֵי), there was a political head or chief whom the Eastern Jews invested with a good deal of general authority, and whom they called רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא, Head or Prince of the Captivity.