The Jews of the twentieth century, numbering perhaps some ten or eleven millions, although scattered over many lands, constitute a distinct race, a separate people or nation. While during the Christian centuries _all_ other races--peoples--nations--without a single exception have become extinct, or have become fused and merged with other and newer races and peoples, they, the Jews, have _alone_ preserved their ancient nationality, their descent, their peculiar features, their individuality, their cherished traditions--_absolutely intact_. * * * * * It does not seem ever to have been remarked that the rise and influence of the great Rabbinic schools of Palestine and Babylonia, at Tiberias and Jamnia, at Sura and Pumbeditha--schools devoted to the study of the Torah (the Law) and the other books of the Old Testament, were coincident with the rise and influence of the Gnostic schools, schools in which the Old Testament was generally reviled and discredited. Is it too much to assume that echoes from the great Rabbinic teaching centres reached and sensibly influenced the Christian masters in their life and death contest with Gnosticism, a contest in which the Old Testament, its divine origin and its authority, was ever one of the principal questions at stake? * * * * * Nor is it an altogether baseless conception which sees that the reverence and love of at least a large proportion of earnest Christian folk for the Old Testament books, a reverence and a love that for more than eighteen hundred years has undergone no diminution or change, are in large measure due to the reverential handling, to the patient tireless studies of the great Rabbinical schools of the early Christian centuries--to the passionate, possibly exaggerated, love of the Jew for his precious book. Though men guess it not, surely echoes from those strange Jewish schools of Tiberias and Sura, whose story we are about to relate, have reached the hearts of unnumbered Christians to whom the Jewish schools in question and their restless toil, all centering in the Holy Books in question, are but the shadow of a name? I THE HISTORY OF THE THREE WARS WHICH CLOSED THE CAREER OF JUDAISM AS A NATION In the wonderful Jewish epic--so closely united to the Christian story--which stretches already over several thousand years, the history of the three last awful wars which led to their extinction as a nation, though not as a people, is merely a terrible episode in the many-coloured records of the wonderful race.