It is still more difficult to estimate the total of the Jews in other countries of the world at this time. We may safely assume that they could not have been fewer than the inhabitants of Palestine. We have reason to believe that the bulk of the nation did not return with Zorobabel. Those who remained behind in the foreign countries to which they had been conveyed throve and multiplied in their new homes. There are grounds for supposing that, at subsequent periods, large emigrations from the Holy Land took place, probably at the date of King Ahasuerus’s edict, more certainly during the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes and the Roman invasion. We have the clearest testimony of contemporaneous writers as to the extent to which the Jews in our Lord’s time had spread into foreign lands, forming everywhere a distinct people, as they do at the present day. Mommsen quotes the statement of a writer of Julius Cæsar’s date, to the effect that it would be dangerous for the Roman governor of his province to offend the Jews, because, on his return to Rome, he might encounter contumely from their countrymen there. Agrippa I. wrote to the Emperor Caligula to the same effect, but more explicitly. ‘Jerusalem,’ he says, ‘is the metropolis, not of Judæa only, but of very many lands, on account of the colonies which from time to time it has sent out into the adjoining countries—Egypt, Phœnicia, Syria, Cœlo-Syria, Pamphylia, Cilicia, Asia Minor, as far as Bithynia, and the remotest parts of Pontus; likewise into Europe—Thessaly, Bœotia, Macedonia, Ætolia, Attica, Argos, Corinth, and the Peloponnesus. Nor are the Jewish settlements confined to the mainland. They are to be found also in the more important islands, Eubœa, Cyprus, Crete. I do not insist on the countries beyond the Euphrates; for with few exceptions all of them, Babylon and the fertile regions round it, have Jewish inhabitants.’[245] This testimony is confirmed by St. Luke’s narrative of what occurred on the day of Pentecost immediately following the crucifixion (Acts ii. 9, 10). It can hardly be doubted that at the date of the commencement of this history, there were fully as many Jews in other lands as there were in Palestine—the whole nation numbering, at the lowest computation, not less than seven millions.