That however seems to have been the general rule in the older communities of the East, in Palestine just as in Greece and Asia. There was no feeling against entertaining a stranger at table among the Jews, although the relation could not well be reversed. And there was the rub. It was not in Palestine (where the Jew was likely always to be the host), but in the communities in which Jew and non-Jew acknowledged the same civic bond that the refusal of the Jew to accept the hospitality of his neighbor would be a flagrant instance of μισοξενία, of dislike of strangers. We need not suppose that it needed careful investigation and the accumulation of instances to produce the statement. A few incidents within anyone’s experience would suffice. We shall have to remember further that we are dealing with a literary tradition in which many statements are taken over from the writer’s source without independent conviction on his own part. However, among the great masses the general feeling that the Jews disliked strangers, and so were properly to be termed μισόξενοι, was in all likelihood based on an observation of more obvious facts than dietary regulations. It is principally in meat diet that the separation is really effective, and meat diet was the prerogative of the rich. Then, as now, the great majority of the people ate meat rarely, if at all, and surely could take no offense at a man’s squeamishness about the quality or nature of the food he ate. But what everybody was compelled to notice was that the Jews deliberately held aloof from practically all public festivities, since these were nearly always religious, and that they created barriers which seemed as unnecessary as they were foolishly defended. That in itself could be interpreted by the man in the street only as a sign of deep-rooted antipathy, of μισοξενία. This accusation, as has been shown, was more than the reproach of unsociability. The vice charged by it was of serious character. Those individuals who in Greek poetry are called inhospitable are nothing short of monsters. It implied not merely aloofness from strangers, but ill-usage of them, and that ill-usage was sometimes assumed to be downright cannibalism. So Strabo (vii. 6) tells us that the “inhospitable” sea was called so, not only because of its storms, but because of the ferocity of the Scythian tribes dwelling around it, who devoured strangers and used their skulls for goblets. That was of course to be inhospitable with a vengeance, but the term covered the extreme idea as well as the milder acts that produced at Sparta and Crete frequent edicts of expulsion (ξενηλασίαι)[200] and a general cold welcome to foreigners.