Thus the Jews came to play a prominent part in the Macedonian Hellenising of the East; their pliancy and serviceableness on the one hand, their unyielding tenacity on the other, must have induced the very realistic statesmen who assigned this course of action, to resolve on such arrangements. Nevertheless the extraordinary extent and significance of the Jewish Diaspora, as compared with the narrowness and poorness of their home, remains at once a fact and a problem. In dealing with it we may not overlook the circumstance that the Palestinian Jews furnished no more than the nucleus for the Jews of other countries. The Judaism of the older time was anything but exclusive; was, on the contrary, no less pervaded by missionary zeal than were afterwards Christianity and Islam. The Gospel makes reference to Rabbis who traversed sea and land to make a proselyte; the admission of half-proselytes, of whom circumcision was not expected but to whom religious fellowship was yet accorded, is an evidence of this converting zeal and at the same time one of its most effective means. Motives of very various kinds came to the help of this proselytising. The civil privileges, which the Lagids and Seleucids conferred on the Jews, must have induced a great number of non-Jewish Orientals and half-Hellenes to attach themselves in the new towns to the privileged category of the non-burgesses. In later times the decay of the traditional faith of the country helped the Jewish _propaganda_. Numerous persons, especially of the cultivated classes, whose sense of faith and morality turned away with horror or derision from what the Greeks, and still more from what the Egyptians termed religion, sought refuge in the simpler and purer Jewish doctrine renouncing polytheism and idolatry--a doctrine which largely met the religious views resulting from the development of philosophy among the cultured and half-cultured circles. There is a remarkable Greek moral poem, probably from the later epoch of the Roman republic, which is drawn from the Mosaic books on such a footing that it adopts the doctrine of monotheism and the universal moral law, but avoids everything offensive to the non-Jew and all direct opposition to the ruling religion, evidently intended to gain wider acceptance for this denationalised Judaism. Women in particular addicted themselves by preference to the Jewish faith. When the authorities of Damascus in the year 66 resolved to put to death the captive Jews, it was agreed to keep this resolution secret, in order that the female population devoted to the Jews might not prevent its execution. Even in the West, where the cultivated circles were otherwise averse to Jewish habits, dames of rank early formed an exception; Poppaea Sabina, Nero’s wife, sprung from a noble family, was notorious for her pious Jewish faith and her zealous protectorate of the Jews, as for other things less reputable. Cases of