But if the legions could destroy Jerusalem, they could not raze Judaism itself; and what on the one side was a remedy, exercised on the other the effect of a poison. Judaism not only remained, but it became an altered thing. There is a deep gulf between the Judaism of the older time, which seeks to spread its faith, which has its temple-court filled with the Gentiles, and which has its priests offering daily sacrifices for the emperor Augustus, and the rigid Rabbinism, which knew nothing and wished to know nothing of the world beyond Abraham’s bosom and the Mosaic law. Strangers the Jews always were, and had wished to be so; but the feeling of estrangement now culminated within them as well as against them after a fearful fashion, and rudely were its hateful and pernicious consequences drawn on both sides. From the contemptuous sarcasm of Horace against the intruding Jew from the Roman Ghetto there is a wide step to the solemn enmity which Tacitus cherishes against this scum of the human race, to which everything pure is impure and everything impure pure; in the interval lie those insurrections of the despised people, and the necessity of conquering it and of expending continuously money and men for its repression. The prohibitions of maltreating the Jew, which are constantly recurring in the imperial ordinances, show that those words of the cultured were translated, as might be expected, by their inferiors into deeds. The Jews, on their part, did not mend the matter. They turned away from Hellenic literature, which was now regarded as polluting, and even rebelled against the use of the Greek translation of the Bible; the ever-increasing purification of faith turned not merely against the Greeks and the Romans, but quite as much against the “half-Jews” of Samaria and against the Christian heretics; the reverence toward the letter of the Holy Scriptures rose to a giddy height of absurdity, and above all an--if possible--still holier tradition established itself, in the fetters of which all life and thought were benumbed. The gulf between that treatise on the Sublime which ventures to place Homer’s Poseidon shaking land and sea and Jehovah, who creates the shining sun, side by side, and the beginnings of the Talmud which belong to this epoch, marks the contrast between the Judaism of the first and that of the third century. The living together of Jews and non-Jews showed itself more and more to be just as inevitable, as under the given conditions it was intolerable; the contrast in faith, law, and manners became sharpened, and mutual arrogance and mutual hatred operated on both sides with morally disorganising effect. Not merely was their conciliation not promoted in these centuries, but its realisation was always thrown further into the distance, the more its necessity was apparent. This exasperation, this arrogance, this contempt, as they became established at that time, were indeed only the inevitable growth