The attitude of the Jews towards other religions was essentially different from that of the priests of Cybele or any other Pagan divinity. Jupiter or Mars or Vesta could tolerate the temples of other Gods, and the respect paid to other Gods--it was of the essence of polytheism to multiply divinities--but the Jew declared that there was only one God; his God was not one of many Gods, but the only God, and the worship of other Gods was wrong and monstrous. Thus to the Roman Senate the observances of the Jews were actually “profane”; they involved hostility to existing religions, and toleration of the Jews was therefore impossible for the orthodox Pagan. Again, it is important to remember that the Jews at this period were not shut up in ghettos, and visibly separated from the rest of the community; whatever differences in dress and customs distinguished them from other inhabitants of the cities in which they dwelt were not peculiar to them; the Syrian, the Egyptian, the Gaul, men of many other nationalities wore their distinctive dress and practised their national religions in every populous city of the Empire. The Jews might for convenience live in the neighbourhood of a synagogue, and thus give portions of the cities which they inhabited the aspect of a Jewish quarter; but such separate residence was not enforced upon them; they moved freely among the people; many of them were in positions of trust, their princes, the Herods, were on intimate terms with the Imperial family, and their young men took part in the diversions of the Roman youth; among them were ardent proselytisers, their peculiar doctrines were well known to the educated, and though Horace might laugh at their credulity, his sneer indicates how well they were known. The unhappy four thousand young men who were sent to Sardinia were either freedmen or the sons of freedmen, a fact which shows that they, or their fathers, had been the trusted servants of Romans. But the Jews were no more homogeneous then than now; if they had their Rothschilds, they had also their Jews of mean streets, their “vagabond Jews, exorcists”; and if the great financier was the trusted friend of an Emperor, the small moneylender of the slums was as much detested in ancient Rome as he is in modern London. There were Jews who were deservedly respected for their great intellectual ability, for the purity of their lives, for the dignity of their religion; but there were also Jews whose disreputable callings and mean habits involved at least a section of their race in such contempt as to lead Tacitus to contemplate with satisfaction their extinction in the fever-haunted swamps of Sardinia. We should, however, be on our guard against attributing to the contemporaries of Tiberius the same degree of animosity against the Jews which was felt by the contemporaries of Trajan; for, in spite of the sweeping decrees of the Senate, the Jews steadily advanced in