The life and work of St. Paul

70 THE LIFE AND WOEK OP ST. PAITL.
trade. " "
There can be no worse occupation than !
agriculture said B. Eleazar.
"
All the fanning in the world will not make you so remunerative as commerce,"
said Rabh l as he saw a cornfield bowing its golden ears under the
summer breeze. 2 So easy is it for a people to get over an archaic legislation
if it stands in the way of their interests or inclinations ! The Mosaic restrictions
upon commerce were, of course, impracticable in dealing with Gentiles,
and in material successes the Jews found something, at any rate, to make up
to them for the loss of political independence. The busy intercourse of
cities wrought a further change in their opinions. They began to see that
God never meant the nations of the world to stand to each other in the posi-
tion of frantic antagonism or jealous isolation. A Jerusalem Rabbi, ignorant
of everything in heaven and earth and under the earth, except his own
Halojcha, might talk of all the rest of tha world promiscuously as an
3 but an educated Alexandrian Jew would
" elsewhere " of no importance ;
be well aware that the children of heathen lands had received from their
Father's tenderness a share in the distribution of His gifts. The silent and
imperceptible influences of life are often the most permanent, and no
amount of exclusiveness could entirely blind the more intelligent sons of
the Dispersion to the merits of a richer civilisation. No Jewish boy familiar
with the sights and sounds of Tarsus or Antioch could remain unaware that
all wisdom was not exhausted in the trivial discussions of the Rabbis ; that
there was something valuable to the human race in the Greek science which
Jewish nescience denounced as thaumaturgy ; that there might be a better
practice for the reasoning powers than an interminable application of the
Middoth of Hillel; in short, that the development of humanity involves
larger and diviner duties than a virulent championship of the exclusive privi-
4
leges of the Jew-
We might naturally have conjectured that these wider sympathies would
specially be awakened among those Jews who were for the first time brought
into close contact with the great peoples of the Aryan race. That contact
was first effected by the conquests of Alexander. He settled 8,000 Jews in
the Thebais, and the Jews formed a third of the population of his new city of
Alexandria. Large numbers were brought from Palestine by Ptolemy I., and
they gradually spread from Egypt, not only over " the parts of Libya about
1 Rabh was a contemporary of Babbi (Judah the Holy), and was "Head of the
Captivity."
2
YebhamAth, f. 63, 1.
3
pub mnn, " outside the land " (Frank!, Jews in the East, ii. 34). Something like the
French M-bas.
4
Many of the Rabbis regarded the Gentiles as little better than BO much fuel for the
"
fires of Gehenna. R. Jose construes Isa. xxxiii. 12, And the peoples shall be a burning
Jifajlime." Rabh Bar Shilo explained it "that they should be burnt because of their
neglect of the Law, which was written upon lime. "
(See the curious Hagadah in Sotak,
t. 35, 2.) But the Hellenist would soon learn to feel that
"
All knowledge is not couch'd in Mosea' Law,
The Pentateuch, or what the Prophets wrote ;
The Gentiles also know, and write, ami teach
To admiration, taught by Nature's light." HILTON, Par.