The Maccabaean

INTRODUCTION

If the proud Roman Citizen of old could assert with exultation that wherever he went Rome went with him; if the modern Roman, as the son of the British Isles is so often called, can declare with confidence that on whatever continent he sets foot he is still within the bounds ot his fatherland, with a still greater confidence and a larger amount of certainty could the Jew of the Diaspora assert that wherever indifferent chance, inevitable fate, or the rude hand of the enemy has thrown him, he was still in that loving and enchanting circle of his distant, far lyinge country, Palestine.

The saying of the Rabbis that Palestine is destined to expand over all the countries of the world (1) is more than a mere utterance of a dreamer. It is almost an historic truism except that its fulfillment does not necessarily lie in the distant future, but in the bygone past. Great and mighty was the Roman Empire. It extended its sway from the hot sands of the Sahara to the plains of Panonia, (Hungary,) from the sunscorched valley of the Euphrates to the muddy and storm-beaten Elbe. But side by side with this gigantic and most marvelous creation of human civilization, and even long after the Roman political edifice was shattered, there existed a still greater empire whose area included not only the vast extensive countries covered by the first, but also many more kingdoms in addition. This was the empire of Pal-

(1). Sanhedrin

estine. I am not alluding here to the "Kingdom of God," the influence of religious teaching upon civilization, nor am I speaking in metaphors. I mean a real, imperial vital force acting in life and producing wonderful results. If by empire we understand not that brute and tyrannizing force that one land or a single city, as the case was with Rome, exercises over a multitude of weaker provinces, not the vast armies and mighty fleets, iron-clad legions, corrupt officials and heavy taxes, but the unifying force, the loyalty, affection and love that serve as eternal bonds and ties to fasten the dispersed colonies to the single spot, the mother country, which acts as the center of gravity for the dispersed sons and instills in them unity, aspiration and hope, power and energy; if this is what the term empire connote as it should then no past or present monarchy can equal that of the small strip of land on the Mediterranean coast known by the name of Judea.

It is one of the most curious feats of human history that the most landless people in the world are at the same time the most devoted and deeply rooted to their land. For more than three quarters of its existence the Jewish nation, or at least the majority of it lived outside of the land of its birth—the Diaspora began much earlier than the destruction of the temple, and yet all the time the Jew lived within the shadow of Palestine. It occupied the central point in the life of the dispersed nation, whence lines of influence in all ways of life diverged in