rites. Foremost among them was the initiatory rite of circumcision, a constant subject for coarse

jests. What could be the meaning of it; or of what seemed like some ancestral veneration for the

pig, or dread of it, since they made it a religious duty not to partake of its flesh? Their Sabbath-

observance, however it had originated, was merely an indulgence in idleness. The fast young

Roman literati would find their amusement in wandering on the Sabbath-eve through the

tangled, narrow streets of the Ghetto, watching how the dim lamp within shed its unsavory light,

while the inmates mumbled prayers `with blanched lips;'37 or they would, like Ovid, seek in the

Synagogue occasion for their dissolute amusements. The Thursday fast was another target for

their wit. In short, at the best, the Jew was a constant theme of popular merriment, and the

theatre would resound with laughter as his religion was lampooned, no matter how absurd the

stories, or how poor the punning.38

And then, as the proud Roman passed on the Sabbath through the streets, Judaism would

obtrude itself upon his notice, by the shops that were shut, and by the strange figures that idly

moved about in holiday attire. They were strangers in a strange land, not only without sympathy

with what passed around, but with marked contempt and abhorrence of it, while there was that

about their whole bearing, which expressed the unspoken feeling, that the time of Rome's fall,

and of their own supremacy, was at hand. To put the general feeling in the words of Tacitus, the

Jews kept close together, and were ever most liberal to one another; but they were filled with

bitter hatred of all others. They would neither eat nor sleep with strangers; and the first thing

which they taught their proselytes was to despise the gods, to renounce their own country, and

to rend the bonds which had bound them to parents, children or kindred. To be sure, there was

some ground of distorted truth in these charges. For, the Jew, as such, was only intended for

Palestine. By a necessity, not of his own making, he was now, so to speak, the negative element

in the heathen world; yet one which, do what he might, would always obtrude itself upon public

notice. But the Roman satirists went further. They accused the Jews of such hatred of all other

religionists, that they would not even show the way to any who worshipped otherwise, nor point

out the cooling spring to the thirsty.39 According to Tacitus, there was a political and religious

reason for this. In order to keep the Jews separate from all other nations, Moses had given them

rites, contrary to those of any other race, that they might regard as unholy what was sacred to

others, and as lawful what they held in abomination.40 Such a people deserved neither

consideration nor pity; and when the historian tells how thousands of their number had been

banished by Tiberius to Sardinia, he dismisses the probability of their perishing in that severe

climate with the cynical remark, that it entailed a `poor loss'41 (vile damnum).