Their dispersion along all the coast of the Mediterranean, and the use
of the Greek language, which they adopted when out of Palestine,
prepared the way for a propagandism, of which ancient societies,
divided into small nationalities, had never offered a single example.

Up to the time of the Maccabees, Judaism, in spite of its persistence
in announcing that it would one day be the religion of the human race,
had had the characteristic of all the other worships of antiquity, it
was a worship of the family and the tribe. The Israelite thought,
indeed, that his worship was the best, and spoke with contempt of
strange gods; but he believed also that the religion of the true God
was made for himself alone. Only when a man entered into the Jewish
family did he embrace the worship of Jehovah.[1] No Israelite cared to
convert the stranger to a worship which was the patrimony of the sons
of Abraham. The development of the pietistic spirit, after Ezra and
Nehemiah, led to a much firmer and more logical conception. Judaism
became the true religion in a more absolute manner; to all who wished,
the right of entering it was given;[2] soon it became a work of piety
to bring into it the greatest number possible.[3] Doubtless the
refined sentiment which elevated John the Baptist, Jesus, and St. Paul
above the petty ideas of race, did not yet exist; for, by a strange
contradiction, these converts were little respected and were treated
with disdain.[4] But the idea of a sovereign religion, the idea that
there was something in the world superior to country, to blood, to
laws--the idea which makes apostles and martyrs--was founded. Profound
pity for the pagans, however brilliant might be their worldly fortune,
was henceforth the feeling of every Jew.[5] By a cycle of legends
destined to furnish models of immovable firmness, such as the
histories of Daniel and his companions, the mother of the Maccabees
and her seven sons,[6] the romance of the race-course of
Alexandria[7]--the guides of the people sought above all to inculcate
the idea, that virtue consists in a fanatical attachment to fixed
religious institutions.

[Footnote 1: Ruth i. 16.]

[Footnote 2: Esther ix. 27.]

[Footnote 3: Matt. xxiii. 15; Josephus, _Vita_, 23; _B.J._, II. xvii.
10, VII. iii. 3; _Ant._, XX. ii. 4; Horat., Sat. I., iv., 143; Juv.,
xiv. 96, and following; Tacitus, _Ann._, II. 85; _Hist._, V. 5; Dion
Cassius, xxxvii. 17.]

[Footnote 4: Mishnah, _Shebiit_,