he perpetuity of the nation.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Jews hated all other peoples and
were reciprocally despized and contemned by all others. They manifested
especial dislike for the Samaritans, perhaps because this people
persisted in their efforts to establish some claim of racial
relationship. These Samaritans were a mixed people, and were looked upon
by the Jews as a mongrel lot, unworthy of decent respect. When the Ten
Tribes were led into captivity by the king of Assyria, foreigners were
sent to populate Samaria.[163] These intermarried with such Israelites
as had escaped the captivity; and some modification of the religion of
Israel, embodying at least the profession of Jehovah worship, survived
in Samaria. The Samaritan rituals were regarded by the Jews as
unorthodox, and the people as reprobate. At the time of Christ the
enmity between Jew and Samaritan was so intense that travelers between
Judea and Galilee would make long detours rather than pass through the
province of Samaria which lay between. The Jews would have no dealings
with the Samaritans.[164]

The proud feeling of self-sufficiency, the obsession for exclusiveness
and separation--so distinctively a Jewish trait at that time--was
inculcated at the maternal knee and emphasized in synagog and school.
The Talmud,[165] which in codified form post-dates the time of Christ's
ministry, enjoined all Jews against reading the books of alien nations,
declaring that none who so offended could consistently hope for
Jehovah's favor.[166] Josephus gives his endorsement to similar
injunction, and records that wisdom among the Jews meant only
familiarity with the law and ability to discourse thereon.[167] A
thorough acquaintanceship with the law was demanded as strongly as other
studies were discountenanced. Thus the lines between learned and
unlearned came to be rigidly drawn; and, as an inevitable consequence
those who were accounted learned, or so considered themselves, looked
down upon their unscholarly fellows as a class distinct and
inferior.[168]

Long before the birth of Christ, the Jews had ceased to be a united
people even in matters of the law, though the law was their chief
reliance as a means of maintaining national solidarity. As early as four
score years after the return from the Babylonian exile, and we know not
with accuracy how much earlier, there had come to be recognized, as men
having authority, certain scholars afterward known