Nor were such the feelings of the Palestinian Jews only. These indeed were now a minority. The majority of the nation constituted what was known as the dispersion; a term which, however, no longer expressed its original meaning of banishment by the judgment of God, [12] since absence from Palestine was now entirely voluntary. But all the more that it referred not to outward suffering, [13] did its continued use indicate a deep feeling of religious sorrow, of social isolation, and of political strangership [14] in the midst of a heathen world. For although, as Josephus reminded his countrymen, [15] there was no nation in the world which had not among them part of the Jewish people,' since it was widely dispersed over all the world among its inhabitants,' [16] yet they had nowhere found a real home. A century and a half before our era comes to us from Egypt [17] - where the Jews possessed exceptional privileges - professedly from the heathen, but really from the Jewish [18] Sibyl, this lament of Israel -
Crowding with thy numbers every ocean and country -
Yet an offense to all around thy presence and customs! [19]
Sixty years later the Greek geographer and historian Strabo bears the like witness to their presence in every land, but in language that shows how true had been the complaint of the Sibyl. [20] The reasons for this state of feeling will by-and-by appear. Suffice it for the present that, all unconsciously, Philo tells its deepest ground, and that of Israel's loneliness in the heathen world, when speaking, like the others, of his countrymen as in all the cities of Europe, in the provinces of Asia and in the islands,' he describes them as, wherever sojourning, having but one metropolis - not Alexandria, Antioch, or Rome - but the Holy City with its Temple, dedicated to the Most High God.' [21] A nation, the vast majority of which was dispersed over the whole inhabited earth, had ceased to be a special, and become a world-nation. [22] Yet its heart beat in Jerasulem, and thence the life-blood passed to its most distant members. And this, indeed, if we rightly understand it, was the grand object of the Jewish dispersion' throughout the world.
What has been said applies, perhaps, in a special manner, to the Western, rather than to the Eastern dispersion.' The connection of the latter with Palestine was so close as almost to seem one of continuity. In the account of the truly representative gathering in Jerusalem on that ever-memorable Feast of Weeks, [23] the division of the dispersion' into two grand sections - the Eastern or Trans-Euphratic, and the Western or Hellenist - seems clearly marked. [24] In this arrangement the former would include the Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and dwellers in Mesopotamia,' Judæa standing, so to speak, in the middle, while the Bretes and Arabians' would typically represent the farthest outrunners respectively of the Western and the Eastern Diaspora. The former, as we know from the New Testament, commonly bore in Palestine the name of the dispersion of the Greeks,' [25] and of Hellenists' or Grecians.' [26] On the other hand, the Trans-Euphratic Jews, who inhabited Babylon and many of the other satrapies,' [27] were included with the Palestinians and the Syrians under the term Hebrews,' from the common language which they spoke.
But the difference between the Grecians' and the Hebrews' was far deeper than merely of language, and extended to the whole direction of thought. There were mental influences at work in the Greek world from which, in the nature of things, it was impossible even for Jews to withdraw themselves, and which, indeed, were as necessary for the fulfillment of their mission as their isolation from heathenism, and their connection with Jerusalem. At the same time it was only natural that the Hellenists, placed as they were in the midst of such hostile elements, should intensely wish to be Jews, equal to their Eastern brethren. On the other hand, Pharisaism, in its pride of legal purity and of the possession of traditional lore, with all that it involved, made no secret of its contempt for the Hellenists, and openly declared the Grecian far inferior to the Babylonian dispersion.' [28] That such feelings, and the suspicions which they engendered, had struck deep into the popular mind, appears from the fact, that even in the Apostolic Church, and that in her earliest days, disputes could break out between the Hellenists and the Hebrews, arising from suspicion of unkind and unfair dealings grounded on these sectional prejudices. [29]