The possession of such wealth, coupled no doubt with pride and self-assertion, and openly spoken contempt of the superstitions around, [288] would naturally excite the hatred of the Alexandria populace against the Jews. The greater number of those silly stories about the origin, early history, and religion of the Jews, which even the philosophers and historians of Rome record as genuine, originated in Egypt. A whole series of writers, beginning with Manetho, [289] made it their business to give a kind of historical travesty of the events recorded in the books of Moses. The boldest of these scribblers was Apion, to whom Josephus replied - a world-famed charlatan and liar, who wrote or lectured, with equal presumption and falseness, on every conceivable object. He was just the man to suit the Alexandrians, on whom his unblushing assurance imposed. In Rome he soon found his level, and the Emperor Tiberius well characterised the irrepressible boastful talker as the tinkling cymbal of the world.' He had studied, seen, and heard everything - even, on three occasions, the mysterious sound on the Colossus of Memnon, as the sun rose upon it! At least, so he graved upon the Colossus itself, for the information of all generations. [290] Such was the man on whom the Alexandrians conferred the freedom of their city, to whom they entrusted their most important affairs, and whom they extolled as the victorious, the laborious, the new Homer. [291] There can be little doubt, that the popular favour was partly due to Apion's virulent attacks upon the Jews. His grotesque accounts of their history and religion held them up to contempt. But his real object was to rouse the fanaticism of the populace against the Jews. Every year, so he told them, it was the practice of the Jews to get hold of some unfortunate Hellene, whom ill-chance might bring into their hands, to fatten him for the year, and then to sacrifice him, partaking of his entrials, and burying the body, while during these horrible rites they took a fearful oath of perpetual enmity to the Greeks. These were the people who battened on the wealth of Alexandria, who had usurped quarters of the city to which they had no right, and claimed exceptional privileges; a people who had proved traitors to, and the ruin of every one who had trusted them. If the Jews,' he exclaimed, are citizens of Alexandria, why do they not worship the same gods as the Alexandrians?' And, if they wished to enjoy the protection of the Cæsars, why did they not erect statues, and pay Divine honor to them? [292] There is nothing strange in these appeals to the fanaticism of mankind. In one form or another, they have only too often been repeated in all lands and ages, and, alas! by the representatives of all creeds. Well might the Jews, as Philo mourns, [293] wish no better for themselves than to be treated like other men!
We have already seen, that the ideas entertained in Rome about the Jews were chiefly derived from Alexandrian sources. But it is not easy to understand, how a Tacitus, Cicero, or Pliny could have credited such absurdities as that the Jews had come from Crete (Mount Ida - Idæi = Judæi), been expelled on account of leprosy from Egypt, and emigrated under an apostate priest, Moses; or that the Sabbath-rest originated in sores, which had obliged the wanderers to stop short on the seventh day; or that the Jews worshipped the head of an ass, or else Bacchus; that their abstinence from swine's flesh was due to remembrance and fear of leprosy, or else to the worship of that animal - and other puerilities of the like kind. [294] The educated Roman regarded the Jew with a mixture of contempt and anger, all the more keen that, according to his notions, the Jew had, since his subjection to Rome, no longer a right to his religion; and all the more bitter that, do what he might, that despised race confronted him everywhere, with a religion so uncompromising as to form a wall of separation, and with rites so exclusive as to make them not only strangers, but enemies. Such a phenomenon was nowhere else to be encountered. The Romans were intensely practical. In their view, political life and religion were not only intertwined, but the one formed part of the other. A religion apart from a political organisation, or which offered not, as a quid pro quo, some direct return from the Deity to his votaries, seemed utterly inconceivable. Every country has its own religion, argued Cicero, in his appeal for Flaccus. So long as Jerusalem was unvaquished, Judaism might claim toleration; but had not the immortal gods shown what they thought of it, when the Jewish race was conquered? This was a kind of logic that appealed to the humblest in the crowd, which thronged to hear the great orator defending his client, among others, against the charge of preventing the transport from Asia to Jerusalem of the annual Temple-tribute. This was not a popular accusation to bring against a man in such an assembly. And as the Jews - who, to create a distrubance, had (we are told) distributed themselves among the audience in such numbers, that Cicero somewhat rhetorically declared, he would fain have spoken with bated breath, so as to be only audible to the judges - listened to the great orator, they must have felt a keen pang shoot to their hearts while he held them up to the scorn of the heathen, and touched, with rough finger, their open sore, as he urged the ruin of their nation as the one unanswerable argument, which Materialism could bring against the religion of the Unseen.