Roman empire.  Within the cities of Alexandria especially and of Cyrene the Jews formed special communities administratively and even locally distinct, not unlike the “Jews’ quarters” of our towns, but with a freer position and superintended by a “master of the people” as superior judge and administrator.  How numerous even in Rome the Jewish population was already before Caesar’s time, and how closely at the same time the Jews even then kept together as fellow-countrymen, is shown by the remark of an author of this period, that it was dangerous for a governor to offend the Jews, in his province, because he might then certainly reckon on being hissed after his return by the populace of the capital.  Even at this time the predominant business of the Jews was trade; the Jewish trader moved everywhere with the conquering Roman merchant then, in the same way as he afterwards accompanied the Genoese and the Venetian, and capital flowed in on all hands to the Jewish, by the side of the Roman, merchants.  At this period too we encounter the peculiar antipathy of the Occidentals towards this so thoroughly Oriental race and their foreign opinions and customs.  This Judaism, although not the most pleasing feature in the nowhere pleasing picture of the mixture of nations which then prevailed, was nevertheless a historical element developing itself in the natural course of things, which the statesman could neither ignore nor combat, and which Caesar on the contrary, just like his predecessor Alexander, with correct discernment of the circumstances, fostered as far as possible.  While Alexander, by laying the foundation of Alexandrian Judaism, did not much less for the nation than its own David by planning the temple of Jerusalem, Caesar also advanced the interests of the Jews in Alexandria and in Rome by special favours and privileges, and protected in particular their peculiar worship against the Roman as well as against the Greek local priests.  The two great men of course did not contemplate placing the Jewish nationality on an equal footing with the Hellenic or Italo-Hellenic.  But the Jew who has not like the Occidental received the Pandora’s gift of political organization, and stands substantially in a relation of indifference to the state; who moreover is as reluctant to give up the essence of his national idiosyncrasy, as he is ready to clothe it with any nationality at pleasure and to adapt himself up to a certain degree to foreign habits—­the Jew was for this very reason as it were made for a state, which was to be built on the ruins of a hundred living polities and to be endowed with a somewhat abstract and, from the outset, toned-down nationality.  Even in the ancient world Judaism was an effective leaven of cosmopolitanism and of national decomposition, and to that extent a specially privileged member in the Caesarian state, the polity of which was strictly speaking nothing but a citizenship of the world, and the nationality of which was at bottom nothing but humanity.