Over the portals of the first century A.D., says H.P.  Blavatsky, the words “the Karma of Israel” are written.  Judaism had never tried to impress itself on the world, as the religion that was born from it did.—­It is rarely that one finds sane views taken as to Jewish history; it is a history, and a race, that provoke extreme feelings.  A small people, originally exiled from India, that had had eight thousand years of vicissitudes since; sometimes, it is necessary to think, high fortunes;—­no doubt an age of splendor once under their great king Solomon, or some one else for whom the traditional Solomon stands; oftenest, perhaps, subjected to their powerful neighbors in Egypt, Babylon, or Assyria, and latterly Rome:  you may say that no doubt they were in the long run no better and no worse than the rest of mankind.  They had great qualities, and the failings correspondent.  They had, like all other races, their champions of the Light, their Prophets and wise Rabbis; and in ages of darkness their stiff necked fierce materialism incased in dogma and inthroned in high places in the national religion.  Their history has been lifted to a bad eminence,—­bad for them and the rest of us,—­by the ignorance of the last two millenniums; in reality, that history, sanely understood, and not gathered too much from their own records, amply explains their failings and their virtues, and should leave us not unduly admiring, nor unfraternally the reverse.  They were human; which means, subject to human duality, to cycles of light, and cycles of darkness.  The centuries after the sixth B.C. were, as we have seen, a cycle of growing darkness for most of the world.  The position of the Jews, a small people surrounded by great ones, and therefore always liable to be trampled on, had intensified their national feeling to an extraordinary pitch; and their religion was the one lasting bond of their nationality.  So, at the beginning of the Christian era, they were notoriously the most difficult people to govern in the Roman world.  The passing of the Egyptian Mysteries had left those Egyptians who still were Egyptian sullenly fanatical; but the reaction from ancient greatness kept that fanaticism aloof,—­the energies were dormant:  Egypt, thoroughly conquered, turned her face from the world, and hoped for nothing.  But the Jews maintained an inextinguishable hope; they nourished on it a fighting spirit which entered fiercely into the religion that was for them the one and only truth, and that lifted them in their own estimation high above the rest of mankind.  Romans and Egyptians alike worshiped the Gods, though they called them by different names; but the Jews abhorred the Gods.  The Maker of Sirius and Canopus and the far limits of the galaxy was a good Jew like themselves, their peculiar property; He had his earthly headquarters in Jerusalem; spoke, I suppose, only Hebrew, and considered other languages gibberish; of all this earth, was only interested in a tiny corner at the south-east