of Europe also they were not wanting; many thousands of them lived in Rome.  In those cities where they were at all numerous they, during the imperial period, formed separate communities; Josephus has preserved a great variety of documents in which the Roman authorities recognise their rights and liberties (especially as regards the Sabbath rest and the observance of festivals).  Of greatest importance was the community in Alexandria; according to Philo a million of Jews had their residence there under an ethnarch for whom a gerusia was afterwards substituted by Augustus (In Flac., secs. 6, 10).  The extent to which this diaspora was helpful in the diffusion of Christianity, the manner in which the mission of the apostles everywhere attached itself to the synagogues and proseuchai, is well known from the New Testament.  That the Christians of the 1st cenentury had much to suffer along with the Jews is also a familiar fact.  For at this period, in other respects more favourable to them than any other had previously been, the Jews had occasionally to endure persecution.  The emperors, taking umbrage at their intrusiveness, more than once banished them from Rome (Acts xviii. 2).  The good will of the native population they never secured; they were most hated in Egypt and Syria, where they were strongest. 1

********************************** 1.  Compare Schuerer, Neutest.  Zeitgeschichte (1874), sec. 31.  The place taken by the Jewish element in the world of that time is brilliantly set forth by Mommsen in his History of Rome (book v. chapter ii.; English translation iv. p. 538 seq., 1866):—­ “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....  At this period too we encounter the peculiar antipathy of the Occidentals touards 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, an historical element developing itself in the natural course of things,... which Caesar just like his predecessor Alexander fostered as far as possible....They did not, of course, 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 organisation, 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, weakened nationality.  In the ancient world also Judaism was an effective leaven of cosmopolitanism and of national decomposition.” *********************************************