What has been attempted in the foregoing pages is an interpretation of certain facts of Jewish, Roman, and Greek history within a given period. For that purpose it has been necessary to analyze fully the terms used, and in many cases rather to clear away misconceptions than to set forth new points of view. A brief retrospect is here added.

The Jews, as one of the Mediterranean nations, began to come into close contact with Greek civilization about the time of Alexander. Greece was then entering on a new stage in her development. The Macedonian hegemony produced a greater degree of political unity than had been previously achieved, but above all a real cultural unity had been created, and was carried by arms and commerce over the East. To this the Jews, as other nations did, opposed a vigorous resistance; and this resistance was successful in so far as it allowed the creation of a practically independent nation, and particularly it stimulated the independent development of Jewish institutions, especially religious ones.

In religion the Jews came into further and more extensive conflict with their Greek environment. For many centuries all the East had known a great spiritual unrest, from which had grown various religious movements. Of all these the common goal was the attainment of a personal immortality, the “salvation of the soul.” Among the Jews too this movement had been active, and had produced concrete results in sects and doctrines. The Jewish aspect of this general movement would have remained a local development, had it not been given a wider field by the unusual position of the Jews, due to their dispersion.

For this dispersion various causes can be assigned. Perhaps the most potent single cause was the fact that the Jews, who rigorously opposed exposure of infants, and encouraged in other ways the growth of their population, increased too rapidly for the very limited resources of their small and niggardly territory. At any rate the kingdoms of the successors of Alexander found Jews as colonists in many of the new foundations in Asia, Syria, and Egypt, especially the last, where, as a matter of fact, Jews had lived from pre-Persian times. Within these new and, in many cases, old communities the doctrines preached in Palestine became a means of propaganda, and enabled the Jews to do more than maintain themselves in the exceptional position which their highly specialized religion necessitated.

The Jews were by no means the only religious group in the Greek communities with proselytizing tendencies. But they were unique in so far as they were permanently connected with an existing national group, with which they maintained relations. This made friction of some sort inevitable at first, since some community of religious observances for all citizens of a single state was axiomatic for ancient times. However, the anomaly of the Jewish position became less glaring in course of time.

The first stage of Jewish influence is marked by two things, a constantly increasing dispersion and an equally increasing propaganda that reached all stages of society.

The advance of the power of Rome at first did not change these conditions. In fact that advance materially assisted both the dispersion and its propaganda, since the support of Rome was an invaluable asset for the Hasmonean kingdom. Even the conquest by Pompey had no other effect than to accelerate the indicated development, especially within Italy and Rome itself.

But the relations of the Jews with the Greco-Roman world entered upon a second stage, the stage of armed conflict, when the national and religious aspirations of certain classes of Jews, which culminated in the Messianic hope, came into contact with the denationalizing tendencies of the imperial system. This conflict was in no sense inevitable, and might easily have been avoided. In addition to the internal movements that provoked the series of rebellions between 68 and 135, there was a constant excitation from without. The hereditary enemies of the Greek East and its successor, the Roman Empire—the Persians and their kinsmen and successors, the Parthians—maintained not only their independence but also their hostility, and the fact that the Jews lived in both empires, and that Parthian Jews communicated freely with the others, presented a channel for foreign stimulation to revolt.

The third stage of Jewish relations consists of an adjustment of the Jews to the rapidly centralizing empire, of which the administrative center was moving eastward. The center of wealth and culture had always been in the East. The reforms of Hadrian and his successors prepared the way for the formal recognition of the new state of things in the Constitutio Antonina, the Edict of Caracalla, which gave Roman citizenship to almost all the freedmen of the empire. This is the great period of Roman law, when, in consequence of the enormously extended application of the civil law, a great impetus was given to the scientific analysis and application of juristic principles. Out of this grew the bureaucratic system perfected by Diocletian, and begun perhaps by Alexander Severus, in which, as told in the last chapter, the attempt was made to classify every form of human activity in its relation to the state.

A new stage of Jewish relations begins with the dominance of Christianity; and that, as was stated at the beginning of this study, lies outside of its scope.