In Ancient The curious persist ence of anti-Semitism in modern cultured writers and the faulty generalizations which they do not hesitate to proclaim as scientific truth thus finds its parallel in many famous authors of antiquity. Thus Manetho, high priest of the temple at Heliopolis and court historian under the early Ptolemies, consid ered the Jews descendants of the Hv1csos usurpers and attributed their expulsion from Egypt to sacrilege and irreligion, stigmatizing them at the same time as afflicted with leprosy —and the story was repeated by Chaeremon and Lysimachus, to reappear in Schiller's' Mis sion of Moses.' Diodorus Siculus asserts that the prevalence of a plague in Egypt led to the banishment of foreigners, most of whom en tered "the country now called Judea"; at the same time he vindicates the character of Moses and the traditional religion. Apollonius Molo, a Greek rhetorician who lived at Rome in Cicero's time, pronounces Moses ((a conjuror and deceiver"; and his disciple, Cicero, went further in his utterances to show his contempt. There are several passages in his 'Pro Flacco' which display his animus against a people whose wealth and influence were beginning to be feared. "Their barbarous superstitions must be fought," he exclaims; they are a na tion addicted to "suspicion and slander"; they "display contempt for the Roman Tacitus, the model for historians, repeats the fables of Manetho as to the origin of the Jews and adds that their laws are "hostile to men and calculated to inspire the Jew with hatred and opposition to the rest of mankind" —"the first instruction they receive is to de spise the gods, to forswear their country, to forget father, mother, and children." Horace and Martial could jest at the Jew and his cere monies, like a modern comic journalist, while Juvenal exercised his wit more than once in the same direction, and Seneca, with all of his philosophic insight, deplores that °this abomi nable nation" has spread its customs every where and °the conquered have given their laws to the conqueror." Under such teachings from moralists and orators, what wonder that the spirit of persecution was roused in Rome, Antioch, Lybia and the Greek cities, with its accompanying bloodshed. In this era Chris tian and few were brethren in suffering and de spised alike for harboring a °detestable super stition"; and many of the accusations which in after centuries the Church hurled against the Jew were now forged against the Chris tian.
Apion and His was Apion, an Egyptian teacher of rhetoric at Rome in the reign of Tiberius, who was probably the most violent anti-Semitic in his field of his or any day; for his statements as ?reserved by Josephus in the historian's treatise 'Against Apion,) are modern in their variety and bitter ness, 'while they are as baseless, as Josephus suc cinctly shows. Among his many charges, Apion claimed that the Sews derived the name Sab bath from the circumstance that they were obliged to rest after journeying for six days because they were afflicted with a painful dis ease which the Egyptians called Sabbatosis. He asserts that they put up a head of an ass in the Holy of Holies, that they caught a Greek annually and fattened him for sacrifice. He accuses them of having produced °no wonder ful men, not any inventors of arts or any emi nent for wisdom." He states that "they swear by God to bear no good will to any foreigner, especially to Egyptians, while they have no just laws of their own and do not worship God as they ought." One of the replies made by Jo sephus can be given here. If the Jews, said the historian, had set up the head of an ass, it would not have been more contemptible than some of the animals, such as the goat, which the Egyptians deify. But the statement, he continued, is an untruth, which Apion would not have told had he not the heart of an ass or the impudence of a dog.
In the spirit of antag onism to the Jew which was displayed after the final destruction of Jerusalem and the gradual dispersion of the Jews, east and west, can hardly be called anti-Semitism, for it was really anti-Judaism and directed against the Jew and his religion. It was practically a re ligious, not a social or political crusade, in di rect contrast to the modern movement which ostensibly claims to be without any religious motive and to work purely for the welfare of society and the state. Under the Romans there was often some approach to a legal residence, but the attitude of the Church toward Jews and heretics was decisive. While here and there a kindly voice was heard and occasionally priest and prince championed them, the ages until the French Revolution were periods of enforced seclusion and repressive legislation. With the iron power of religion and the state checking them at every step, the Jews became a special class, awakening to new life and vigor for a few centuries under the Moslem, but liable at any moment to be at the mercy of the mob in Mohammedan Spain or Christian Europe. Be ing thus the weaker class both in numbers and prestige, upon whom insult could be heaped with impunity, the morale of the Jews was not to be improved by the policy which herded them in the Ghetto and restricted them from ordinary avocations. Most of the faults which their enemies discerned in them were acquired, not hereditary. The famous dramatist who to suit the London temper of his day consciously transposed the characters in the original story at the basis of 'The Merchant of Venice' and branded the Jew as a Shylock for all time, il lustrates the attitude of those centuries. Springing from these conditions came the con ception of a Jew as a kind of Barabbas, in Marlowe's play, who poisons wells, murders children, commits all binds of wickedness in his hatred of the Christian. In the heated at mosphere of the Dark and Middle Ages no ac cusation was too vile to fasten on the Tew. Hence their responsibility for the °Black Death," a plague which ravaged Europe be tween 1348 and 1351. A myth arose, especially in Germany, that the disease sprang from the wells which the Jews had poisoned. Alleged confessions were sent from town to town and the maddened populace wreaked vengeance, for getting that the Jews were suffering as much as their neighbors from the pestilence. In nearly every town in Germany, exclusive of Austria, about 350 in all, the Jewish communi ties were attacked, only three large Jewish cen tres by the end of the 15th century being left in that land. A further source of odium was the Jewish usurer. Owing to the canon law forbidding loans on money, the money trade of western Europe fell into the hands of the Jews in the early Middle Ages, who charged high interest, first because there was little if any competition, and secondly because of the insecure tenure of their property — emperors, prelates and powerful individuals could not be depended upon long to remain under a bur den of debt to heretics. However, Christian evasions of the canon law became frequent and Jews were soon despoiled of their capital; and as reputable trades, professions and agricul ture were denied them, they were forced into humbler occupations, but the taint of the money-lender has clung to them even in later days when money-lending has become the vital international pursuit. Undoubtedly it was im prudent for them to lend on interest, but they had no other resource and one can understand the sense of power it gave to a despoiled race, for which they had to pay dearly in exactions and expulsions from land to land until Eng land was closed to them for centuries.