Note 11 — Chapter III · ROOTS OF THE MYTH

The eighth item needs to be specially insisted upon. It is frequently asserted that nothing in the nature of a heteroclite cult could subsist continuously in Jewry; that there were no religious ideas in the Jewish world save those of the Sacred Books of the Rabbis.11 This is a historical delusion. The historical and prophetic books of the Old Testament affirm a constant resort to pagan rites and Gods before the Exile. There is official record of bitter strife and sunderance between those of the Return and the people they found on the soil. Malachi sounds the note of strife, lamenting popular lukewarmness, sacrilege and unbelief. The simple fact that after the Exile Hebrew was no longer the common language, and that the people spoke Aramaic or “Chaldee,” tells of a highly artificial relation between hierarchy and populace. Never can even Judæa have been long homogeneous. “Neither in Galilee nor Peræa must we conceive of the Jewish element as pure and unmixed. In the shifting course of history Jews and Gentiles had been here so often, and in such a variety of ways, thrown together, that the attainment of exclusive predominance by the Jewish element must be counted among the impossibilities. It was only in Judæa that this was at least approximately arrived at by the energetic agency of the scribes during the course of a century.”12