Haec est, in gremium victos quae sola recepit, humanumque genus communi nomine fovit matris non dominae ritu, civesque vocavit quos domuit, nexuque pio longinqua revinxit?

Jewish patriotism was of a different kind.  A federation of fierce Bedouin tribes, encamped amid hostile populations, and set in the cockpit of rival empires against which it was impossible to stand, the Israelites were hammered by misfortune into the most indestructible of all organisms, a theocracy.  Their religion was to them what, in a minor degree, Roman Catholicism has been to Ireland and Poland, a consecration of patriotic faith and hope.  Westphal says the Jews failed because they hated foreigners more than they loved God.  They have had good reason to hate foreigners.  But undoubtedly the effect of their hatred has been that the great gifts which their nation had to give to humanity have come through other hands, and so have evoked no gratitude.  In the first century of our era they were called to an almost superhuman abnegation of their inveterate nationalism, and they could not rise to it.  As almost every other nation would have done, they chose the lower patriotism instead of the higher; and it was against their will that the religion of civilised humanity grew out of Hebrew soil.  But they gained this by their choice, tragic though it was, that they have stood by the graves of all the empires that oppressed them, and have preserved their racial integrity and traditions in the most adverse circumstances.  The history of the Jews also shows that oppression and persecution are far more efficacious in binding a nation together than community of interest and national prosperity.  Increase of wealth divides rather than unites a people; but suffering shared in common binds it together with hoops of steel.

The Jews were the only race whose spiritual independence was not crushed by the Roman steam-roller.  It would be unfair to say that Rome destroyed nations; for her subjects in the West were barbarous tribes, and in the East she displaced monarchies no less alien to their subjects than her own rule.  But she prevented the growth of nationalities, as it is to be feared we have done in India; and the absence of sturdy independence in the countries round the Mediterranean, especially in the Greek-speaking provinces, made the final downfall inevitable.  The lesson has its warning for modern theorists who wish to obliterate the sentiment of nationality, the revival of which, after a long eclipse, has been one of the achievements of modern civilisation.  For it was not till long after the destruction of the Western Roman Empire that nationality began to assume its present importance in Europe.