Page:History of Art in Sardinia, Judæa, Syria and Asia Minor Vol 1.djvu/128

 no A History of Art in Sardinia and Jud/Ea and soldiers in turn. Their industry was of the simplest kind, and such as a community with the smallest pretensions to a cultured life must needs possess. How inferior that was we may guess from their having borrowed of their more advanced neigh- bours, the Philistines, notably the Phoenicians, the best part of their domestic and war implements. Nor did matters improve until after the fall of Samaria and Jerusalem ; when the Babylonian captivity, by compelling the Jews to live among strangers, opened up new avenues of thought and awakened aptitudes and tastes which had laid dormant until then. This was their first great stride onwards ; from that day a series of circumstances so worked upon them as to finally drive them from the country of their fore- fathers, causing them to spread in more or less compact groups over the East, thence from stage to stage over the whole habitable globe. In their eternal exile, in conditions rendered exceptional and dramatic by circumstances trying in the extreme, their genius for thrift, patience and boldness, as traffickers, was unfolded. Who more persuasive or untiring than the Jewish broker ? What financial enterprise is gone into which has not a Jew as its pro- moter ? Are there transactions, great or small, carried on without his cognizance ? From the purchase of a horse, a small plot of ground, or the negotiating of a national loan, it is a Jew who moves the springs ; and his the only verdict that can make a nation solvent or bankrupt. What wonder, then, that modern communities should view with terror and alarm the unfathomable capital that must be in their hands. In some respects, the Jews of what St. Paul called the latter days, like their descendants, recall their Phoenician brethren in spite of divergences which it were easy to indicate. Thus, for instance, the Tyrians and Carthaginians were eminently merchants, craftsmen, and mariners ; the same mercantile and practical spirit is evinced by the Jews, in the devotion of all their energies to banking, the lending of money, and credit. The differences are but slight ; the means to an end employed are analagous if not identical. During their national existence the Jews were essentially husbandmen ; and the traffic of money being severely reprobated by the Mosaic law, gave them no opportunity of displaying their proclivities in this direction. They were an inland people, hemmed in towards the sea by the Phoenicians ; whilst inimical states and warring tribes opposed an impassable barrier from Damascus to