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 INTRODUCTORY

Among all the various evidential arguments adduced in support of the truth of Christianity, many of them of a most weighty character and capable of an almost indefinite expansion, the history of the Jewish people, their wonderful past and their present condition, their numbers, their books, their ever-growing influence in the world of the twentieth century, must be considered as the most striking and remarkable.

The Christianity of the first century was surely no new religion; it was closely knit to, bound up with, the great Hebrew tradition. The sacred Hebrew tradition was the first chapter—the preface, so to speak—of the Christian revelation.

The early or pre-Christian details of the Jewish story are well known and generally accepted. The Old Testament account of the Jewish race historically is rarely disputed.

Less known and comparatively little regarded is the subsequent history of the Chosen People; over the records of their fate, after the final and complete separation of Judaism and Christianity, an almost impenetrable mist settled, and the story of the fortunes of the remnant of the Jews who survived the terrible exterminating wars of Titus and Hadrian has been generally neglected by the historians of the great Empire.

Very few have even cared to ask what happened to that poor remnant of vanquished Jews: all that is commonly known is that a certain number survived the great catastrophes, and that their scattered descendants, in different lands, appear and reappear all through the Middle Ages—a wandering and despised folk, generally hated and hating.

But these are still with us, and among us; that they occupy in our day and time a peculiar, a unique position of