The relations of the Jews in the time of the Roman empire were so peculiar and, one might say, so little dependent on the province which was named in the earlier period after them, in the later rather by the revived name of the Philistaeans or Palaestinenses, that, as we have already said, it appeared more suitable to treat of them in a separate section. The little which is to be remarked as to the land of Palestine, especially the not unimportant share of its maritime and partly also of its inland towns in Syrian industry and Syrian trade, has already been mentioned in the exposition given above of these matters. The Jewish Diaspora had already, before the destruction of the temple, extended in such a way that Jerusalem, even while it still stood, was more a symbol than a home, very much as the city of Rome was for the so-called Roman burgesses of later times. The Jews of Antioch and Alexandria, and the numerous similar societies of lesser rights and minor repute took part, as a matter of course, in the commerce and intercourse of the places where they dwelt. Their Judaism comes into account in the case only perhaps so far as the feelings of mutual hatred and mutual contempt, which had become developed or rather increased since the destruction of the temple, and the repeated national-religious wars between Jews and non-Jews must have exercised their effect also in these circles. As the Syrian merchants resident abroad met together in the first instance for the worship of their native deities, the Syrian Jew in Puteoli cannot well have belonged to the Syrian merchant-guilds there; and, if the worship of the Syrian gods found more and more an echo abroad, that which benefited the other Syrians drew one barrier the more between the Syrians believing in Moses and the Italians. If those Jews who had found a home outside of Palestine, attached themselves beyond it not to those who shared their dwelling-place but to those who shared their religion, as they could not but do, they thereby renounced the esteem and the toleration which the Alexandrians and the Antiochenes and the like met with abroad, and were taken for what they professed to be--Jews. The Palestinian Jews of the West, however, had for the most part not originated from mercantile emigration, but were captives of war or descendants of such, and in every respect homeless; the Pariah position which the children of Abraham occupied, especially in the Roman capital--that of the mendicant Jew, whose household furniture consisted in his bundle of hay and his usurer’s basket, and for whom no service was too poor and too menial--linked itself with the slave-market. Under these circumstances we can understand why the Jews during the imperial period played in the West a subordinate part alongside of the Syrians. The religious fellowship of the mercantile and proletarian immigrants told heavily on the collective body of the Jews, along with the general disparagement connected with their position. But that Diaspora, as well as this, had little to do with Palestine.