before Christ; the Aramaic-speaking Chaldeans, who, likewise about 1000 B.C., sprang up as clan-groups and from 659 to 539 ruled the Babylonian world; the Israelites before the Exile;[1] and the Persians of Cyrus.[2] So strongly already the populations felt this form that the priesthoods which developed here, there, and everywhere after the time of Alexander received the names of foundered or fictitious tribes. Amongst the Jews and the South- Arabian Sabxans they were called Levites; amongst the Medes and Persians, Magi (after an extinct Indian tribe); and amongst the adherents of the new Babylonian religion Chaldeans (also after a disintegrated clan-grouping).[3] But here, as in all other Cultures, the energy of the national consensus completely overrode the old tribal arrangements of the primitives. Just as the Populus Romanus unquestionably contained folk-elements of very varied provenance, and as the nation of the French took in Salian Franks and Romanic and Old Celtic natives alike, so the Magian nation also ceased to regard origin as a distinguishing mark. The process, of course, was an exceedingly long one. The tribe still counts for much with the Jews of the Maccabean period and even with the Arabs of the first Caliphs; but for the inwardly ripened Culture-peoples of this world, such as the Jews of the Talmudic period, it no longer possessed any meaning. He who belongs to the Faith belongs to the Nation — it would have been blasphemy even to admit any other distinction. In early Christian times the Prince of Adiabene[4] went over to Judaism with his people in a body, and they were all ipso facto incorporated in the Jewish nation. The same applies to the nobility of Armenia and even the Caucasian tribes (which at that period must have Judaized on a large scale) and, in the opposite direction, to the Beduins of Arabia, right down to the extreme south, and beyond them again to African tribes as far afield as Lake Chad.[5] Here evidently is a national common feeling proof even against such race-distinctions as these. It is stated that even to-day Jews can amongst themselves distinguish very different races at the first glance, and that in the ghettos of eastern Europe the "tribes" (in the Old Testament sense) are clearly recognized. But none of this constitutes a difference of nation. According to von Erckert[6] the West-European Jew-type is universally distributed within the non-Jewish Caucasian peoples, whereas according to Weissenberg[7] it does not occur at all amongst the long-headed Jews of southern Arabia, where the
- ↑ A loose group of Edomite tribes which, with Moabites, Amalekites, Ishmaelites, and others, thus constituted a fairly uniform Hebrew-speaking population.
- ↑ See p. 167.
- ↑ Aristotle says that "philosophers are called Calani among the Indians, and Jews among the Syrians." Exactly the same is stated by Megasthenes, the Seleucid ambassador at Pataliputra, of Brahmins and Jews. — Tr.
- ↑ The district south of Lake Van, of which the capital was Arbela, the old home of the goddess Ishtar.
- ↑ As evidenced by the Falasha, the black Jews of Abyssinia.
- ↑ Arch. f. Anthrop., Vol. XIX.
- ↑ Zeitschr. f. Ethnol. (1919).
