Similarly, Judaism had reached many countries, especially around the Mediterranean Sea, long before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. The spread of their religion depended partly on the migration of ethnic Jews but also on the distribution of their ideas. The conversion of the Khazars in the eighth century AD is only a later and more impressive example of this process. It is, however, unjustifiable to say, as some do, that if the Jews are not racially homogeneous they can lay no claim to the territorial state of Israel. The concepts of nation and race are not interchangeable. That the Jews as a people, of whatever ethnic origin, have a religious and historic connection with Israel is not open to dispute, and no section of the people has a stronger attachment to the Holy Land than the Jews of Ethiopia. It is estimated that in the days of Philo of Alexandria, in the first century BC, there were one million Jews in each of Syria, Egypt, Babylonia and Asia Minor and that the Diaspora outnumbered the Jews of Palestine by three to one.(1) A total Jewish population which then numbered some eight million could only have been the result of conversion due to the spread of ideas. Judaism was a religion which appealed to those who sought an alternative to the polytheism of Greece and Rome. According to Ethiopian tradition half the population was Jewish before the country was converted to Christianity in the fourth century.

The Jewish religion penetrated to the limits of the Graeco Roman world and beyond, into countries where the strangers in their midst were readily absorbed into existing small Jewish communities. No penalty attached to those who were converted such as was later imposed on apostates both by Christian and Muslim rulers; and the rabbis did not discourage proselytism as, subsequently, they were obliged to do largely as a measure of self-protection for the community.

Nor was separation from the Holy Land and Jerusalem, following the Roman conquest, an insuperable obstacle to the coherence of the scattered settlements, which displayed an astonishing resilience in the face of disaster. Exile, as Professor Elie Kedourie has insisted, 'figures from the earliest times as a leitmotiv in the Jewish self-view. Following the destruction of the Second Temple and the ending of Jewish autonomy, the fact, and the consciousness, of exile naturally became even more prominent. Through their own sins, successive generations of Jews were taugnt, they had brought this punishment on themselves. But God

(1) S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History if the Jews, vol. 1, pp. 170f