They further observed that different nations had different moral characteristics, both good and bad (Egyptians are superstitious, Arabs are thieves, Greeks are fast-talking tricksters, and so on), but neither the Greeks nor the Romans ever explained these differences by appeal to what we would call a racial theory. Instead, they argued that climate, soil, and water determine both the physical and moral characteristics of nations. Therefore the notion of anti-Semitism is inappropriate to antiquity, even if many of the motifs and arguments of the anti-Jewish literature of antiquity are familiar
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