Book V — The Jew and the Talmud
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 power and influence which they have gradually acquired in all grades of modern society in many lands is now universally recognized.
This subsequent history of the fortunes of the Jewish people from the dates of their final separation from the Christian community, and the great catastrophes of the years of grace A.D. 70 and A.D. 135, constitutes a piece of supreme importance in the evidential history of the religion of Jesus; and yet, strange to say, it is, comparatively speaking, unknown and neglected.
It will be seen, as the pages of this wonderful story are turned over, how the guiding hand of the Lord, though in a different way, just as in the far-back days of the desert wanderings, has been ever visible in all the strange sad fortunes of the people, once the beloved of God.
The Jews of the twentieth century, numbering perhaps some ten or eleven millions, although scattered over many lands, constitute a distinct race, a separate people or nation. While during the Christian centuries all other races—peoples—nations—without a single exception have become extinct, or have become fused and merged with other and newer races and peoples, they, the Jews, have alone preserved their ancient nationality, their descent, their peculiar features, their individuality, their cherished traditions—absolutely intact.
It does not seem ever to have been remarked that the rise and influence of the great Rabbinic schools of Palestine and Babylonia, at Tiberias and Jamnia, at Sura and Pumbeditha—schools devoted to the study of the Torah (the Law) and the other books of the Old Testament, were coincident with the rise and influence of the Gnostic schools, schools in which the Old Testament was generally reviled and discredited. Is it too much to assume that echoes from the great Rabbinic teaching centres reached and sensibly influenced the Christian masters in their life and death contest with Gnosticism, a contest in which the Old Testament, its divine origin and its authority, was ever one of the principal questions at stake?
Nor is it an altogether baseless conception which sees that the reverence and love of at least a large proportion of earnest Christian folk for the Old Testament books, a reverence and a love that for more than eighteen hundred years has undergone no diminution or change, are in large measure due to the reverential handling, to the patient tireless studies of the great Rabbinical schools of the early Christian centuries—to the passionate, possibly exaggerated, love of the Jew for his precious book.
Though men guess it not, surely echoes from those strange Jewish schools of Tiberias and Sura, whose story we are about to relate, have reached the hearts of unnumbered Christians to whom the Jewish schools in question and their restless toil, all centering in the Holy Books in question, are but the shadow of a name?