III — (b) Rabbinism
What Rabbinism and Its Book, the Talmud, Did for the Jewish People
Historical summary of events leading up to the compilation and consolidation of the first part of the Talmud—the Mishnah.
After A.D. 70, when Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed, an extraordinary group of Rabbis or teachers of “the Law” arose—men of rare gifts, far-seeing and possessing unusual powers of communicating their enthusiasm to other men. These teachers recognized the utter hopelessness of any further war with Rome; they abandoned all expectation of seeing the Temple rebuilt; they saw that the future of Israel lay not in any restoration of its nationality as a people—that was now hopeless. But Israel alone among the people of the world possessed a Divine Law, was the inheritor of a glorious promise, a promise which they maintained belonged alone to them; no earthly misfortune could rob the Jew of this: they were the people specially beloved of God, and only by neglecting the observance of the Divine Law could they forfeit the sure and blessed inheritance reserved for them. That same Law must be their sole guide in all the various details of life—in the smallest matters as in the more important. In the rigid keeping of it they would in the end receive their great reward, the reward reserved for them, and for them alone, as the peculiar people of God the Supreme, the Almighty.
For some five centuries, since the days of Ezra and the return of the remnant of the people from the Captivity, “the Mosaic Law,” as contained in the Pentateuch, essentially in the same form as we now have it, had been regarded by the Jew with an almost limitless reverence. The acknowledgment of its awful and binding precepts was the condition without which no one was a member of the Chosen People, or could have a share in the glorious promises reserved for them.
Their teachers insisted that the commands of “the Law” (the Torah) were in their entirety the commands of God. “He who says that Moses wrote even one verse of his own knowledge is a denier and despiser of the Word of God.” The whole Pentateuch thus came to be regarded as dictated by God. Even the last eight verses of Deuteronomy, in which the death of Moses is told, were asserted to have been written by means of a divine revelation. Some of the teachers even went further; they asserted that the complete book of the Law had been handed to Moses by God.152
As time went on, the other Books of the “Old Testament”—at first the writings of the older prophets and works on the pre-exilic period of Israel; then the body of the “prophets” and the other Old Testament writings, became also regarded as documents in which the will of God was revealed in a manner absolutely binding.
Round the Law (Torah) had gathered a vast number of explanatory directions, and a certain number of traditional additions known as “Haggadah.” The first of these, the directions or explanations, were known by the term “Halachah.”153 It had become necessary, seeing that the Law of Moses was accepted as the divine code for the guidance of the Chosen People, to explain and enlarge it further, so as to apply its brief enactments to all the conditions of everyday life. Some few of these Halachah were traditionally derived from Moses himself. Others had probably been composed very early in the schools of the prophets; yet more were the work of the Scribes,154 a numerous class of teachers which had arisen after the return from exile in the days of Ezra. These Halachah (we use the well-known expression in preference to the more accurate plural form Halachoth; the same course has been followed in that of the expression “Haggadah”) had been largely augmented in the half-century preceding the catastrophe of A.D. 70.
The group of eminent Rabbis who arose after the fall of the City and Temple, and who set themselves the task of reconstituting Israel on a new and purely religious basis, took these Halachah, studied them, meditated on them,—no doubt recast many of them to suit the new position of the people, now that the Temple and its complicated ritual of sacrifice and public prayer had disappeared, and framed them into an elaborate system of regulations, thus pointing out how the Law might be rigidly observed in all the relations of ordinary life.
This great and elaborate work is termed the Mishnah155—or “Repetition,”—the term originally derived from the method in which it was elaborated. It was not written down in the first instance, but was repeated again and again by the more famous teachers and heads of schools to their pupils. The term “Mishnah” came in time to signify “the second Law,” but that was not the original meaning; it belonged to a period when the whole instruction was oral.
The period of the elaboration of these Halachah (rules) and Haggadah (tradition) lasted somewhere about a hundred years or a little more. The great teachers who busied themselves in this work are ordinarily termed the Mishnic Rabbis—the Talmud term for them being Tannaim.
In the last years of the second century the Mishnah or first part of the Talmud was virtually closed, and the great Rabbinic schools then busied themselves in further commenting upon and explaining the Halachah (rules) and Haggadah (traditions) of the Mishnah; these further comments and explanations are known as the Gemara.
This second part of the Talmud, known as “Gemara,”155 the complement of the first or Mishnic portion, was the outcome of the labours of several hundred Doctors or Rabbis. Two famous schools of Rabbinical study carried on the great work of commenting on the Mishnah. The one, the Palestinian, had its headquarters in Tiberias. The chief centres of the other, the Babylonian, were Sura and Pumbeditha. In both these compilations the same Mishnah is the text on which the vast body of commentary is based. But the Gemara, or commentary, is in many cases different. The Palestinian Talmud in the form which now exists is much shorter than the Eastern or Babylonian work. The Palestinian Rabbis worked from about the year of our Lord 190; their work was closed in the middle of the fifth century. The labours of the Babylonian doctors may be dated from the last years of the second, and were closed in the middle or later years of the sixth century.
The Babylonian—the larger Talmud, containing the Mishnah and Gemara, which has come down to us fairly intact, fills some twelve large folio volumes, and covers no less than 2947 folio leaves in double columns; or in other words, 5894 pages written in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Rabbinic. The nature of these vast compilations is described more in detail in a later section of this Fifth Book.
The Talmudic term for the doctors of the Gemara is Amoraim.
The one purpose and object of the Talmud, followed out with a changeless and restless industry by the doctors of the Mishnah and the Gemara, from the year 70 to nearly the close of the sixth century—that is to say, for a period of some five hundred years—was the Glorification of Israel. Law and legend, rule and tradition, massed together with rare skill, all dwell on this. The Jews, and only the Jews, were the people chosen by God. If they would but honour Him and serve Him faithfully they would in the end win the exceeding great and promised reward. The way, and the only way, to know Him and to serve Him was pointed out with unerring lucidity and a marvellous wealth of detail in the mighty compilation of the Talmud. They were strictly warned against encouraging proselytes. The ineffable blessings belonged to the Jew and to the Jew alone. Again, the exceeding great reward belonged not to the successful Jewish soldier, but to the Jew who kept the stern Law handed down from Moses to prophet, and by prophet to scribe, and by scribe to the Rabbis who compiled the Mishnah and Gemara, which together make up the Talmud. The question of revolt against Rome found no place in the Talmud teaching.
After the three great wars—especially after the first, which closed with the destruction of the Temple—the Jew had no nationality, no country. He needed none. He had something far greater. He, and only he, was possessor of the blessed Divine Law; the solitary heir of its glorious promises.
The Talmud became the bond which linked together in one solid group the Jews of Cyrene and Alexandria, of Rome and Babylonia. Its power over the Jewish mind became boundless. It possessed indeed a wondrous fascination for every child of Israel. It impressed upon each member of the scattered race, in a way no teaching had ever previously done, the consciousness who he was, and what was the awful nature of his inheritance. Strong in this consciousness, he endured all the wrongs and persecutions, the cruel acts and yet more cruel words which have been, with rare interludes, his lot since A.D. 70. All through the subsequent ages he endured a bitter persecution, which even in our own day and time is still in many lands constantly ready to break out against him.
Strong in this consciousness he lives on, a willing wanderer and a stranger among the various nations of the earth, hated and hating,—feared but at the same time honoured; ever increasing in numbers, in wealth, and influence. His hand is in each group of statesmen, now publicly, more often hidden, but always there: he is yet greater in the exchanges and marts of the nations; the finance of every civilized country is more or less guided by him, more or less subject to his dictation and supervision.
Who now, men ask, is this ever-present changeless Jew? What is the secret of his power and ever-growing influence? The second great awakening—the awakening to the grandeur of his true position in the world’s story—when all seemed lost, when his Temple and City were destroyed, when he became at once homeless, landless, an outcast hated, even despised, as far as we can see, was the work of the Doctors and Rabbis of Tiberias in Galilee, and of Sura and other centres in Babylonia, in the years which followed the crushing ruin of A.D. 70. It was the work of the compilers and teachers of the Mishnah and Gemara which together made up the Talmud. We may now and again wonder at the curious and startling assertions of the Mishnah, and even smile at some of the marvellous extravagances of the Gemara; but when we ponder over the wonderful story of the Jew during the eighteen centuries which have passed since the desolation of A.D. 70, we dare not mock at the Talmud.
When we consider the whole question of what we have termed “the great awakening” of the Jewish people after the sudden and tremendous ruin of the City and Temple; the complete change in the heart of the Jew; the abandonment of the old dream of the restoration of the kingdom of Israel; the adoption of a spiritual kingdom in its place: when we remember the universal reverence for, the implicit obedience which very soon began to be paid to, the teaching of the Mishnah and Gemara—the Talmud—a reverence and an obedience which completely changed the life, the views, the hopes of the scattered race in all lands,—we ask the pressing question: Whence came all this—the mighty change, the enthusiasm which has never paled or waned? The Mishnic Rabbis—the Gemara teachers, numerous, able, and devoted though they were, some few of them men of lofty genius and profound scholarship, do not account for this amazing result.
The “Talmud,” the outcome of these famous Rabbinic schools of the early Christian centuries, with its wild extravagances, its many beautiful thoughts, its peculiar and rigid system, touched the heart of the Jew, and bound together this people condemned to wander through the ages without a home, a country, a nationality, with a link no time, no human hate or scorn has been able to break or even to loose.
The strange weird Book was God’s mysterious instrument by which He has chosen to preserve intact the people He once loved—loves still—until the day, perhaps still far distant, dawns when the Jew, with eyes opened at last, shall look on Him whom they pierced.