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THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS
BY LOUIS GINZBERG
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN MANUSCRIPT BY
HENRIETTA SZOLD
VOLUME I
BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS
FROM THE CREATION TO JACOB
TO MY BROTHER ASHER
PREFACE
Was sich nie und nirgends hat
begeben, das allein veraltet nie.
The term Rabbinic was applied to the Jewish Literature of
post-Biblical times by those who conceived the Judaism of the
later epoch to be something different from the Judaism of the
Bible, something actually opposed to it. Such observers held that
the Jewish nation ceased to exist with the moment when its
political independence was destroyed. For them the Judaism of the
later epoch has been a Judaism of the Synagogue, the spokesmen of
which have been the scholars, the Rabbis. And what this phase of
Judaism brought forth has been considered by them to be the
product of the schools rather than the product of practical,
pulsating life. Poetic phantasmagoria, frequently the vaporings
of morbid visionaries, is the material out of which these
scholars construct the theologic system of the Rabbis, and fairy
tales, the spontaneous creations of the people, which take the
form of sacred legend in Jewish literature, are denominated the
Scriptural exegesis of the Rabbis, and condemned incontinently as
nugae rabbinorum.
As the name of a man clings to him, so men cling to names. For
the primitive savage the name is part of the essence of a person
or thing, and even in the more advanced stages of culture,
judgments are not always formed in agreement with facts as they
are, but rather according to the names by which they are called.
The current estimate of Rabbinic Literature is a case in point.
With the label Rabbinic later ages inherited from former ages a
certain distorted view of the literature so designated. To this
day, and even among scholars that approach its investigation with
unprejudiced minds, the opinion prevails that it is purely a
learned product. And yet the truth is that the most prominent
feature of Rabbinic Literature is its popular character.
The school and the home are not mutually opposed to each other in
the conception of the Jews. They study in their homes, and they
live in their schools. Likewise there is no distinct class of
scholars among them, a class that withdraws itself from
participation in the affairs of practical life. Even in the
domain of the Halakah, the Rabbis were not so much occupied with
theoretic principles of law as with the concrete phenomena of
daily existence. These they sought to grasp and shape. And what
is true of the Halakah is true with greater emphasis of the
Haggadah, which is popular in the double sense of appealing to
the people and being produced in the main by the people. To speak
of the Haggadah of the Tannaim and Amoraim is as far from fact as
to speak of the legends of Shakespeare and Scott. The ancient
authors and their modern brethren of the guild alike elaborate
legendary material which they found at hand.
It has been held by some that the Haggadah contains no popular
legends, that it is wholly a factitious, academic product. A
cursory glance at the pseudepigraphic literature of the Jews,
which is older than the Haggadah literature by several centuries,
shows how untenable this view is. That the one literature should
have drawn from the other is precluded by historical facts. At a
very early time the Synagogue disavowed the pseudepigraphic
literature, which was the favorite reading matter of the
sectaries and the Christians. Nevertheless the inner relation
between them is of the closest kind. The only essential
difference is that the Midrashic form prevails in the Haggadah,
and the parenetic or apocalyptic form in the pseudepigrapha. The
common element must therefore depart from the Midrash on the one
hand and from parenesis on the other.
Folklore, fairy tales, legends, and all forms of story telling
akin to these are comprehended, in the terminology of the
post-Biblical literature of the Jews, under the inclusive
description Haggadah, a name that can be explained by a
circumlocution, but cannot be translated. Whatever it is applied
to is thereby characterized first as being derived from the Holy
Scriptures, and then as being of the nature of a story. And, in
point of fact, this dualism sums up the distinguishing features
of Jewish Legend. More than eighteen centuries ago the Jewish
historian Josephus observed that "though we be deprived of our
wealth, of our cities, or of the other advantages we have, our
law continues immortal." The word he meant to use was not law,
but Torah, only he could not find an equivalent for it in Greek.
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