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HEBRAIC LITERATURE;
TRANSLATIONS FROM THE TALMUD, MIDRASHIM AND KABBALA
SPECIAL INTRODUCTION
Among the absurd notions as to what the Talmud was, given credence in
the Middle Ages, one was that it was a man! The mediaeval priest or
peasant was perhaps wiser than he knew. Almost, might we say, the Talmud
was Man, for it is a record of the doings, the beliefs, the usages, the
hopes, the sufferings, the patience, the humor, the mentality, and the
morality of the Jewish people for half a millennium.
What is the Talmud? There is more than one answer. Ostensibly it is the
_corpus juris_ of the Jews from about the first century before the
Christian era to about the fourth after it. But we shall see as we
proceed that the Talmud was much more than this. The very word "Law" in
Hebrew--"Torah"--means more than its translation would imply. The Jew
interpreted his whole religion in terms of law. It is his name in fact
for the Bible's first five books--the Pentateuch. To explain what the
Talmud is we must first explain the theory of its growth more remarkable
perhaps than the work itself. What was that theory? The Divine Law was
revealed to Moses, not only through the Commands that were found written
in the Bible, but also through all the later rules and regulations of
post-exilic days. These additional laws it was presumed were handed down
orally from Moses to Joshua, thence to the Prophets, and later still
transmitted to the Scribes, and eventually to the Rabbis. The reason why
the Rabbis ascribed to Moses the laws that they later evolved, was due
to their intense reverence for Scripture, and their modest sense of
their own authority and qualification. "If the men of old were giants
then we are pigmies," said they. They felt and believed that all duty
for the guidance of man was found in the Bible either directly or
inferentially. Their motto was then, "Search the Scriptures," and they
did search them with a literalness and a painstaking thoroughness never
since repeated. Not a word, not a letter escaped them. Every redundancy
of expression was freighted with meaning, every repetition was made to
give birth to new truth. Some of the inferences were logical and
natural, some artificial and far-fetched, but all ingenious. Sometimes
the method was inductive and sometimes deductive. That is, occasionally
a needed law was promulgated by the Jewish Sanhedrin, and then its
authority sought in the Scripture, or the Scripture would be sought in
the first instance to reveal new law.
So while the Jewish code, religious and civil, continued to grow during
the era of the Restoration of the second Temple, to meet the more
complex conditions of later times, still the theory was maintained that
all was evolved from original Scripture and always transmitted, either
written or oral, from Moses from Mount Sinai. It was not, however, till
the year 219 after the Christian era that a compiled summary of the
so-called oral law was made--perhaps compiled from earlier summaries--by
Rabbi Jehudah Hanassi (the Prince), and the added work was called the
Mishnah or Second Law. Mark the date. We have passed the period of the
fall of Judea's nationality. And it was these very academies in which
the Jewish tradition--the Jewish Law was studied, that kept alive the
Jewish people as a religious community after they had ceased to be a
nation. This Mishnah, divided into six _sedarim_ or chapters, and
subdivided into thirty-six treatises, became now in the academies of
Palestine, and later in Babylonia, the text of further legal
elaboration, with the theory of deduction from Scripture still
maintained.
Although the life of denationalized Israel was much narrower and more
circumscribed, with fewer outlets to their capacities, nevertheless the
new laws deduced from the Mishnah code in the academies grew far larger
than the original source, while the discussions which grew around each
Halacha, as the final decision was termed, and which was usually
transmitted with the decision, grew so voluminous that it became
gradually impossible to retain the complex tradition in the
memory--remarkable as the Oriental memory was and is. That fact, added
to the growing persecutions from Israel's over-lords, and the consequent
precarious fate of these precious traditions, made it necessary to write
them down in spite of the prejudice against committing the oral law to
writing at all. This work was undertaken by Rav Asche and his disciples,
and was completed before the year 500. The Mishnah, together with the
laws that later grew out of it, called also Gamara, or Commentary, form
the Talmud. While the Palestinian school evolved a Gamara from the
Mishnah which is called the "Palestinian Talmud," it was the tradition
of the Babylonian academies, far vaster because they continued for so
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