great orators, or

great writers? To this question Mr.

Disraeli

answers:

"Favoured by Nature and by Na

ture's God, we produced the lyre of David; we gave you Isaiah and Ezekiel: they are our Olynthians,' our 'Phillippics.' Favoured by Nature we still remain: but in exact proportion as we have been favoured by Nature, we have been persecuted by Man. After a thousand struggles; after acts of heroic courage that Rome has never equalled; deeds of patriotism that Athens, and Sparta, and Carthage have never excelled; we have endured fifteen hundred years of supernatural slavery, during which every device that can degrade or destroy man has been the destiny that we have

:

sustained and baffled. The Hebrew child has entered adolescence only to learn that he was the pariah of that ungrateful Europe that owes to him the best part of its laws, a fine portion of its literature, all its religion. Great poets require a public we have been content with the immortal melodies that we sung more than two thousand years ago by the waters of Babylon, and wept. They record our triumphs; they solace our affliction. Great orators are the creatures of popular assemblies; we were permitted only by stealth to meet even in our temples. And as for great writers, the catalogue is not blank. What are all the schoolmen, Aquinas himself, to Maimonides? and as for modern philosophy, all springs from Spinoza."

But Israel has one eminent work which she regards as the greatest literary chef d'œuvre ever written; the possession of which, says a Jewish historian, ought to compensate all Hebrews for the loss of their ancestral country. And this, work is the Talmud-a book which forms a kind of homestead for the Jewish mind, an intellectual and moral fatherland for a people who are exiles and aliens in all the nations of the earth.

The Jews hold that the Law was given in a twofold character. There was the Torah Shebeketeh, the Law which is in writing; and the Torah Shebeal Peh, the Law which is "upon the lip;" or, in other words, Scripture and Tradition, the Written and the Oral Law.

The oral law the Jews regard with the same veneration as their written law; and, holding them both to be of Divine origin, they think them equally binding. Indeed, if preference be given to either, it is to the oral law; for the written law is considered by them in many places obscure and defec

tive, and could be no perfect rule to them without the former, which supplies all the defects, and solves all the difficulties of the written law. For, they say, that when God gave Moses the law on Mount Sinai, He gave unto him also the interpretation of it, commanding him to commit the former to writing; but to deliver the other only by word of mouth, to be preserved in the memories of men, and to be transmitted down to them by tradition only from generation to generation. Hence the former is called the Written, and the other the Oral Law.

This oral law was repeated by Moses to Joshua, by Joshua to the elders who succeeded him, by the elders to the prophets, by the prophets to each other, till it came to Jeremiah, who delivered it to Baruch, and Baruch to Ezra, by whom it was transmitted to the men of the Great Synagogue, the last of whom was Simon the Just. From Simon the Just, it was delivered through successive channels, till it arrived at Gamaliel (at whose feet St. Paul sat), and by him, through his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, to Rabbi Judah Hakkadosh, who wrote it in the book called the Mishna-a work treated by the Jews with the greatest veneration throughout all their dispersions.

The Mishna is divided into six parts, each of which consists of separate treatises; every treatise is divided into chapters; and every chapter into mishnas or aphorisms. In the first part is discussed whatever relates to seeds, fruits, and trees; in the second, feasts; in the third, women, their duties, their disorders, marriages, divorces, contracts, and nuptials; in the fourth, the damages or losses sustained by beasts or men, of things found, deposits, usuries, rents, farms, partnerships in commerce, inheritance, sales and purchases,

oaths, witnesses, arrests, idolatry—and here are named those by whom the oral law was received and preserved; in the fifth, sacrifices and holy things; and the sixth, purifications, vessels, furniture, clothes, houses, leprosy, baths, and numerous other articles.

As soon as the Mishna was published, it became the subject of the studies of learned men. The great scholars of Judæa and Babylonia employed themselves in writing comments on it; and these comments, with the Mishna, make up both the Talmuds-the Babylonish Talmud, and the Jerusalem Talmud. These comments are called the Gemara, or the Complement; because by them the Mishna is fully explained, and the whole traditionary doctrine of the Jewish law completed. In these two Talmuds the whole doctrines of the Hebrew faith now professed by the Orthodox Jews are contained. No Orthodox Jew can be a Rabbi who is not well versed in the text of the Mishna, and in its complement, the Gemara. Maimonides, the greatest Rabbi of the Jews, has made a digest from the Talmud of all the resolutions and determinations arrived at on every case. This digest is called Yad Hachazakah, or the Strong Hand, and is regarded as the authority on the subject.

Within the last few years certain writers, whose proclivities are certainly far more Jewish than they are Christian, have done all in their power, by exaggerated praise and favourably rendered extracts, to prove that the religious and moral tone of the Talmud is quite equal to the Holy Scriptures. And among them no one stands higher than the learned and brilliant reviewer who, three years ago, took the reading world by storm, by the celebrated "What is the Talmud ?" article in the Quarterly Review. Notwithstanding its vacillating style, and its

sentences, which no true Jew would have penned, that famous essay on the Talmud interested both Jew and Christian alike. The Orthodox Jews were delighted at such a powerful and scholarly article appearing in a well-known Christian publication, to vindicate the reputation of a work for which they have the highest veneration. The Karaite Jews in Russia, the Crimea, and Jerusalem, who, for the last twelve hundred years, have rejected the Talmud as a useless and fabulous work, read it with avidity; and some even paused to reflect whether they had done rightly in ignoring so holy and noble a book. Among the Reformed Jews in Germany, in France, and England the effect of that wondrous review was not a whit the less. It was translated into every European language, it was read by every one, and charmed and instructed all. Hardly a voice was raised against it in dissent. Even Christians rejoiced that Judaism had so pure and religious a work as a lamp to their feet and a light to their paths.

Its

And yet the Talmud does not deserve this praise. stories are childish, ignorant, and superstitious; its principles are often coarse, false, and debasing, and its impurity in many parts is as obscene as the sixth satire of Juvenal, or a comedy of Aristophanes. A work must, indeed, be bad which does. not admit of some good sayings and pious sentences being culled from its pages, when those pages number two thousand, nine hundred, and forty-seven folio leaves. And this is what the reviewer has done. He has collected a mass of elegant extracts, some of which have been slightly garbled; and these he has placed before the world as honest and fair specimens of the contents of the Talmud. I will adduce a few instances.

From the reviewer I learn, for the first time, that the Tal