It is a veritable lanx satura. It consists of disputes, decisions, stories, sermons, legends, Scripture comments, moral truths, prescriptions, observations, mazes of legal enactments, gorgeous day-dreams, masked history, ill-disguised rationalism. It is drawn from the promiscuous note-books of students of very diverse attainments and character in which they have scribbled down all the wisdom and all the unwisdom, all the sense and all the nonsense which was talked for centuries in the schools of all kinds of Rabbis.1 The Jew might say of his beloved Bablî, 66 Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, The work of hundreds of learned men of different ages, countries, and conditions, it forms a wonderful monument of human industry, human wisdom, and human folly.2 Written in a style of lapidary brevity, it reads like a collection of telegraphic messages. It is also full of uncouth grammar, barbarous solecisms, and exotic words. We can hardly wonder that it is difficult to discover the method of its apparently confused and desultory discussions, when we remember that it was developed amid conditions of peril and discouragement, amid endless disturbances of war and violences of persecution, under the jealous eye of Roman informers or the cruel greed and fanatical malice of Persian oppressors. Such being its origin it naturally teems with errors, exaggerations, 1 Rabbi Jehudi Hallévy makes some excellent remarks to this effect in Cusari pt. iii. 73, see Klein Le Judaïsme p. 40-46, who also quotes Ibn Ezra, R. Serira Gaon, Luzzatto and others, as well as such authorities as Buxtorf, Wagenseil, Selden, etc. 2 Hurwitz; Milman, Hist. of the Jews, iii. 5. The method of dispute in the Rabbinic schools was called " Pilpul," or "duel." There are four Schools of Talmudists the Pilpulists, who almost ceased after the days of Mendelssohn; the Casuists; the Homilists; and the Historic School, among whom may be reckoned writers like Rappoport, Zunz, Jost, Krochmal, Frankel, Geiger, Luzzato, Grätz, Steinschneider, &c. See Löw, Praktische Einleit. pp. 84-89. 3 The language of the Talmud has been philologically handled by Geiger, Levisohn, Luzzato, L. Dukes, and others. The translation of the whole Talmud was begun by Chiarini (into French), and by Dr. Moses Pinner (into German), but in both cases proceeded no further than one volume. The translation by Dr. Moïse Schwab seems likely to become complete. See Etheridge, Hebr. Lit. 175. The "Sea of the Talmud." 93 and even obscenities; with strange superstitions of Eastern demonology; with wild Arabian tales about the freaks of Ashmodai; with childish extravagances of fancy about Behemoth and the bird Bar Juchne and the Shorhabor; with perverted logic; with confusions of genealogy chronology, and history; with exorcisms, incantations, and magic formulae; with profane and old wives' fables, of which some few may have had a hidden significance to those who had the key to their meaning,1 but of which the majority were understood by the multitude in their literal absurdity.2 These "Jewish myths and genealogies," as St. Paul calls them, have their dark side. All that can be urged by way of excuse for their baser elements is that they were not always meant to be taken literally, or to be weighed in jeweller's scales. The Rabbi, talking familiarly in his lighter and unguarded moments, did not intend his eager pupils to retain and record his most rash and accidental utterances. Here, however, in this strange literary Herculaneum all things are swept together in wild confusion. Things grave and fantastic, great and small, valuable and worthless, Jewish and Pagan, the altar and its ashes are piled together in wild disorder. Amid the labyrinths of rubbish we require a torch to enable us to pick up an accidental gem. Such gems, indeed, it contains. In this sea of the Talmud-"this strange wild weird ocean with its leviathans, and its wrecks of golden argosies, and its forlorn bells which send up their dreamy sounds ever and anon "-there are some treasures, which have frequently 1 "Sed hoc interim etiam dicendum et sciendum, non omnia quae imperitis talia videntur, esse talia." Buxtorf. 2 No one will take his estimate of the Talmud from such wholly uncritical collections as those of Raymond Martin's Pugio Fidei, or Eisenmenger's Entdecktes Judenthum (see Weber, xxxiii.). Even such valuable works as those of Lightfoot, Schöttgen, Meuschen, and Wetstein, are vitiated by the uncritical promiscuousness of the quotations collected. But after every allowance is made the Talmud is one of the dreariest of books. 3 Deutsch, Remains, 1-58, 135-145. See Bartolocci, Bibl. Rabb. iii. 359 sq. Grätz, iv. 410-412; Etheridge, Hebr. Lit. 185. Buxtorf admits that there are in the Talmud "inutiles quasi paleae et multi furfures" but also "utilia quandoque esse grana et puram similam." been gathered, amid the froth and scum, the flotsam and jetsam of a thousand years. Exquisite parables and noble aphorisms are scattered in its pages here and there. The general darkness is sometimes broken by keen flashes of intellectual, and even of spiritual, light. But these are rare, and to speak of the Talmud in such terms of enthusiasm as those with which Dr. Deutsch charmed the unwary, or to say of it, with Professor Hurwitz, that no uninspired work contains more interesting, more varied, or more valuable information-is to be blinded by national prejudice to facts which any one can put to the test. But the worst result of the influence exercised by the Talmud is the injury which it inflicted on the living oracles of God. That injury was twofold. On the one hand the Jews were taught to care more for it, and to devote more continued study to its masses of casuistry and extravagance than to the divine beauty of the Psalms and the noble moral teaching of the Prophets. Thus they were turned from the river of life to broken cisterns which would hold no water, or only the shallow and stagnant pools of a tradition polluted by a thousand strange and heterogeneous influxes. A "Biblical theologian" was as great an object of contempt to the Rabbis as he became to the Schoolmen in their worst epoch of decline. On the other hand, the actual exegesis of Scripture in which the Talmud abounds is so arbitrary and so futile, so tasteless and so insincere, that it must have given to its students a radically false conception of their sacred books. It represented to them the Law of Moses as fragmentary without the supplement of tradition, and inexplicable without the intervention of Rabbinism. Let us, for instance, take the tracts Shabbath and Bîtza. The interminable discussions on Sabbath regulations which those treatises contain turn almost exclusively on false quotations or on inferences wholly without base.1 1 For an instance see Chiarini, ii. 226. VI. What has been said of the Talmud applies in general to all the Rabbinic writings and to the whole collection of Midrashim, of which the most celebrated are nothing but catenae of Talmudic passages.1 The word Midrash means, in its strictest sense, the exposition of the Pentateuch and of the five rolls of Canticles, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, which is collected in the Midrash Rabba. Jewish exegesis, as applied in the Midrashim, was founded on the four methods mnemonically described as, or Paradise :—namely, PaRDES Peshat, or the literal sense; the grammatico-historical meaning of words and sentences.2 Remez, or hint, the development of latent meanings.3 Darush, or homiletics, including allegory and all kinds of illustration. Sôd, or mystery." Exegetically the Peshat is alone of real value. The Remez was chiefly devoted to the development of Halakha; the Darush to the Haggada, and the Sôd to the Qabbala. It was in the development of the Sod, or mystery, that the Kabbalists found the chief sphere of their labours. The 1 See Dr. Ginsburg in Kitto's Cyclopaedia, s. v. Midrashim ; and in Koheleth p. 30. It is a haggadistic collection, half homiletic, half exegetical in character. 2 Compare the name of the Syriac version-Peshito, which implied that the version was simple and literal. Even some of the Sopherîm had laid down the rule that every interpretation was to accord with the literal .but no one practically attended to it ,(אין מקרא יוצא מידי פשיטו) 3 An assonance, a change of letters, &c. "Gott als Verfasser könne mit einem Worte, mit der einfachen und natürlichen Bedeutung, noch eine andere verknüpft haben und Mehreres mit einem Male lehren. Dieses heisst im Talmud ID n'y 'nn, Beides entnehme ich daraus." Hirschfeld, Halach. Exegese, § 104. See too § 112; Weber, 115. 4 From 7, "to search." 5 The Derek ha-kabbala. See Etheridge, Hebr. Lit. p. 404. 6 Critical Jews distinguish between popular commentaries like the Midrashim, and scientific commentaries (Perushim). The writers of the Midrash were neither Paraphrasts (Targumists), nor, properly speaking, commentators (Hiphreshim). The latter begin properly with Saadja in the tenth century, and include the great names of Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Maimonides, the Qimchis, and Abrabanel. Asaria di Rossi distinguishes between hyperbolical (guzma), haggadistic, and "exhaustive" Midrash. The latter, like what Sixtus Senensis calls the Pandesiac method, explained Scripture in all possible ways. word Qabbala means "a thing received," but it was used for "scholastic lore," 1 and it was asserted that the Qabbala was of equal sacredness with the Law, and had been received by Moses on Sinai. The germs of the Qabbala, in some of its branches, must be of early date, for it is referred to in the Mishna.2 Its two main divisions were the Real and the Symbolical. The real Qabbala is more connected with theosophy and thaumaturgy than with anything which could be called exegesis. Its theoretical section comprised the two great branches of inquiry, cosmogony and theosophy. They were called the Maaseh Bereshith, or Work of the Creation, and the Maaseh Merkaba, or Work of the Chariot, which derived its name from the Vision of Ezekiel. The Maaseh Bereshith entered into endless speculations about the Creation, the ten spheres, the four worlds, the En Soph, or "Infinite," Memra or the Word, Adam Kadmon the Primeval Man, the mysteries of numbers, and so forth. It sought to explain the transition from the Infinite to the Finite, from Mind to Matter. The Maaseh Merkaba plunged into inquiries respecting the abstract nature of God, and was surrounded 66 1 Ewald, Hist. of Israel, v. 190, E. Tr. Hence the word is even used for 'an amulet." See Buxtorf, Lex. p. 1953. Qabbala means the act of giving, while Massora, from Masar, "to transmit," means the act of receiving. See Ginsburg, The Kabbala, p. 4. 2 The Qabbala, or "secret wisdom" (n),-called also from the initials of these two words, 1, "grace,"-may be divided as follows: Theoretical. Practical (Magic Thauma- Gematria. Notarikon. Temoorah. turgy, &c.). 3 The ten pure numbers (Sephiroth) represent the twenty-two which have letters as their signs are the See the strange remarks of Philo on the number 7. Kabbalism in general "bears about the same relation to Being of God; the creative word of God. Vit. Mos. iii. p. 156. Scripture that magic does to nature." Reuss, Gesch. der heiligen Schriften Neuen Testaments, p. 503. |