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Hebraic Literature

Translations from

THE TALMUD, MIDRASHIM and KABBALA

Tudor Publishing Co.
New York

1943

SPECIAL INTRODUCTION

Among the absurd notions as to what the Talmud was, givencredence in the Middle Ages, one was that it was a man! Themediaeval 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 forhalf a millennium.

What is the Talmud? There is more than one answer. Ostensibly itis the corpus juris of the Jews from about the first centurybefore the Christian era to about the fourth after it. But we shallsee as we proceed that the Talmud was much more than this. The veryword "Law" in Hebrew—"Torah"—means more than itstranslation would imply. The Jew interpreted his whole religion interms of law. It is his name in fact for the Bible's first fivebooks—the Pentateuch. To explain what the Talmud is we mustfirst explain the theory of its growth more remarkable perhaps thanthe work itself. What was that theory? The Divine Law was revealedto Moses, not only through the Commands that were found written inthe Bible, but also through all the later rules and regulations ofpost-exilic days. These additional laws it was presumed were handeddown orally from Moses to Joshua, thence to the Prophets, and laterstill transmitted to the Scribes, and eventually to the Rabbis. Thereason why the Rabbis ascribed to Moses the laws that they laterevolved, was due to their intense reverence for Scripture, andtheir modest {iv} sense of their own authority andqualification. "If the men of old were giants then we are pigmies,"said they. They felt and believed that all duty for the guidance ofman was found in the Bible either directly or inferentially. Theirmotto was then, "Search the Scriptures," and they did search themwith a literalness and a painstaking thoroughness never sincerepeated. Not a word, not a letter escaped them. Every redundancyof expression was freighted with meaning, every repetition was madeto give birth to new truth. Some of the inferences were logical andnatural, some artificial and far-fetched, but all ingenious.Sometimes the method was inductive and sometimes deductive. Thatis, occasionally a needed law was promulgated by the JewishSanhedrin, and then its authority sought in the Scripture, or theScripture would be sought in the first instance to reveal newlaw.

So while the Jewish code, religious and civil, continued to growduring the era of the Restoration of the second Temple, to meet themore complex conditions of later times, still the theory wasmaintained that all was evolved from original Scripture and alwaystransmitted, either written or oral, from Moses from Mount Sinai.It was not, however, till the year 219 after the Christian era thata compiled summary of the so-called oral law was made—perhapscompiled from earlier summaries—by Rabbi Jehudah Hanassi (thePrince), and the added work was called the Mishnah or Second Law.Mark the date. We have passed the period of the fall of Judea'snationality. And it was these very academies in which the Jewishtradition—the Jewish Law was studied, that kept alive theJewish people as a religious community after they had ceased to bea nation. This Mishnah, divided into six sedarim orchapters, and subdivided into thirty-six treatises, became now inthe academies of Palestine, and later in Babylonia, the text offurther legal elaboration, with the theory of deduction fromScripture still maintained.

Although the life of denationalized Israel was much narrower andmore circumscribed, with fewer outlets to their capacities,nevertheless the new laws deduced from the Mishnah code in theacademies grew far larger than the {v} original source, while thediscussions which grew around each Halacha, as the final decisionwas termed, and which was usually transmitted with the decision,grew so voluminous that it became gradually impossible to retainthe complex tradition in the memory—remarkable as theOriental memory was and is. That fact, added to the growingpersecutions from Israel's over-lords, and the consequentprecarious fate of these precious traditions, made it necessary towrite them down in spite of the prejudice against committing theoral law to writing at all. This work was undertaken by Rav Ascheand his disciples, and was completed before the year 500. TheMishnah, together with the laws that later grew out of it, calledalso Gamara, or Commentary, form the Talmud. While the Palestinianschool evolved a Gamara from the Mishnah which is called the"Palestinian Talmud," it was the tradition of the Babylonianacademies, far vaster because they continued for so many morecenturies, that is the Talmud per se, that great work of2,947 folio leaves. Were we to continue the tradition further, wemight show how often this vast legal compilation was the subject of