by Will Durant
From such tribulations the Jews of the Dispersion always recovered. Patiently they rebuilt their synagogues and their lives; toiled, traded, lent money, prayed and hoped, increased and multiplied. Each settlement was required to maintain at communal expense at least one elementary and one secondary school, both of them usually in the synagogue. Scholars were advised not to live in any town that lacked such schools. The language of worship and instruction was Hebrew; the language of daily speech was Aramaic in the East, Greek in Egypt and Eastern Europe; elsewhere the Jews adopted the language of the surrounding population. The central theme of Jewish education was religion; secular culture was now almost ignored. Dispersed Jewry could maintain itself, in body and soul, only through the Law; and religion was the study and observance of the Law. The faith of their fathers became more precious to the Jews the more it was attacked; and the Talmud and the synagogue were the indispensable support and refuge of an oppressed and bewildered people whose life rested on hope, and their hope on faith in their God.
II. THE MAKERS OF THE TALMUD
In the Temple, the synagogues, and the schools of Palestine and Babylonia the scribes and the rabbis composed those enormous bodies of law and commentary known as the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. Moses, they held, had left to his people not only a written Law in the Pentateuch, but also an oral Law, which had been handed down and expanded from teacher to pupil, from generation to generation. It had been the main point of issue between the Pharisees and the Sadducees of Palestine whether this oral Law was also of divine origin and binding force. As the Sadducees disappeared after the Dispersion of A.D. 70, and the rabbis inherited the tradition of the Pharisees, the oral Law was accepted by all orthodox Jews as God’s commandment, and was added to the Pentateuch to constitute the Torah or Law by which they lived, and in which, quite literally, they had their being. The thousand-year-long process by which the oral Law was built up, given form, and put into writing as the Mishna; the eight centuries of debate, judgment, and elucidation that accumulated the two Gemaras as commentaries on the Mishna; the union of the Mishna with the shorter of these Gemaras to make the Palestinian, and with the longer to make the Babylonian, Talmud—this is one of the most complex and astonishing stories in the history of the human mind. The Bible was the literature and religion of the ancient Hebrews; the Torah was the life and blood of the medieval Jews.
Because the Law of the Pentateuch was written, it could not meet all the needs and circumstances of a Jerusalem without freedom, or a Judaism without Jerusalem, or a Jewry without Palestine. It was the function of the Sanhedrin teachers before the Dispersion, and of the rabbis after it, to interpret the legislation of Moses for the use and guidance of a new age or place. Their interpretations and discussions, with majority and minority opinions, were transmitted from one generation of teachers to another. Perhaps to keep this oral tradition flexible, possibly to compel its memorizing, it was not written down. The rabbis who expounded the Law might on occasion call in the help of persons who had accomplished the feat of committing it to memory. In the first six generations after Christ the rabbis were called tannaim—“teachers of the oral Law.” As the sole experts in the Law, they were at once the teachers and the judges of their communities in Palestine after the fall of the Temple.
The rabbis of Palestine and of the Dispersion constituted the most unique aristocracy in history. They were no closed or hereditary class; many of them rose from the poorest ranks; most of them earned their living as artisans even after achieving international repute; and until near the end of this period they received no payment for their work as teachers and judges. Rich men sometimes made them silent partners in business enterprises, or took them into their homes, or married their daughters to them to free them from toil. A few of them were spoiled by the high status accorded to them in their communities; some were humanly capable of anger, jealousy, hatred, undue censoriousness, pride; they had frequently to remind themselves that the true scholar is a modest man, if only because wisdom sees the part in the light of the whole. The people loved them for their virtues and their faults, admired them for their learning and their devotion, and told a thousand stories about their judgments and their miracles. To this day no people so honors the student and the scholar as do the Jews.
As rabbinical decisions accumulated, the task of memorizing them became unreasonable. Hillel, Akiba, and Meir attempted various classifications and mnemonic devices, but none of these received general acceptance. Disorder in the transmission of the Law became the order of the day; the number of men who knew the entire oral Law by heart was dangerously reduced, and dispersion was scattering these few to distant lands. About the year 189, at Sepphoris in Palestine, Rabbi Jehuda Hanasi took over and transformed the work of Akiba and Meir, rearranged the whole oral Law, and wrote it down, with some personal additions, as the “Mishna of Rabbi Jehuda.” * It was so widely read that it became in time the Mishna, the authoritative form of the oral Law of the Jews.
As we have it, the Mishna (i.e., oral teaching) is the result of much editing and interpolation since Jehuda; even so it is a compact summary, designed for memorizing by repetition, and therefore tantalizingly terse and obscure to one who comes to it from any background except that of Jewish life and history. Babylonian and European as well as Palestinian Jews accepted it, but each school placed upon its maxims an individual interpretation. As six “generations” (A.D. 10–220) of rabbinical tannaim had shared in formulating the Mishna, so now six “generations” (220–500) of rabbinical amoraim (“expounders”) accumulated those two masses of commentary, the Palestinian and the Babylonian Gemaras. The new teachers did to the Mishna of Jehuda what the tannaim had done to the Old Testament: they debated, analyzed, explained, amended, and illustrated the text to apply it to the new problems and circumstances of their place and time. Towards the end of the fourth century the schools of Palestine co-ordinated their commentaries in the form known as the Palestinian Gemara. About the same time (397) Rab (Rabbi) Ashi, head of the Sura college, began to codify the Babylonian Gemara, and worked on it for a generation; a hundred years later (499) Rabina II bar (son of) Samuel, also at Sura, brought this work to completion. If we note that the Babylonian Gemara is eleven times as long as the Mishna, we shall begin to understand why its compilation spanned a century. Through an additional 150 years (500-650) rabbinical saboraim (“reasoners”) revised this vast commentary, and gave the finishing touches to the Babylonian Talmud.
The word talmud means teaching. Among the amoraim it was applied only to the Mishna; in modern usage it includes both the Mishna and the Gemara. The Mishna is the same in both the Palestinian and the Babylonian Talmuds; the two differ only in the Gemara or commentary, which is four times longer in the Babylonian than in the Palestinian form.* The language of the two Gemaras is Aramaic; that of the Mishna is Neo-Hebraic, with many borrowings from neighbor languages. The Mishna is concise, stating a law in a few lines; the Gemaras are deliberately discursive, giving the diverse opinions of leading rabbis on the Mishna text, describing the circumstances that might require modification of the law, and adding illustrative material. The Mishna is mostly halacha, law; the Gemaras are partly halacha—restating or discussing a law—and partly haggada (“story”). Haggada has been lazily defined as anything in the Talmud that is not halacha. For the most part haggada includes illustrative anecdotes or examples, bits of biography, history, medicine, astronomy, astrology, magic, and theosophy, and exhortations to virtue and obedience to the Law. Often a haggada relieved the minds of the students after some complex and tiring debate. So, we read,
Rab Ami and Rab Assi were conversing with Rabbi Isaac Napcha, when one of them said to him: “Tell us, sir, some pretty legend”; and the other said: “Pray explain to us, rather, some nice point of law.” When he began the legend he displeased the one, and when he began to explain a point of law he offended the other. Whereupon he took up this parable: “I am like the man with the two wives, the one young and the oth
er old. The young one plucked out all his gray hairs, that he might look young; the old wife pulled out all his black hairs, that he might look old; and so between the two he became bald. So it is with me between you.”13
III. THE LAW
If now, with offensive brevity and ecumenical ignorance, we attempt to sketch some phases of this immense Talmud that entered into every cranny of medieval Hebrew life, let us confess that we are but scratching a mountain, and that our external approach condemns us to error.
1. Theology
First, said the rabbis, one must study the Law, written and oral. “Greater is study of Torah than the rebuilding of the Temple.”14 “Every day when a man busies himself with the study of the Law he should say to himself, ‘It is as if this day I received it from Sinai.’”15 No other study is necessary; Greek philosophy, secular science, may be studied only “at that hour which is neither day nor night.”16 Every word of the Hebrew Scriptures is literally the word of God; even the Song of Songs is a hymn inspired by God—to portray allegorically the union of Yahveh with Israel as His chosen bride.*17 Since without the Law there would be moral chaos, the Law must have existed before the creation of the world, “in the bosom or mind of God”; † only its communication to Moses was an event in time. The Talmud, so far as it is halacha, is also God’s eternal word; it is the formulation of laws orally communicated to Moses by God, and by Moses to his successors; and its decrees are as binding as anything in the Scriptures.‡ Some rabbis ranked the Mishna above the Scriptures in authority, as being a later and revised form of the Law.18 Certain rabbinical edicts frankly voided laws of the Pentateuch, or interpreted them into harmlessness.19 During the Middle Ages (476-1492) the Jews of Germany and France studied the Talmud far more than the Scriptures.
The Talmud, like the Bible, takes for granted the existence of an intelligent and omnipotent God. There were occasional skeptics among the Jews, like the learned Elisha ben Abuyah whom the pious Rabbi Meir befriended; but they were apparently a tiny and hardly vocal minority. The Talmud’s God is frankly anthropomorphic: He loves and hates, gets angry,20 laughs,21weeps,22 feels remorse,23 wears phylacteries,24 sits on a throne surrounded by a ministering hierarchy of cherubim and seraphim, and studies the Torah three times a day.25 The rabbis acknowledged that these human attributes were a bit hypothetical; “we borrow terms from His creatures to apply to Him,” they said, “in order to assist the understanding”;26 it was not their fault if the commonalty could think only in pictures. They also represented God as the soul of the universe, invisible, pervasive, vitalizing, at once transcendent and immanent, above the world and yet present in every nook and fragment of it. This universal divine presence, the Shekinah (dwelling), is especially real in sacred places, persons, and things, and in moments of study or prayer. Nevertheless this omnipresent God is one. Of all ideas the most distasteful to Judaism is that of a plurality of gods. The unity of God is passionately reiterated against the polytheism of the pagans and the apparent tritheism of the Christian Trinity; it is proclaimed in the most famous and universal of Jewish prayers, the Shema Yisrael: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one” (Shema Yisrael adonoi elohenu, adonoi ehad).27 No messiah, no prophet, no saint is to have a place beside Him in His temple or worship. The rabbis forbade, except on rare occasions, the utterance of His name, hoping to deter profanity and magic; to avoid the sacred tetragrammaton JHVH they used the word Adonai, Lord, and recommended even for this such substitutions as “The Holy One,” “The Merciful One,” “The Heavens,” and “Our Father which is in heaven.” God can and does work miracles, especially through great rabbis; but these marvels are not to be thought of as infractions of nature’s laws; there are no laws but the will of God.
Everything created has a divine and beneficent purpose. “God created the snail as a cure for the scab, the fly as a cure for the sting of the wasp, and the gnat as a cure for the bite of the serpent, and the serpent as a cure for a sore.”28 Between God and man there is a continuous relation; every step of man’s life is taken in the inescapable sight of God; every deed or thought of man’s day honors or dishonors the divine presence. All men are descended from Adam; nevertheless, “man was first created with a tail like an animal”;29 and “up to the generation of Enoch the faces of the people resembled those of monkeys.”30 Man is composed of body and soul; his soul is from God, his body is of the earth. The soul impels him to virtue, the body to sin. Or perhaps his evil impulses come from Satan, and that multitude of malignant spirits which lurks about everywhere.31 Every evil, however, may be ultimately good; without his earthy desires man might neither toil nor breed; “Come,” says a jolly passage, “let us ascribe merit to our ancestors, for if they had not sinned we should not have come into the world.”32
Sin is natural, but its guilt is not inherited. The rabbis accepted the doctrine of the fall of man, but not of original sin or divine atonement. A man suffers only for his own sins. If he suffers more on earth than his sins seem to warrant, that may be because we do not know the full measure of his sins; or such excess of punishment may be a great blessing, as entitling the sufferer to exceptional rewards in heaven; therefore, said Akiba, a man should rejoice in the multitude of his misfortunes.33 As for death, it came into the world through sin; a really sinless person would never die.34 Death is a debt owed by a sinful humanity to the author of all life. A midrash tells a touching story of death and Rabbi Meir:
While Rabbi Meir was holding his weekly discourse on a Sabbath afternoon, his two beloved sons died suddenly at home. Their mother covered them with a sheet, and forbore to mourn on the sacred day. When Rabbi Meir returned after evening services he asked for his sons, whom he had not seen in the synagogue. She asked him to recite the habdalah [a ceremony marking the close of the Sabbath], and gave him his evening meal. Then she said: “I have a question to ask thee. A friend once gave me jewels to keep for him; now he wishes them again; shall I return them?” “Beyond doubt thou must,” said Rabbi Meir. His wife took him by the hand, led him to the bed, and drew back the sheet. Rabbi Meir burst into bitter weeping, and his wife said: “They were entrusted to us for a time; now their Master has taken back His very own.”35
The Hebrew Scriptures had said little of an immortality of reward and punishment; but that idea now played a major role in rabbinical theology. Hell was pictured at Ge Hinnom or Sheol,* and divided like heaven into seven stories, with graduated degrees of torment. Only the most wicked of the circumcised would enter it,36 and even confirmed sinners would not be punished forever. “All who go down to hell shall come up again, except these three: he who commits adultery, he who shames another in public, and he who gives another a bad name.”37 Heaven was called Gan Eden, and was represented as a garden of every physical and spiritual delight; the wine there would be of a vintage preserved from the six days of the creation; perfumes would bless the air; and God Himself would join the saved in a banquet whose supreme joy would be the sight of His face. However, some rabbis confessed that no man can say what lies beyond the grave.38
The Jews thought of salvation in terms of the nation rather than of the individual. Driven across the earth with apparently irrational ruthlessness, they strengthened themselves with the belief that they were still the chosen and favored people of God. He was their father, and a just God; it could not be that He would break covenant with Israel. Was it not to them that He had given those Scriptures which both the Christians and the Moslems accepted and revered? In the depths of their despair they mounted to such compensatory pride that their rabbis, who had exalted them, had to humble them with reproof. Then, as now, they longed for the land of their nation’s birth, and idealized it in loving memory. “He who walks four ells in Palestine is sure of everlasting life,” they said; “he who lives in Palestine is without sin”;39 “even the merest talk of those who dwell in Palestine is Torah.”40 The central part of the daily prayers, the Shemoneh Esreh (“eighteen paragraphs”), included a petition for the coming of the son o
f David, the Messiah King who would make the Jews a nation again, united, free, worshiping God in their own Temple with the ancient ritual and song.
2. Ritual
What distinguished the Jews in this Age of Faith, what kept them one in their scattering, was not theology but ritual, not a creed that Christianity had merely extended and that Islam would substantially adopt, but a ceremonial law of such burdensome complexity that only this proud and high-strung people showed the humility and patience required to obey it. Christianity sought unity through uniform belief, Judaism through uniform ritual. The laws “were given,” said Abba Areca, “only for the purpose of disciplining and refining men by their observance.”41
The ritual was first of all a law of worship. When the synagogue succeeded the Temple, animal sacrifice was replaced by offerings and prayer. But no more in the synagogue than in the Temple was any image of God or man allowed. Every approach to idol worship was shunned; and instrumental music, permitted in the Temple, was forbidden in the synagogue. Here Christianity diverged, Mohammedanism stemmed, from Judaism; the Semites developed a somber piety, the Christians a somber art.