by Paul Johnson
These scholars, as a body, declined to join the Bar Kokhba revolt. But, of course, it affected them. Scholars often had to meet secretly. Jabneh itself became untenable, and after the revolt was crushed the rabbinical authorities transferred themselves to the town of Usha in western Galilee. Most rabbis were poor. They worked, usually with their hands. Constructing the Jewish history of these times is difficult, for the Jews themselves had ceased to write it, and the biographical and other information recorded emerges incidentally and without anchorage in chronology from passages in the halakhah or legal rulings, or in the aggadah stories and legends. Jewish academic society was not always homogeneous and self-contained. One of the greatest Jabneh scholars, Elisha ben Avuyah, became a heretic. But one of his pupils, the Rabbi Meir, best of the second-century scholars, may have been a convert. Women played their part. Meir’s wife Bruria made herself into a leading halakhic authority. At times the Jews were harassed or even persecuted by the imperial authorities. Sometimes they were left alone. At times they worked in harmony with Rome. Their leaders received grants of imperial lands and were permitted to exercise wide judicial powers. The Christian scholar Origen (185-254) says the nasi even imposed death-sentences. He certainly had the right to collect taxes. The Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi, or Judah the Prince, who lived in the second half of the second century and the beginning of the third, was a rich man attended by guards, who ruled the Jewish community both of Galilee and of the south almost like a secular potentate. Almost, but not quite: he spent his wealth on supporting scholars, the ablest of whom ate at the top table in his hall; he exempted scholarly men from taxation, at the expense of the workers; and in times of scarcity he fed scholars, but not the unlettered, from his food reserves. Even his maidservant, it is said, knew Hebrew and could explain the meaning of rare words. Judah was an intellectual elitist of the most uncompromising kind. He used to say, grimly: ‘It is the unlearned who bring trouble into the world.’140
Dynasties of scholars existed even in the period of the Second Commonwealth, when they are classified as zugot or ‘pairs’. There were five pairs of the leading scholars, the last being the famous Hillel, Christ’s teacher, and his opponent Shammai. Their descendants and followers, and other scholars who joined the elite, are known as the tannaim. Hillel’s grandson, Gamaliel the Elder, was the first of six generations, Judah Ha-Nasi the last. The next generation, beginning with Rabbi Hiya Rabbah about 220 AD, inaugurated the age of the amoraim, which lasted five generations in Judaea, up to the end of the fourth century, and eight generations in Babylon, up to the end of the fifth. There had, of course, been large Jewish communities in Babylon and its surroundings since the Exile. Contact was continuous since Babylonian Jewry accepted the calendar calculations from the Jerusalem authorities, and later from Jabneh. Babylonian Jews also came to Jerusalem on pilgrimage when this was possible. Pharisee or rabbinical Judaism came to Babylonia as a direct result of the Bar Kokhba revolt, when refugee scholars fleeing from Judaea established academies in what was then the territory of the Parthians. These schools were centralized at Sura, south of what is now Baghdad, and at Pumbedita to the west, where they flourished until the eleventh century. The location of the western academies in Palestine varied. In Judah Ha-Nasi’s time he concentrated all scholarship at Bet Shearim, but after his death there were important academies at Caesarea, Tiberias and Lydda.
The physical traces of this period of Jewish history are not impressive. Jewish archaeologists have not, of course, been able to explore sites in Iraq. The Jewish settlement at Sura had vanished completely as long ago as the 1170s, when the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela visited the spot; the town, he wrote, was in ruins. By contrast he found a sizeable community at Pumbedita, but that is the last we hear of it. On the other hand, excavations in 1932 uncovered, at the Roman caravan city of Dura Europus on the Euphrates, the remains of a synagogue dated 245 AD, with inscriptions in Aramaic, Greek and Pahlevi-Parthian. The Jewish colony there dated back, it appears, to the destruction and exile of the Northern Kingdom, but had been reinforced by more orthodox Jews after the revolts of 66-70 and 132-35. Even so it was a heterodox community, as perhaps were many at that time. The architecture was Hellenistic, as one would expect, but the surprise lay in some thirty painted panels (now in the Damascus National Museum), which illustrate the messianic theme of the Return, the restoration and salvation. There are images of the patriarchs, of Moses and the Exodus, of the loss of the Ark and its return, of David and Esther. Scholars relate these paintings to the illustrated Bibles which are believed to have existed in the second and third centuries AD, and which indicate that Christian art too had a Jewish origin. Evidently the rule on images was not then strictly observed, at any rate in all Jewish circles.141
A number of synagogues and tombs from the time of the sages have survived in Palestine. At Tiberias on the Lake of Galilee, the fourth-century synagogue also has human and animal images on its mosaic floor, and signs of the zodiac too. On the hill near the town is the tomb of the martyr, Rabbi Akiva, and that of Johanan ben Zakkai; two miles down the lake, Rabbi Meir has his tomb. At Capernaum, where the centurion whose servant Jesus healed built a synagogue, its second-third-century successor was excavated between 1905 and 1926, and carvings discovered of the shofar and menorah, the manna-pot, the palm tree and the shield of King David. Three synagogues have been unearthed in Syria and in northern Israel, and just off the Nazareth-Haifa road is Judah Ha-Nasi’s academic centre of Bet Shearim, with its synagogue, catacombs and cemetery—the last crowded with figurative art and concealing, somewhere, the tomb of Judah himself.142
But the chief memorials to this age of collective and individual scholarship are the Jewish holy writings themselves. Jewish sacred scholarship should be seen as a series of layers, each dependent on its predecessor. The first is the Pentateuch itself, which was essentially complete before the Exile, though some editing clearly went on after the Return. This is the basic body of written Jewish law, on which all else rests. Then come the books of the prophets, the psalms and wisdom literature, canonization of which was completed, as we have seen, under Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, between 70 and 132 AD. To this were added various non-canonical works essential to the study of Jewish religion and history: the Greek translation of the Bible, or Septuagint; the works of Josephus; the Apocrypha and various papyri.
The next layer or stage was the sorting out and writing of Oral Law, which had been accumulating for centuries. This was a practice termed Mishnah, meaning to repeat or study, since it was originally memorized and recapitulated. Mishnah consisted of three elements: the midrash, that is the method of interpreting the Pentateuch to make clear points of law; the halakhah, plural halakhot, the body of generally accepted legal decisions on particular points; and the aggadah or homilies, including anecdotes and legends used to convey understanding of the law to the ordinary people. Gradually, over many generations, these interpretations, rulings and illustrations found written form. After the Bar Kokhba revolt, and culminating in the work of Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi and his school at the end of the second century AD, this material was edited into a book called the Mishnah, the epitome of ‘repetition’. It has six orders, each divided into a variable number of tractates. The first is Zera’im, with eleven tractates, dealing with benedictions, offerings and titles. Mo’ed, with twelve tractates, covers the Sabbath and feasts. Nashim (seven tractates) deals with marriage and divorce. Nezikin (ten) covers civil wrongs or torts, judges, punishments and witnesses. Kodashim (eleven) deals with sacrifices and sacrileges, overlapping somewhat with the first order. Finally, Tohorot (twelve) covers uncleanliness and rituals.143 In addition to the Mishnah, there is a collection of sayings and rulings by the tannaim, four times larger in bulk, known as the Tosefta. The exact provenance, date and composition of the Tosefta—and its precise relationship to the Mishnah—have been subjects of unresolved scholarly dispute for over a thousand years.144
Of course, immediately the Mishnah was complete, furthe
r generations of scholars—who were, it should be remembered, determining legal theory in the light of actual cases—began to comment upon it. By this time, since the rabbinic methods had spread to Babylonia, there were two centres of commentary, in Eretz Israel and in the Babylonian academies. Both produced volumes of Talmud, a word meaning ‘study’ or ‘learning’, which were compiled by the various generations of the amoraim. The Jerusalem Talmud, more correctly called the Talmud of the West, was completed by the end of the fourth century AD, and the Babylonian Talmud a century later. Each has folios of commentary dealing with the tractates of the Mishnah. This formed the third layer.
Thereafter further layers were added: Perushim, or commentaries, on both the Talmuds, of which the outstanding example was Rashi’s on the Babylonian Talmud in the eleventh century; and Hiddushim or novellae, which compare and reconcile different sources, so producing new rulings or halakhot, the classic novellae being composed on the Babylonian Talmud in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries. There was another layer of responsa prudentium (She’elot u-Teshuvot) or written answers by leading scholars to questions put to them. The last of the layers consisted of attempts to simplify and codify this enormous mass of material, by such outstanding scholars as Isaac Alfasi, Maimonides, Jacob ben Asher and Joseph Caro, from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. From the fifth to the eleventh centuries, which is known as the age of the gaons or geonim, scholars worked to produce collective rulings and compilations bearing the authority of academies. Later, in what is known as the rabbinic age, rulings were decentralized and individual scholars dominated the evolution of the Law. As an epilogue, from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, came the age of the aharonim or later scholars.
During all this time, Jewish communities, spread throughout the Near East and Mediterranean, and eventually through most of central and eastern Europe, settled most of their legal problems through their own religious courts, so this multi-layered body of writings constituted not just a work of continuing research into the true meaning of the Bible, but a living body of communal law, dealing with actual cases and real people. Seen in Western terms, it was natural law, the law of the Bible, the code of Justinian, the canon law, the English common law, the European civil law, the parliamentary statutes, the American Constitution and the Napoleonic Code all rolled into one. Only in the nineteenth century, by which time many Jews had been emancipated and had ceased to live in judicial autonomy, did the study of Jewish halakhah begin to become academic—and even then it continued to govern Jewish marriage law in advanced societies and many other aspects of life in the backward areas.
There is, then, no system in the history of the world which has sought for so long to combine moral and ethical teaching with the practical exercise of civil and criminal jurisprudence. It always had many drawbacks. That was why the Jewish Christians could achieve universalism only by breaking away from it. Eventually, in the Age of Enlightenment, it came to be seen as irredeemably backward, even positively abhorrent by many educated Jews, as well as by non-Jewish society. But it had many remarkable strengths too, and it gave to the Jews a moral and social world-view which is civilized and practical and proved extremely durable.
The notion of human life being sacred, because created in God’s image, was the central precept of Jewish ethics, and as we have seen it determined the provisions of Jewish criminal codes from the earliest times. But the sages and their successors worked out the implications of this doctrine in ingenious detail. Everything came from God, and man merely had the temporal use of these gifts: thus he must, for instance, farm the land industriously and with a view to its use by future generations. But these gifts included man’s own body. Hillel the Elder taught that man therefore had a duty to keep his body fit and healthy. Philo, like many influenced by Greek notions, separated the body and soul in moral terms and even referred to the body as an emotional, irrational ‘plotter’ against the rational soul. But mainstream, rabbinical Judaism rejected a body-soul dichotomy, just as it rejected the good powers/evil powers of gnosticism. Body and soul, it taught, were one and jointly responsible for sin, therefore jointly punishable. This became an important distinction between Christianity and Judaism. The Christian idea that, by weakening the body through mortification and fasting, you strengthened the soul, was anathema to Jews. They had ascetic sects as late as the first century AD, but once rabbinical Judaism established its dominance, the Jews turned their backs forever on monasticism, hermitry and asceticism. Public fasts might be commanded as symbols of public atonement, but private fasts were sinful and forbidden. Abstaining from wine, as the Nazarites did, was sinful, for it was rejecting the gifts God has provided for man’s necessities. Vegetarianism was rarely encouraged. Nor—another important distinction from Christianity—was celibacy. The rabbinic attitude was: ‘Do the prohibitions of the Torah not suffice for thee that thou addest others for thyself?’ In all things, the body made in God’s image must behave, and be treated, with moderation. Over a whole range of human behaviour, the Jewish watchword was continence or temperance, not abstinence.145
Since man belonged to God, suicide was a sacrilege, and it was sinful to risk one’s life unnecessarily. For a people now without the protection of a state, and in constant danger of persecution, there were important issues here, which became paramount during the Holocaust two millennia later. The sages ruled that a man had no right to save his life by causing the death of another. He was not required to sacrifice his life to save another either. During the Hadrian persecution, the sages at Lydda ruled that a Jew, in order to save his life, could violate any commandment save three: those against idolatry, adultery-incest, and murder. When it came to human life, quantitative factors did not signify. An individual, if innocent, might not be sacrificed for the lives of a group. It was an important principle of the Mishnah that each man is a symbol of all humanity, and whoever destroys one man destroys, in a sense, the principle of life, just as, if he saves one man, he rescues humanity.146 Rabbi Akiva seems to have thought that to kill was to ‘renounce the Likeness’, that is leave the human race. Philo called murder the greatest of sacrileges, as well as by far the most serious criminal act. ‘Ransom’, wrote Maimonides, ‘is never acceptable, even if the murderer is ready to pay all the money in the world, and even if the plaintiff agrees to let the murderer go free. For the life of the murdered person is…the possession of the Holy One blessed be He.’147
As God owns all and everyone, he is an injured party in all offences against fellow men. A sin against God is serious but a sin against a fellow man is more serious since it is against God too. God is ‘the Invisible Third’. Hence if God is the only witness to a transaction, false denial of it is more wicked than if there is a written transaction; open robbery is less wicked than secret theft since he who perpetrates the latter shows he has more respect for the earthly power of man than the divine vengeance of God.148
As men are all equally made in God’s image, they have equal rights in any fundamental sense. It is no accident that slavery among the Jews disappeared during the Second Commonwealth, coinciding with the rise of Pharisaism, because the Pharisees insisted that, as God was the true judge in a court of law, all were equal there: king, high-priest, free man, slave. This was one of their prime differences with the Sadducees. The Pharisees rejected the view that a master was responsible for the actions of his slaves, as well as his livestock, since a slave, like all men, had a mind of his own. That gave him status in the court, and once he had legal status, slavery could not work. The Pharisees, when they controlled the Sanhedrin, also insisted that the king was answerable to it, and must stand in its presence—one source of the bitter conflicts between the Sanhedrin and both the Hasmoneans and Herod. These violent kings might and did overawe the court in practice but the theory remained and triumphed completely when Jewish halakhic practice was being collected into the Mishnah, so that equality before the law became an unassailable Jewish axiom. There was a conflict here with the noti
on of the Jewish king being ‘the Lord’s anointed’, which later Christian theorists used to evolve the doctrine of divine-right kingship. But the Jews never accepted the legal implications of anointing. All David’s acts of arbitrary power were roundly condemned in the Bible and Ahab’s getting possession of Naboth’s vineyard is presented as a monstrous crime. These were reasons why kingship did not mix with Judaism: the Jews wanted a king with all the duties and none of the rights of kingship. In their hearts, indeed, many never believed in anointing but in election, which appeared to precede it. In favour of elective kings, judges or other authorities, Philo quoted Deuteronomy: ‘Thou shalt establish a ruler over thyself, not a foreigner but from thy brethren.’149 Josephus took Gideon’s view that God and no one else ruled but that, if kings were felt necessary, they must be of Jewish race and subject to the Law.
The truth is, the real rulers of the Jewish community, as was natural in a society under divine law, were the courts. One stresses the court, not the judge, since one of the most important axioms was that men could not constitute solitary judges: ‘Judge not alone, for none may judge alone save One.’150 The verdict went with the majority and in capital cases a majority of at least two was required. The same majority principle applied to the interpretation of the Torah. One reason why Judaism clung together over the centuries was its adherence to majority decisions and the great severity with which it punished those who refused to submit to them once they were fairly reached. At the same time, submissive dissentients had the right to have their views recorded, an important practice established by the Mishnah. In courts and scholarly bodies, co-option rather than election applied, since learning was a necessity and only the learned could judge—Jewish society was the first to construct a franchise by educational qualification—but in practice, ‘We do not appoint an officer of the community unless we first consult with it.’151 Not only the courts but the Law had an underlying democratic basis. A body not unlike the later Anglo-Saxon jury was used to ascertain what the practice in a particular community was, so that legal decisions might take this into account. The principle that the Law must be acceptable to the community as a whole was implicit in Judaic jurisprudence and sometimes explicit: ‘Any decree which the court imposes on the community and which the majority of the community does not accept, has no force.’152