"the action of a rich man who, hearing that a poor man is about to buy a piece of property, secretly overbids him"? (Qiddushin, 59a.) Could there be a higher sense of true charity than that conveyed by the following incident? Mar Uqba used to support a poor man by sending him on the eve of each Day of Atonement four hundred zuz. When the rabbi's son took the money on one occasion he heard the poor man's wife say, "Which wine shall I put on the table? Which perfume shall I sprinkle around the room?" The son, on hearing these remarks, returned with the money to his father and told him of what he had heard. Said Mar Uqba: "Was that poor man raised so daintily that he requires such luxuries? Go back to him and give him double the sum?" (Ketuboth, 7a.) This is not recorded by the Talmud as an exception; but it is the Talmudical estimate of charity. The Talmud is free from the narrowness and bigotry with which it is usually charged, and if phrases used out of their context, and in a sense the very reverse from that which their author intended, are quoted against it, we may be sure that those phrases never existed in the original Talmud, but are the later additions of its enemies and such as never studied it. When it is remembered that before the canon of the Talmud was finished, in the sixth century,[1] it had been growing for more than six hundred years, and that afterward it existed in fragmentary manuscripts for eight centuries until the first printed edition appeared; that during the whole of that time it was beset by ignorant, unrelenting, and bitter foes; that marginal notes were easily added and in after years easily embodied in the text by unintelligent copyists and printers, such a theory as here advanced seems not at all improbable.
The attacks on the Talmud have not been made by the enemies of the Jews alone. Large numbers of Jews themselves repudiate it, denying that they are Talmud Jews, or that they have any sympathy with it. Yet there are only the few Karaites in Russia and Austria, and the still fewer Samaritans in Palestine, who are really not Talmud Jews. Radical and Reform, Conservative and Orthodox, not only find their exact counterparts in the Talmud, but also follow in many important particulars the practices instituted through the Talmud, e.g., New Year's Day, Pentecost (so far as its date and significance are concerned), the Qaddish, etc. The modern Jew is the product of the Talmud,
- ↑ According to others, in the eighth century. See our "History of the Talmud."
