marvellous extravagances of the Gemara; but when we ponder over the wonderful story of the Jew during the eighteen centuries which have passed since the desolation of A.D. 70, we dare not mock at the Talmud.
When we consider the whole question of what we have termed "the great awakening" of the Jewish people after the sudden and tremendous ruin of the City and Temple; the complete change in the heart of the Jew; the abandonment of the old dream of the restoration of the kingdom of Israel; the adoption of a spiritual kingdom in its place: when we remember the universal reverence for, the implicit obedience which very soon began to be paid to, the teaching of the Mishnah and Gemara—the Talmud—a reverence and an obedience which completely changed the life, the views, the hopes of the scattered race in all lands,—we ask the pressing question: Whence came all this—the mighty change, the enthusiasm which has never paled or waned? The Mishnic Rabbis—the Gemara teachers, numerous, able, and devoted though they were, some few of them men of lofty genius and profound scholarship, do not account for this amazing result.
The "Talmud," the outcome of these famous Rabbinic schools of the early Christian centuries, with its wild extravagances, its many beautiful thoughts, its peculiar and rigid system, touched the heart of the Jew, and bound together this people condemned to wander through the ages without a home, a country, a nationality, with a link no time, no human hate or scorn has been able to break or even to loose.
The strange weird Book was God's mysterious instrument by which He has chosen to preserve intact the people He once loved—loves still—until the day, perhaps still far distant, dawns when the Jew, with eyes opened at last, shall look on Him whom they pierced.
IV
THE TALMUD
One[1] who loved with a love passionate, though not always discriminating, this vast wondrous compilation which has so
- ↑ Dr. Emanuel Deutsch.
