The Influence of the Talmud on Christianity
But not only among the Jewish peoples of the "Dispersion" has this strange and wonderful book exercised a surpassing influence, but even among the Christian nations of the world has its spirit percolated, and in a remarkable way has influenced and coloured certain important phases of religious thought and belief.
Among Christian peoples the Talmud is virtually unknown; to well-nigh every individual in the Christian nations it is but the shadow of a name, to the great majority scarcely even that; and yet the profound, the awful reverence for the Old Testament Scriptures which lives among all Christian folk, a reverence that often shades into a passionate love, though they guess it not, springs largely out of the teachings of that great Rabbinic book the Talmud, the very name of which so many have scarcely heard.
For the Mishnah and Gemara which make up the Talmud, the thousand treatises which have been written by learned Rabbis at different periods during the last sixteen hundred years of the Jewish Dispersion, are simply all comments upon, explanations and developments of traditions and history bearing upon the Old Testament Scriptures, the one precious heritage of the Jew handed down from generation to generation of the Chosen People from time immemorial.
This story of the changeless love of the Hebrew race for their ancient writings and records, which the Jew is never weary of reiterating, came to him direct from God Almighty, and has found an echo in unnumbered Christian hearts, and so it has come to pass that the Old Testament Scriptures—the Torah (the Law) of Moses, the Prophets, and the other sacred books—are received to this day with a deep reverential love as the expression of the will of the Eternal of Hosts, alike in Christian Churches as in the Jewish Synagogues.[1]*
- ↑ Renan recognizes the service rendered by the Talmudical Rabbis to Christianity, but while acknowledging this, curiously limits it to the preservation of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament Scriptures, which he thinks would probably have been lost but for the labours of the Rabbis of the Talmud—he characterizes this as "un service du 1^{er} ordre." To him the Hebrew
