"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 genberation. 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 elucidation that accumulated the two Gemaras as commentaries on the Mishra -- the union of the Mishna with the shorter of these Gemaras to make the Palentinian, 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.

"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 comitting 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 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 te poorest ranks. Most of them earned their living as artisans even after achieving interntional repute.

"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.

"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 Akoba 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. Toward 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.

"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 addeing 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."

Does this clear it up?

"First, said the rabbis, one must study the Law, written and oral. 'Greater is study of Torah than the rebulding of the Temple.' '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.'

"No other study is necessary. Greek philosophy, secular science, may be studied only 'at that hour' which is neither day nor night.' 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.

"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 communicaed to Moses by God and by Moses to his successors. Its decrees are as binding as anything in the Scripture.

"Some rabbis ranked the Mishna above the Scriptures in authority as being a later and revised form of the Law. Certain raabbinical editors frankly voided laws of the Penetateuch or interpreted them into harmlessness.

"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, laughs, weeps, feels remorse, wears phylacteries, sits on a throne surrounded by a ministering hierarchy of cherubim and seraphim and studies the Torah three times a day.

"The rabbis acknowledged that these human attributes were a bit hypothetical. They said:-'We borrow terms from His creatures to apply to Him in order to assist the understanding. 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. His universal divine presence, the Shekinah (dwelling) is especially real in sacred places, persons, and things and in moments of study of prayer.

"Nevertheless this omnipresent God is one. Of all ideas the most distasteful to Judaism is that of 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 univesal of Jewish prayers, the Shema Yisrael:-'Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our god, the Lord is one (Shema Yisrael adonoi elohenu, adonoi ehad). 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.'

"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 suffer to exceptional rewards in heaven. Therefore, said Akiba, a man should rejoice in the multitude of his misfortunes.

"As for death, it came into the world through sin. A really sinless person would never die. Death is a debt owed by a sinful humanity to the author of all life.

"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. The valley of Hinnom was a rubbish heap outside of Jerusalem where fires were kept constantly burning to prevent pestilence. Sheol was conceived as a subterranean region of darkness that receivd all the dead.

"Only the most wicked of the circumcised would enter it 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.

"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.

"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.'

"The ritual was first of all a law of worship. When the synagogue succeeded the Temple, animal sacrifice was replaed 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. 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.

"Prayer made every day, almost every hour, a religious experience for the orthodox Jew. Morning prayers were to be said with phylacteries (small cases containing passages from the Scriptures) affixed to the forehead and the arms. No meal was to be eaten without a brief grace before it, and a longer prayer of thanksgiving at its close.

"But these domestic prayers were not enough. Men can be held together only by doing things together. The rabbis argued, with Oriental hyperbole, that 'a man's prayer is heard by God only when offered in a synagogue.' The public liturgy consisted mainly of the Shemoneh Esreh, the Shema Yisrael, readings from the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Psalms, a homily of Scriptural explanation, the Kaddish (prayers of praise and blessing for the living and the dead), and a concluding benediction.

"Physical hygiene was considered favorable to spiritual health. The rabbis forbade living in a city in which there was no bathhouse and gave almost medical instructions for the bath. 'If one bathes with hot water, and does not follow it with cold water, it is like iron which is inserted into a furnace and not afterward plunged into cold water.' The body, like the iron, must be tempered and steeled. Anointing should follow the bath.

"Hands were to be washed immediately upon rising, before and after each meal, and before ceremonial prayer or any other ritual observance.

"Corpses, sexual functions, menstruation, childbirth, vermin, pigs, and leprosy (i.e. various skin diseases) were ritually (i.e. by religious law) unclean. Persons touched or affected by any of these were to go to the synagogue and perform a purification ceremonial.

"A woman was considered unclean (not to be sexually approached) for forty days after bearing a son, eighty days after bearing a daughter.

"In accord with the Biblical injunction (Gen. xvii, 9-14), a boy was to be circumcised on his eighth day. This was represented as a sacrifice to, and a covenant with, Yahveh. But the prevalence of the custom among Egyptians, Ethiopians, Phoenicians, Syrians, and Arabs suggests that it was a hygienic measure indicated in a climate more farorable to sexual precocity and excitabiiity than to cleanliness.

"The Jews of the fourth and fifth centuries, like most Mediterranean peoples, were slipping back into the medical superstitions and makeshifts of the isolated and the poor. A good deal of the popular and superstitious medicine entered into the Talmud.

"Nevertheless we find in the Babylonian Gemara excellent descriptions of the esophagus, larynx, trachea, lungs, meninges, and genitals. Tumors of the lungs, cirrhosis of the liver, caseous degeneration, and many other diseases are accurately described.

"The rabbis note that flies and drinking cups mnay carry infection. Hemophilia is recognized as an hereditary ailment making circumcision of the offspring inadvisable.

"Dietary wisdom begins with the teeth. These should never be extracted, no matter how they ache for 'if a man chews well with his teeth his feet will find strength.'

"Vegetables and fruits, except the date, are highly recommended.

"Meat is a luxury which only the well washed should have. The animal is to be killed in such a way as to minimize its pain and draw the blood out of the meat. To eat flesh with blood is an abomination. Hence the slaughter of animals for food must be left to trained persons who will also examine the viscera to make sure that the animal is not diseased.

"Meat and milk and dishes prepared with them must not be eaten at the same meal or even placed near each other in the kitchen. The flesh of swine is to be abhorred.

"Eat no eggs, onions, or garlic that have been left overnight without their shell or peel. Eat at stated hours only.

"'Don't peck all day like hens.'

"'More people die from overeating than from undernourishment.'

"'Up to forty eating is beneficial. After that age, drinking is beneficial.' Moderation in drinking is better than total abstinence. Wine is often a good medicine and 'there is no gladness without it.'

"Pursuing the subject of diet to its end, the rabbis argued that he 'who prolongs his stay in a privy lengthens his years' and recommended a prayer of thanksgiving after every answer to nature's call.'"

It took us thousands of years to recognize what the ancient Jews knew about overeating and obesity.

"Fasts were obligatory at certain periods and on some holydays. But perhaps here too religion was used as a prod to health.

"The wisdom of the race bade the Jews keep festival and make feast now and then despite the overtones of sorrow and longing that sounded even in their joys. 'On a festival a man must make glad his wife and household.' If possible he must outfit them with new clothes.

"The Sabbath -- greatest of Jewish inventions -- was apparently a burden in Talmudic days. The pious Jew was then expected to speak as little as possible, light no fire in his home and spend hours at the synagogue and in prayer. A long tractate discussed with head-splitting hair-splitting just what might and what might not be done on the Sabbath.

"But the cauistry of the rabbis was directed to mitigating rather than increasing the terrors of piety. Their subtlety devised convincing reasons for doing what one had to do on the day of rest.

"Moreover the good Jew discovered a secret happiness in observing the ancient Sabbath ritual. He began it with a little ceremony of 'sanctification' (kiddush). Surrounded by his family and his guests (for this was a favorite day for entertaining friends), he took a full cup of wine, pronounced a benediction over it, drank, and passed the cup along for guests and wife and children to drink.

"Pesach, beginning on the fourteenth of Nisan (April), commemorated through eight days the escape of the Jews from Egypt. In Biblical times it had been called the Feast of Unleavened Bread because the Jews had fled with the dough of their bread still unleavened. Talmudic times called it Pesach, i.e. Passover, because Yahveh, smiting the first born of the Egyptians, 'passed over' those houses whose doorposts had been sprinkled by the Jewish occupants with the blood of the lamb.

"On the first day of the feast the Jews celebrated the Paschal meal (Seder). Each father acted as leader of the service for his gathered family, performed with them a ritual recalling those bitter Mosaic days and passed on, by questions and answers, their treasured story to the young.

"At Pentecost, seven weeks after passover, the feast of Shavuot celebrated the wheat harvest, and the revelation on Mt. Sinai.

"On the first day of Tishri -- the seventh month of the ecclesiastical, the first month of the Jewish civil year, corresponding roughly with the autumnal equinox -- the Jews celebrated Rosh-ha-Shana, the Feast of the New Year and of the month's new moon, and blew the ram's horn (shofar) to commemorate the revealing of the Torah, to call men to repentance and to anticipate the happy day when such a blast would summon all the Jews of the world to worship their God in Jerusalem.

"From the eve of Rosh-ha-Shana to the tenth day of Tishri were penitential days. On all but the ninth of those days pious Jews fasted and prayed. On the tenth, Yom-ha-Kippurim, the Day of Atonement, from sunset to sunset, they were not to eat or drink or wear shoes or labor or bathe or indulge in love. All day long they attended services in the synagogue, confessed and mourned their sins and those of their people, even from the worship of the golden Calf.

"On the fifteenth day of Tishri came Sukkoth, the Feast of Tabernacles. For seven days the Jews were supposed to live in booths, to commemorate the tents in which, it was said, their ancestors had slept during their forty years' sojourn in the wilderness. In the Dispersion a literal fulfillment of this old vintage of harvest festival offered difficulties and the rabbis showed their good will by redefining Sukka to mean almost anyting that could symbolize a habitation.

"On the twenty-fifth of the ninth month, Kislev (December), and for seven days thereafter, the festival of Hanukkah, or Dedication, recalled the purification of the Temple by the Maccabees (165 B.C.) after its defilement by Antiochus Epiphanes.

"And on the fourteenth of Adar (March) the Jews celebrated Purim ('lots'), the deliverance of their people from the wiles of the Persian minister Haman by Esther and Mordecai. Gifts and good wishes were exchanged in a joyful and vinous feast. On that day, said Rab Raba, a man should drink until he could no longer distinguish between 'Cursed be haman!' and 'Cursed be Mordecai!'"

Much to discuss here.

"To do the book justice it would be necessary with polymathic wisdom to survey its judgments in all these fields.

"The Talmud is above all a code of ethics, so different from the Christian, and so like the Moslem, that even a running acquaintance with it challenges the view of the Middle Ages as merely the story of medieval Christianity.

"The three religions agreed in rejecting the practicability of a natural -- non-religious -- morality. Most men, they believed, can be persuaded to tolerate behavior only by the fear of God. All three based their moral code on identical conceptions:- the all-seeing eye and all-recording hand of God, the divine authorship of the moral code, and the ultimate equalization of virtue with happiness by post-mortem punishments and reward.

"In the two Semitic cultures law, as well as ethics, was insepaable from religion. No distinction was admitted between crime and sin, between civil and ecclesiastical law.

"Some Jews were niggardly, some were miserly, but by and large no other people has ever given as generously as the Jews. The rabbis had to forbid men to give more than a fifth of their property to charity.

"Yet some were found, at their death, to have given half. 'On Abba Umna's face there was always a holy peace. He was a surgeon, but would never accept with his hands any payment for his service. He had a box placed in a corner of his consulting room, so that those who were able to pay could deposit what they wished and those who could not afford to pay would not be shamed.'

"Rab Huna, 'when he sat down to a meal, would open the doors and exclaim, 'Let whoever is in need enter and eat.'

"Chama ben Ilai gave bread to all who sought it and kept his hand in his purse when he walked abroad so that none need hesitate to ask.

"On it and religion rested the whole structure of Jewish life. They did not condemn the sexual appetite but they feared its force and labored to control it. Some advised that salt be eaten with bread to 'lessen the seminal fluid'. Others felt that the only recourse against sexual temptation was hard work combined with study of the Torah. If this availed not, 'let him go to a place where he is unknown, put on black clothes and do what his heart desires, but let him not publicly profane the Name.'

"A man should avoid any situation that may excite his passions. He should not talk much with women and he 'should never walk behind a woman along the road, not even his own wife. A man should walk behind a lion rather than behind a woman.'

"The rabbis apparently felt that virginity is all right in its place but that perpetual virginity is arrested development. In their view the supreme perfection of a woman is perfect motherhood as the supreme virtue of a man is perfect fatherhood.

"Every father was urged to save and provide a dowry for each of his daughters and a marriage settlement for each son lest their marriage be unhealthily delayed.

"Early marriage was recommended -- at fourteen for the girl, eighteen for the man. A girl might legally marry at twelve years and six months, a man at thirteen. Postponement of marriage was permitted to students engaged in the study of the Law.

"Some rabbis argued that a man should get his economic footing before marrying -- 'A man should first build a house, then plant a vineyard, then marry' -- but this was a minority opinion and perhaps involved no contradiction if the parents provided the expected financial aid.

"Said one rabbi:-'A man may marry as many wives as he pleases.' But another passage in the same tractate limited the number to four. A third required the husband, when taking a second wife, to give a divorce to the first wife if she should ask for it.

"The institution of the livitate, by which a Jew was required to marry his brother's widow, presumed polygamy, and was probably due not only to kindly sentiment but also to a desire for a high birth rate in a community which, like all ancient and medieval societies, suffered high mortality.

"Having allowed such freedom of mating for the man, the rabbis made adultery a capital crime. Some of them agreed with Jesus that 'one may commit adultery with the eyes.' Some went further saying:-'Whoever regards even the little finger of a woman hath already sinned in his heart.'

"But Rab Areca was more humane;-'A man will have a demerit in his record on Judgment Day for everything he beheld with his eyes and declined to enjoy.

"Divorce by mutual consent was allowed.

"The husband could be divorced only with his consent. The wife without her consent. To divorce an adulterous wife was mandatory and divorce was recommended where the wife had remained childless ten years after marriage.

"The school of Shammai had allowed the husband to put away his wife only for adultery. The school of Hillel allowed it if the husband found in her 'anything unseemly.' Hillel's view prevailed in the Talmudic period. Akiba went so far as to say that a husband 'may divorce his wife if he finds another woman more beautiful.'

"A man might, without surrendering the marriage settlement, divorce 'a woman who transgresses Jewish law, such as going in public with uncovered head, spinning in the street, or conversing with all sorts of men or 'a loud-voiced woman -- i.e. one who talks in her house and her neighbors can hear what she says.'

"Desertion by the husband gave no ground for divorce. Some rabbis permited the wife to ask the court for divorce from a cruel, impotent, or unwilling husband, or one who did not support her properly, or was maimed, or stank. The rabbis did something to discourage divorce by requiring complex legal formalities and, in all but a few cases, the forfeiture of both dowry and marriage settlement to the wife.

"The task of reducing the thought of a thousand years into a coherent system proved too much even for a hundred patient rabbis. Several tractates are obviously in the wrong seder or order. Several chapters are in the wrong tractate. Subjects are taken up, dropped, and lawlessly resumed.

"It is not the product of deliberation. It is the deliberation itself. All views are recorded and contradictions are often left unresolved. It is as if we had crossed fifteen centuries to eavesdrop on the most intimate discussions of the schools and heard Akoba and Meir and Jehuda Hanasi and Rab in the heat of their debates.

"Remembering that we are interlopers, that these men and the others have had their casual words snatched from their mouths and cast into uncalculated contexts and sent hurtling down the years, we can forgive the casuistry, sophistry, legends, astrology, demonology, superstition, magic, miracles, numerology, and revelatory dreams, the Pelion on Ossa of argument crowning a web of fantasy, the consolatory vanity forever healing frustrated hope.

"If we resent the stringency of these laws, the intrusive minuteness of these regulations, the Oriental severity of punishment for their violation, we must not take the matter too much to heart. The Jews made no pretense to keeping all these commandments and the rabbis winked on every other page at the gap between their counsels of perfection and the stealthy frailties of men.

"Said a cautious rabbi:-'If Israel should properly observe a single Sabbath, the Son of David would come immediately.' The Talmud was not a code of laws requiring strict obedience. It was a record of rabbinical opinion, gathered for the guidance of leisurely piety.

"Here and there, in these twenty volumes, we find words of hatred for Christianity. But they were for a Christianity that had forgotten the gentleness of Christ -- that persecuted the adherents of the Law that Christ had bidden His followers to fulfill. And that had, in the view of the rabbis, abandoned the monotheism which was the inalienable essence of the ancient faith.

"Amid these ceremonial complexities and controversial barbs we find hundreds of sage counsels and psychological insights, and occasional passages recalling the majesty of the Old Testament or the mystical tenderness of the New.

"The whimsical humor characteristic of the Jew lightens the burden of the long lesson. So one rabbi tells how Moses entered incognito into Akoba's classroom, sat in the last row and marveled at the many laws derived by the great teacher from the Mosaic code, and of which its amanuensis had never dreamed.

"For 1400 years the Talmud was the core of Jewish education.

"Seven hours a day, through seven years, the Hebrew youth pored over it, recited it, sank it into his memory by sound and sight. And like the Confucian classics similarly memorized, it formed mind and character by the discipline of its study and the deposit of its lore.

"The method of teaching was not by mere recitation and repetition. It was also by disputation between master and pupil, between pupil and pupil, and the application of old laws to the circumstances of the new day.

"The result was a sharpness of intellect, a retentiveness of memory, that gave the Jew an advantage in many spheres requiring clarity, concentration, persistence and exactitude, while at the same time it tended to narrow the range and freedom of the Jewish mind.

"The Talmud tamed the excitable nature of the Jew. It checked his indiviualism, and molded him to fidelity and sobriety in his family and his community.

"What the Prophets had done to uphold the Jewish spirit in the Babylonian Captivity, the rabbis did in this wider dispersion. Pride had to be regained, order had to be established, faith and morals maintained, health of body and mind rebuilt after a shattering experience.

"Through this heroic discipline, this rerooting of the uprooted Jew in his own tradition -- stability and unity were restored through continents of wandering and centuries of grief.

"The Talmud, as Heine said, was a portable Fatherland. Wherever Jews were, even as fearful enclaves in alien lands, they could put themselves again into their own world, and live with their Prophets and rabbis, by bathing their minds and hearts in the ocean of the Law. No wonder they loved this book, to us more undulant and divese than a hundred Montaignes.

"In their internal affairs they continued, as under the Sasanian kings, to enjoy self-government under their exilarch and the directors of their rabbinical academics. The exilarch was accepted by the caliphs as the head of all the Jews in Babylonia, Armenia, Turkestan, Persia, and Yemen. According to Benjamin of Tudela all subjects of the caliphs were required 'to rise in the presence of the Prince of the Captivity and to salute him respectfully.'

"The office of exilarch was hereditary in one family, which traced its lineage to David. It was a political rather than a spiritual power. Its efforts to control the rabbinate led to its decline and fall. After 762 the directors of the academics elected and dominated the exilarch.

"The rabbinical colleges at Sura and Pumbeditha provided religious and intellectual leadership for the Jews of Islam and in less degree for those of Christendom.

"In 659 the Caliph Ali freed the academy of Sura from the jurisdiction of the exilarch. Thereupon its head, Mar-Isaac, took the title Gaon, or Excellency and inaugurated the Gaonate, the epoch of the Geonim in Babylonian religion and scholarship. As the college of Pumbeditha rose in revenues and dignity from its proximity to Baghdad, its directors also assumed the title of Gaon.

"From the seventh to the elevanth century, questions in Talmudic law were addressed to these Geonim from all the Jewish world.

"In 762, when the Exilarch Solomon died, his nephew Anan ben David stood in line for the succession. But the heads of Sura and Pumbeditha, discarding the hereditary principle, installed as exilarch Anan's younger brother Chananya.

"Anan denounced the two Geonim, fled to Palestine, established his own synagogue, and called upon Jews everywhere to reject the Talmud and obey only the law of the Pentateuch.

"This was a return to the position of the Sadducees. It corresponded to the repudiation of the 'tradition' and exaltation of the Koran by the Shia sect in Islam and to the Protestant abandonment of Catholic traditions for a return to the Gospels.

"Anan went further and re-examined the Pentateuch in a commentary that marked a bold advance in the critical study of the Biblical text. He protested against the changes that the Talmudic rabbis had made in the Mosaic Law by their adaptive interpretations and insisted on the strict fulfillment of the Pentateuch decrees. Hence his followers received the name of Qaraites -- 'adherents of the text.'

"Anan praised Jesus as a holy man who had wished to set aside not the written Law of Moses but only the oral Law of the scribews and the Pharisees. Jesus, in Anan's view, had aimed not to found a news religion but to cleanse and strengthen Judaism. The Qaraites became numerous in Palestine, Egypt, and Spain. They declined in the twelfth century and only a vanishing remnant survives in Turkey, South Russia, and Arabia.

"Qaraites of the ninth century presumably influenced by the Mutazilites of Islam, abandoned Anan's principle of literal interpretation and proposed that the resurrention of the body, and certin physical descriptions of God in the Bible, should be tken wiht a metaphorical grain of salt.

"The orthodox 'Rabbanite' Jews, reverting to literalism in their turn, insisted, like the orthodox Moslems, that phrases like 'God's hand' or 'God sitting down' were to be taken literally. Some expositors calculated the precise measurements of God's body, members, and beard. A few Jewish freethinkers, like Chivi al-Balehi, rejected even the Pentateuch as a binding law.

"He grew up in Egypt and married there. In 915 he migrated to Palestine, then to Babylonia. He must have been an apt student and sound teacher for at the youthful age of thirty-six he was made Gaon or director of the college at Sura.

"Perceiving the inroads that Qaraism and skepticism had made upon orthodox Judaism, he set himself the same task that the mutakal-limun had undertaken in Islam -- to demonsrate the full accord of the traditional faith with reason and history. In his brief life of fifty years Saadia produced -- mostly in Arabic -- a mass of writings rivaled only by those of Maimonides in the record of medieval Jewish thought.

"His Agron, an Aramaic dictionary of Hebrew, founded Hebrew philology. His Kitab al-Lugah, or Book of Language, is the oldest known grammar of the Hebrew tongue.

"His arabic translation of the Old Testament remained to our time the version used by Arabic-speaking Jews. His several commentaries on books of the Bible rank him as 'perhaps the greatest Bible commentator of all time.'

"But he also accepts reason and proposes to prove by reason the truth of revelation and tradition. Wherever the Bible clearly contradicts reason, we may assume that the passage is not meant to be taken literally by adult minds. Anthropomorphic descriptions of the deity are to be understood metaphorically. God is not like a man.

"The order and law of the world indicate an intelligent creator. It is unreasonable to suppose that an intelligent God would fail to reward virtue but obviously virtue is not always rewarded in this life. Consequently there must be another life which will redeem the apparent injustice of this one.

"Perhaps the sufferings of the virtuous here are punishments for their occasional sins so that they may enter paradise at once when they die. The earthly trimphs of the wicked are rewards for their incidental virtues, so . . . But even those who achive the highest virtue, prosperity, and happiness on earth feel in their hearts that there is a better state than this one of indefinite possibilities and limited fulfillments.

"And how could a God intelligent enough to create so marvelous a world allow such hopes to form in the soul if they were never to be reaalized? Saadia took a leaf or two from Moslem theologians and followed their methods of exposition, even, now and then, the details of their argument.

"In 930 David excommunicated Saadia and Saadia excommunited David.

"In 940 David died and Saadia appointed a new exilarch. But this appointee was assassinated by Moslems on the ground that he had disparaged Mohammed. Saadia appointed the victim's son to succeed him whereupon this youth also was slain.

"The discouraged Jews decided to leave the office unfilled. In 942 the Babylonian exilarchate closed its career of seven centuries. In that year Saadia died. The disintegration of the Baghdad caliphate, the establishment of Egypt, North Africa, and Spain as independent Moslem states, weakened the bonds between Asiatic, African, and European Jewry.

"The Babylonian Jews shared in the economic decline of Eastern Islam after the tenth century. The college of Sura closed its doors in 1934, that of Puymbeditha four years later. In 1040 the Gaonate came to an end.

"In that capital, and in the Byzantine realm, the Jews enjoyed a harassed prosperity from the eighth to the twelfth century. Greece had several substantial Jewish communities, notably at Thebes, where their silk manufactures earned high repute.

"Up through Thessaly, Thrace, and Macedonia the Jews migrated into the Balkans, and followed the Danube into Hungary.

"A handful of Hebrew merchants came to Poland from Germany in the tenth century. Jews had been in Germany since pre-Christian times.

"In the ninth century there were considerable Jewish settlements at Metz, Speyer, Mainz, Worms, Strasbourg, Frankfort, and Cologne. These groups were too busy and mobile with commerce to contribute much to cultural history.

"Many more came in with William the Conqueror and were at first protected by the Norman rulers as providers of capital and collectors of revenue. Their communities in London, Norwich, York, and other English centers were outside the jurisdiction of the local authorities and were subject only to the king.

"By 600 there were Jewish colonies in all the maor cities. The Merovingian kings persecuted them with pious ferocity.

"Chilperic ordered them all to accept Christianity or have their eyes torn out (581).

"Charlemagne, while maintaining discriminatory laws against the Jews, protected them as useful and enterprising farmers and craftsmen, merchants, doctors, and financiers, and employed a Jew as his personal physician.

"In 787, according to a disputed tradition, he brought the Kalonymos family from Lucca to Mainz to encourage Jewish scholarship in the Frank realm.

"In 797 he sent a Jew as interpreter or as dragoman with an embassy to Harun al-rashid.

"Louis the Pious favored the Jews as stimulators of commerce and appointed a magister Iudaeorum to guard their rights.

"Jews were especially numerous in Padua, and may have influenced the growth of Averroism in the university there. Salerno, home of the first medieval school of scientific medicine in Latin Christendom, contained 600 Jews, several of them noted physicians.

"The Emperor Frederick II had Jewish scholars at his court in Foggia and Pope Alexander III (1159-81) had several Jews in high position in his household.

"But Frederick joined with Pope Gregory IX in oppressive measures against the Jews of Italy.

"The Spanish Jews called themselves Sephardin and traced their origin to the royal tribe of Judah.

"After the conversion of King Recared (586-601) to orthodox Christianity the Visigothic government united with the powerful hierarchy of the Spanish Church to make life less attractive to the Jews. They were excluded from public office and were forbidden to marry Christians or have Christian slaves.

"King Sisebut ordered all Jews to accept Christianity or emigrate (613). His successor repealed this decree but the Council of Toledo of 633 ruled that those Jews who had submitted to baptism and then returned to Judaism should be separated from their children and sold into slavery.

"King Chintila renewed Sisebut's decree (638). King Egica prohibited Jewish ownership of land and any business transaction between Christian and Jew (693).

"50,000 Jews came from Asia and Africa. Some towns, like Lucena, were inhabited almost wholly by Jews.

"Freed from economic disabilities, the Jews of Moslem Spain spread into every field of agriculture, industry, finance, and the professions. They adopted the dress, language, and customs of the Arabs, garbed themselves in turbans and silk robes, rode in carriages, and were hardly distinguishable from their Semitic cousins.

"Several Jews became court physicians and one of these was made adviser to the greatest of the caliphs of Cordova.

"Hasdai ibn Shaprut (915-70) was to Abd er-Rahman III what Nizam al-Mulk in the next century would be to Malik Shah.

"Born in the wealthy and cultured Ibn Ezra family, his father taught him Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin. He studied medicine and other sciences at Cordova, cured the Caliph's ailments, and showed much wide knowledge and good judgment in politics that he was appointed to the diplomatic staff, apparently at the age of twenty-five.

"He was entrusted with ever larger responsibilities over the financial and commercial life of the state. He had no official title. The Caliph hesitated to arouse resentment by making him officially vizier. But Hasdai performed his many functions with such tact that he won the good will of Arabs, Jews, and Christians alike. He encouraged learning and literature, provided students with scholarships and books, and gathered about him a salon of poets, savants, and philosophers.

"When Moses ben Chanoch (d. 965), one of the Bari emigres, was ransomed in Cordova, he organized there, with Hasdai's help, an academy that soon acquired the intellectual leadership of the Jewish world. Similar schools were opened at Lucena, Toledo, Bardelona, Granada.

"And whereas the schools of Eastern Jewry had almost confined themselves to religious education, these gave instruction also in literature, music, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and philosophy. Such education gave to the upper half of the Jewish population in Spain a breadth and depth of culture and refinement at that time equaled only by the Moslem, Byzantine, and Chinese contemporaries.

"It was then a disgrace for a man of wealth or political position to be unacquainted with history, science, philosopy, and poetry. A Jewish aristocracy took form, graced by beautiful women.

"Perhaps it was too keenly conscious of its superiority, but it redeemed its pride by its sense that good birth and fortune are an obligation to generosity and excellence.

"The decline of Spanish Jewry might be dated from the fall of Joseph ibn Naghdela.

"He served the king almost as ably as his father had done, but not with the modest tact tht had reconciled a population half Moorish to be ruled by a Jew. He took all power in his hands, dressed as royally as the king, and laughed at the Koran. Gossip called him an atheist.

"In 1066 the Arabs and Berbers revolted, crucified Joseph, massacred 4000 Jews in Granada and plundered their homes. The remaining Jews were compelled to sell their lands and emigrate.

"Twenty years later the Almoravids came from Africa, aflame with orthodoxy, and the long honeymoon of Spanish Moslems and Jews was ended. A Mohammedan theologian announced that the Jews had promised Mohammed to accept Islam at the end of 500 years after the Hegira, if by that time their expected Messiah had not come. The five centuries were up in 1107 by Mohammedan reckoning. The Emir Yasuf demanded the conversion of all the Jews in Spain but excused them on payment of an enormous sum into his treasury. When the Almohads replaced the Almoravids as rulers of Morocco and Moslem Spain (1148), they gave the Jews and the Christians the same choice that King Sisebut had allowed the Jews 535 years before -- apostasy or exile.

"Alfonso VI and VII of Castile treated the Jews well, made Jew and Christian equal before the law, and sternly repressed an anti-Semitic outbreak in Toledo (1107), where there were then 72,000 Jews.

"A like entente between the mother and daughter religions prevailed for a century in Aragon. Indeed King James I invited Jews to settle in Majorca, Catalonia, and Valencia and in many cases gave Jewish settlers free homes and lands. In Barcelona they dominated commerce in the twelfth century and owned a third of the soil.

"The Jews of Christian Spain were severely taxed but they prospered and enjoyed internal autonomy. Trade flowed freely between Christian, Jew, and Moor. The three exchanged gifts on holidays. Now and then a king contributed to a synagogue building fund.

"From 1085 even to 1492, Jews could be found in high public office in Spanish Christian states as fiscal agents and diplomats, sometimes as ministers.

"During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Christian elergy joined in this Christian amity.

"The first outbreak of intolerance was among the Jews themselves.

"In 1149 Jehuda ibn Ezra, steward of the palace to Alfonso VII of Leon and Castile, turned the powers of his master's government against the Qaraite Jews of Toledo. The details are unknown but from that time the once numerous Spanish Qaraites are heard of no more.

"In 1212 some Christian crusaders entered Spain to help free it from the Moors. For the most part they treated the Jews well. One group attacked the Jews of Toledo and killed many of them. But the Christians of the city rose to the defense of their fellow citizens and stopped the persecution.

"Alfonso X of Castile included anti-Judaic legislation in his law code of 1265 but the code was not put into effect until 1348. Meanwhile Alfonso employed a Jewish physician and treasurer, presented to the Jews of Seville three mosques to be turned into synagogues and basked in the splendor that Jewish and Moslem scholarship shed upon his genial reign.

"In 1276 the military enterprises of Pedro III of Aragon required insufferable taxes. His finance minister and several other officials were Jews. A revolt of nobles and cities against the monarchy compelled the King to dismiss his Jewish aides and to confirm a resolution of the Corres (1283) against further employment of Jews in the government.

"Usually, however, the Jews lived in a voluntary isolation for social convenience, physical security, and religious unity. The synagogue was the geographical, social, and economic center of the Jewish quarter, and drew most Jewish dwellings toward it. There was in consequence much overcrowding, to the detriment of public and private sanitation.

"The taxpaying members of a congregation chose the rabbis and officers of the synagogue. A small group of elected elders sat as a Beth Din or communal court.

"This levied taxes, fixed prices, administered justice, issued ordinances -- not always observed -- on Jewish diet, dancing, morals, and dress. It was empowered to try Jewish offenders against Jewish law and had executive officers to carry out its decrees.

"Penalties ranged from fines to excommunication or banishment. Capital punishment was rarely within the power or custom of the Beth Din. In its stead the Jewish court used the herem or full excommunication -- a majestic and frightening ceremony of charges, curses, and candles extinguished one by one as a symbol of the culprit's spiritual death. The Jews, like the Christians, used excommunication too frequently, so that in both faiths it lost its terror and effectiveness.

"Its only master was the king. Him it paid liberally for a charter protecting its religions and economic rights. Later it paid the liberated communes to confirm its autonomy.

"The Jews, however, were subject to the law of the state and made it a principle to obey it. Said the Talmud:-'The law of the kingdom is law.' Said another passage:-'Since but for fear thereof men would swallow one another alive.'

"The state laid upon the Jews a poll or head tax, property taxes running up to 33%, and taxes on meat, wine, jewelry, imports, and exports. In addition it required 'voluntary' contributions from them to help finance a war, a coronation, or a royal 'progress' or tour.

"The English Jews, numbering in the twelfth century one quarter of one percent of the population, paid eight per cent of the national taxes. They raised a fourth of the levy for the crusade of Richard I, and donated 5000 marks toward his random from German captivity -- thrice the amount given by the city of London.

"The Jew was also taxed by his own community and was periodically dunned for charity, education, and the support of the harassed Jews from Palestine.

"At any moment, for cause or without, the king might confiscate part or all of the property of 'his Jews' for in feudal law they were all his 'men.' When a king died, his agreement to protect the Jews expired. His successor could be induced to renew it only by a large gift. Sometimes this was a third of all Jewish property in the state.

"In 1463 Albrecht III, Margrave of Brandenburg, declared that every new German king 'may according to old usage, either burn all the Jews, or show them his mercy, and, to save their lives, take the third penny' (i.e. one third) 'of their property.'

"The Jews were not legally or generally prevented from owning land. At one time or another in the Middle Ages they owned considerable tracts in Moslem or Christian Spain, in Sicily, Silesia, Poland, England and France.

"But circumstances made such ownership increasingly impractical. Forbidden by Christian law to hire Christian slaves and by Jewish law to hire Jewish slaves, the Jew had to work his holding with free labor, hard to get and costly to retain.

"Jewish law forbade the Jew to work on Saturday, Christian law usually forbade him to work on Sunday. Such leisure was a hardship. Feudal custom or law made it impossible for a Jew to find a place within the feudal system. Any such position required a Christian oath of fealty and military service. But the laws of nearly all Christian states forbade the Jews to carry arms.

"In Vsigothic Spain King Sisebut revoked all grants of land made to Jews by his predecessors. King Egica 'nationalized' all Jewish holdings that had at any time belonged to Christians.

"In 1293 the Cortes of Valladolid prohibited the sale of land to Jews. The ever-present possibility of expulsion or attack persuaded the Jews, after the ninth century, to avoid landed property or rural solitude.

"Indeed in several cases it was they who brought advanced handicraft techniques from Islam or Byzantium to Western lands. Benjamin of Todela found hundreds of Jewish glassworkers in Antioch and Tyre.

"Jews in Egypt and Greece were renowned for the excellence of their dyed and embroidered textiles. As late as the thirteenth century Frederick II called in Jewish craftsmen to manage the state's silk industry in Sicily.

"There and elsewhere Jews engaged in the metal trades, especially in goldsmithing and jewelry. They workd the tin mines of Cornwall until 1290.

"Hebrew artisans in southern Europe were organized in strong guilds and competed successfully with Christian craftsmen. But in northern Europe the Christian guilds acquired a monopoly in many trades.

"They not only advanced capital to build castles, cathedrals, and monasteries, but they raised for themselves substantial houses. In England their homes were among the first dwellings built of stone.

"There were rich and poor among the Jews, despite Rabbi Elezar's dictum that 'all men are equal before God -- women and slaves, rich and poor.' The rabbis sought to mitigate poverty and check profiteering wealth by a variety of economic regulations. They emphasized the responsibility of the group for the welfare of all and softened the stings of adversity with organized charity.

"They did not denounce riches but they succeeded in giving to learning a prestige equal to that of wealth. They branded monopoly and 'corners' as sins. They forbade the retailer to profit by more than a sixth of the wholesale price. They watched over weights and measures. They fixed maximum prices and minimum wages.

"Many of these regulations failed. The rabbis could not isolate the economic life of the Jews from that of their neighbors in Islam or Christendom.

"They acknowledged the social obligations of wealth and perhaps they feared the curse or fury of the poor. No Jew is known to have died of hunger while living in a Jewish community.

"Periodically, and as early as the second century after Christ, each member of the congregation, however poor, was assessed by official overseers for a contribution to the kupah or 'community chest' which took care of the old, poor, or sick, and the education and marriage of orphans. Hospitality was accorded freely, especially to wandering scholars. In some commnities incoming travelers were billeted in private homes by officers of the congregations.

"Jewish philanthropic societies grew to a great number as the Middle Ages advanced. Not only were there many hospitals, orphanages, poorhouses, and homes for the aged but there were organizations providing randoms for prisoners, dowries for poor brides, visits to the sick, care for destitute widows, and free burial for the dead.

"They were less given to pederasty than other peoples of Eastern origin. Their women were modest maidens, industrious wives, prolific and conscientious mothers.

"Early marriage reduced prostitution to a human minimum. Bachelors were rarities. Rabbi Asher ben Yehiel ruled that a bachelor of twenty, unless absorbed in study of the Law, might be compelled to marry by the court.

"Marriages were arranged by the parents. Few girls, says a Jewish document of the eleventh century, were 'indelicate or imprudent enough to express their own fancies or preference.'

"But no marriage was fully legal without the consent of both parties. The father might give his daughter in marriage in her early years, even at six. But such child marriges were not consummated until maturity. When the daughter came of age the she could annul it if she wished. The betrothal was a formal act, making the girl legally the man's wife. They could not thereafter separate except by a bill of divorce.

"At the betrothal a contract (ketuba) was signed for the dowry and the marriage settlement. The latter was a sum set aside out of the husband's estate to be paid his wife in case the husband should divorce her or die.

"Post-Talmudic rabbinical literature refers a thousand times to a man's 'wife,' never to his 'wives.' About the year 1000 Rabbi Gershom ben Judah of Mainz decreed the excommunication of any polygamous Jews. Soon thereafter, in all Europe except Spain, polygamy and concubinage became almost extinct among the Jews.

"Cases confinued to occur, however, where a wife barren for ten years after marriage allowed her husband to take a concubine or an additional wife. Parentage was vital. The same decree of Gershom abolished the old right of the husband to divorce his wife without her consent or guilt.

"Divorces were probably less frequent in medieval Jewry than in modern America.

"Despite the comparative looseness of the marriage bond in law, the family was the saving centr of Jewish life.

"External danger brought internal unity. Hostile witnesses testify to the 'warmth and dignity, thoughtfulness, consideration, parental and fraternal affection' that marked and mark the Jewish family. The young husbnd, merged with his wife in work, joy, and tribulation, developed a profound attachment for her as part of his larger self. He became a father, and the children growing up around him stimulated his reserve energies and engaged his deepest loyalties.

"He had probably known no woman carnally before marriage and had, in so small and intimate a community, few chances for infidelity afterward. Almost from their birth he saved to provide a dowry for his daughters and a marriage settlement for his sons. He took it for granted that he should support them in the early years of their married life. This seemed wiser than to let youth prepare with a decade of promiscuity for the restriction of monogamy.

"In many cases the bridegroom came to live with the bride in her father's home -- seldom to the increment of happiness. The authority of the oldest father in the home was almost as absolute as in republican Rome. He could excommunicate his children and might beat his wife within reason. If he seriously injured her, the community fined him to the limit of his resources.

"The Jew, with the vanity of the commonplace, prided himself on his reproductive ability and his children. His most solemn oath was taken by laying his hand upon the testes of the man receiving the pledge, hence the word testimony.

"Every man was commanded to have at least two children. Usually there were more. The child was reverenced as a visitor from heaven, a very angel become flesh. The father was reverened almost as a vicar of God. The son stood in his father's presence until bidden to be seated, and gave him a solicitous obedience that fully comported with the pride of youth.

"In the ceremony of circumcision the boy was dedicated to Yahveh by the covenant of Abraham. Every family felt obligated to train one son for the rabbinate. When the boy had completed his thirteenth year he was received into manhood, and into all the obligations of the Law, by a solumn ceremony of confirmation.

"Doubtless loopholes were found in the Law and legal fictions were concocted to restore the freedom of adptation indispensable to an enterprising people. But apparently the medieval Jew accepted the Law, by and large, as a bulwark saving him not only from eternal damnation but more visibly from group disintegration.

"The prayers and ritual of the synagogue had their briefer counterparts in the home. The fasts and festivals of the faith were celebrated there with educative ceremonies that bound the present with the past, the living with the dead and the yet unborn.

"Every Friday eve of the Sabbath the father called his wife, children, and servants around him, blessed them individually, and led them in prayer, religious readings, and sacred songs. To the doorpost of each major room was attached a tube (mezuzah) containing a parchment roll inscribed with two passages from Deuteronomy (vi.4-9; xi, 13-21) reminding the Jew that his God is one and must be loved 'wth all thy heart and soul and strength.'

"from the age of four the child was brought to the synagogue. There religion was impressed upon him in his most formative years.

"The synagogue was not merely a temple, it was the social center of the Jewish community. Synagogue, like ecclesis, synod, and college, meant an assemblage, a con-greg-ation. In pre-Christian days it had been essentially a school. It is still called Schule by Ashkenazie Jews.

"In the Dispersion it took on a strange variety of functions. In some synagogues it was the custom to publish, on the Sabbath, the decisions reached by the Beth Din during the week -- to collect taxes, advertise lost aticles, accept complaints of one member against another, and announce the coming sale of property so that any claimant on it might protest the sale. The synagogue dispensed communal charity, and in Asia, served as a lodging for travelers.

"The building itself was always the finest in the Jewish quarter. Sometimes, especially in Spain and Italy, it was an architectural masterpiece, espensively and lovingly adored. Christian authorities repeatedly forbade the erection of synagogues equaling in height the tallest Christian church in the city.

"In 1221 Pope Honorius III orderd the detstruction of such a synagogue in Bourges. Seville had twenty-three synagogues in the fourteenth century, Toleo and Cordova almost as many.

"The hope that he might some day offer sacrifice to Yahveh before the Holy of Holies on Zion's hill inflamed his imagination and left him open to repeated deception by false messiahs.

"About 720 Serene, a Syrian, annointed himself to be the expected redeemer and organized a campaign to recapture Palestine from the Moslems. Jews from Babylonia and Spain abandoned their homes to join his adventure. He was taken prisoner, exposed as a charlatan by the Caliph Yezid II, and was put to death.

"Some thirty years later Obadiah Abu Isa ben Ishaq of Isfahan led a similar revolt. 10,000 Jews took up the sword and fought bravely under his lead. They were defeated, Abu Isa was slain in battle, and the Isfahan Jews suffered indiscriminate punishment.

"When the First Crusade excited Europe, Jewish communities dreamed that the Christians, if victorious, would restore Palestine to the Jews. They awoke from this fantasy to a succession of pogroms.

"In 1160 David Alrui aroused the Jews of Mesopotamia with the announcement that he was the Messiah and would restore them to Jerusalem and liberty. His father-in-law, fearing disaster for the Jews from such an insurrection, slew him in his sleep.

"About 1225 another Messiah appeared in southern Arbia and stirred the Jews to mass hysteria. Maimonides, in a famous 'Letter to the South,' exposed the imposter's claims and reminded the Arabian Jews of the death and destruction that had followed such reckless attempts in the past.

The main sources have ever been economic but religious differences have given edge and cover to economic rivalries. The Moslems, living by Mohammed, resented the Jewish rejection of their prophet. The Christians, accepting the divinity of Christ, were shocked to find that His own people would not acknowledge that divinity.

"Good Christians saw nothing unchristian or inhuman in holding an entire people, through many centuries, responsible for the actions of a tiny minority of Jerusalem Jews in the last days of Christ. The Gospel of Luke told how 'throngs' of Jews welcomed Christ into Jerusalem (xix, 37. How, when He carried His cross to Golgotha, 'there followed Him a great company of people, and of women, who also bewailed and lamented Him' (xxii,27) and how, after the crucifixion, 'all the people that came together to that sight and smote their breasts' (xxiii,48)).

"But these evidences of Jewish sympathy for Jesus were forgotten when, in every Holy Writ, the bitter story of the Passion was related from a thousand pulpits. Resentment flared in Christian hearts.

"On those days the Israelites shut themselves up in their own quarter and in their homes, fearful that the passions of simple souls might be stirred to a pogrom."

"Jewish bankers bore the brunt of the hostility aroused by interest rates that reflected the insecurity of loans. As the economy of Christendom developed and Christian merchants and bankers invaded fields once dominated by Jews, economic competition fomented hate. Some Christian moneylenders actively promoted anti-Semitism.

"Jews in official positions, especially in the finance department of governments, were a natural target for those who disliked both taxes and Jews. Given such economic and religious enmity, everything Jewish became distasteful to some Christians and everything Christian to some Jews.

"The Christian reproached the Jew for clannish exclusiveness and did not excuse it as a reaction to discrimination and occasional physical assault.

"Jewish features, languages, manners, diet, ritual all seemed to the Christian eye offensively bizarre.

"The Jews ate when Christians fasted, fasted when Christians ate.

"Their Sabbath of rest and prayer had remained Saturday as of old, while that of the Christians had been changed to Sunday.

"The Jews celebrated their happy deliverance from Egypt in a Passover feast that came too close to the Friday on which Christians mourned the death of Christ.

"Jews were not allowed by their Law to eat food cooked, to drink wine pressed, or to use dishes or utensils that had been touched by a non-Jew, or to marry any but a Jew. The Christian interpreted these ancient laws -- formulated long before Christianity -- as meaning that to a Jew everything Christian was unclean. He retorted that the Israelite himself was not usually distinguished by cleanliness of person or neatness of dress.

"Mutual isolation begot absurd and tragic legends on both sides. Romans had accused Christians of murdering pagan children to offer their blood in secret sacrifice to the Christian God. Christians of the twelfth century accused Jews of kidnaping Christian children to sacrifice them to Yahveh, or to use their blood as medicine or in the making of unleavened bread for the Passover feast.

"Jews were charged with poisoning the wells from which Christians drank and with stealing consecrated wafers to pierce them and draw from them the blood of Christ.

"When a few Jewish merchants flaunted their opulence in costly raiment, the Jews as a people were accused of draining the wealth of Christendom into Jewish hands.

"Jewish women were suspected as sorceresses. Many Jews, it was thought, were in league with the Devil. The Jews retaliated with like legends about Christians and insulting stories about the birth and youth of Christ.

"In Italy she protected the Jews as 'guardians of the Law' of the Old Testament and as living witnesses to the historicity of the Scriptures and to 'the wrath of God.' But periodically church councils, often with excellent intentions, and seldom with general authority, added to the tribulations of Jewish life.

"The Theodosian Code (439), the Council of Clermont (535), and the Council of Toledo (589) forbade the appointment of Jews to positions in which they could impose penalties upon Christians.

"The Council of Orleans (538) ordered Jews to stay indoors in Holy Week, probably for their protection, and prohibited their employment in any public office.

"The Third Council of the Lateran (1179) forbade Christian midwives or nurses to minister to Jews.

"The Council of Beziers (1246) condemned the employment of Jewish physicians by Christians.

"The Council of Avignon (1209) retaliated Jewish laws of cleanliness by enjoining 'Jews and harlots' from touching bread or fruit exposed for sale. It renewed Church laws against the hiring of Christian servants by Jews. It warned the faithful not to exchange services with Jews but to avoid them as a pollution.

"Several councils declared null the marriage of a Christian with a Jew.

"In 1222 a deacon was burned at the stake for accepting conversion to Judaism and marrying a Jewess.

"In 1234 a Jewish widow was refused her dower on the ground that her husand had been converted to Christianity, thereby voiding their marriage.

"The Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215), arguing that 'at times through error Christians have relations with the women of Jews or Saracens and Jews or Saracens with Christian women,' ruled ' that Jews and Saracens of both sexes in every Christian province and at all times shall be marked off in the eys of the public from other people through the character of their dress.' After their twelfth year they were to wear a distinctive color -- the men on their hats or mantles, the women on their veils. This was in part a retaliation against older and similar laws of Moslems against Christians and Jews. The character of the badge was determined locally by state governments or provincial Church councils. Ordinarily it was a wheel or circle of yellow cloth, some three inches in diameter, sewn prominently upon the clothing. The decree was enforced in England in 1218, in France in 1219, in Hungary in 1279. It was only sporadically carried out in Spain, Italy, and Germany before the fifteenth century when Nicholas of Cusa and San Giovanni da Capistrano campaigned for its full observance.

"In 1219 the Jews of Castile threatened to leave the country en masse if the decree should be enforced and the ecclestiastical authorities consented to its revocation. Jewish physicians, scholars, financiers, and travelers were often exempted from the decree.

"The Byzantine emperors continued for two centuries the oppressive policies of Justinian toward the Jews.

"Heraclius (628) banished them from Jerusalem in retaliation for their aid to Persia and did all he could to exterminate them.

"Leo the Isaurian sought to disprove the rumor that he was Jewish by a decree (723) giving Byzantine Jews a choice between Christianity or banishment. Some submitted. Some burned themselves to death in their synagogues rather than yield.

"Basil I (867-86) resumed the campaign to enforce baptism upon the Jews.

"Constantine VII (912-59) required from Jews in Christian courts a humiliating form of oath -- more Judaico -- which continued in use in Europe until the nineteenth century.

"When, in 1095, Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade, some Christians thought it desirable to kill the Jews of Europe before proceeding so far to fight Turks in Jerusalem.

"Godfrey of Bouillon, having accepted the leadership of the crusade, announced that he would avenge the blood of Jesus upon the Jews and would leave not one of them alive. His companions proclaimed their intention to kill all Jews who would not accept Christianity. A monk further aroused Christian ardor by declaring that an inscription found on the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem made the conversion of all Jews a moral obligation of all Christians.

"The Crusaders planned to move south along the Rhine where lay the richest settlements in northern Europe. The German Jews had played a leading part in the development of Rhenish commerce and had behaved with a restraint and piety that had won the respect of Christian laity and clergy alike. Bishop Rudiger of Sspayer was on cordial terms with the Jews of his district and gave them a charter guaranteeing their autonomy and security.

"In 1095 the Emperor Henry IV issued a similar charter for all the Jews of his realm. Upon these peaceful Jewish congregations the news of the crusade, its proposed route, and the threats of its leaders, broke with paralyzing terror.

"Other Jews of the city took refuge with Bishop Johannsen, who not only protected them but caused the execution of certain Crusaders who had shared in the murders at the church.

"As some Crusaders neared Trier, its Jews appealed to Bishop Egilbert. He offered protection on condition of baptism. Most of the Jews consented. But several women killed their children and threw themselves into the Moselle (June 1, 1096).

"At Mainz Archbishop Ruthard hid 1300 Jews in his cellars. Crusaders forced their way in and killed 1014. The Bishop was able to save a few by concealing them in the cathedral (May 27, 1096). Four Mainz Jews accepted baptism but comitted suicide soon afterward.

"As the Crusaders approached Cologne, the Christians hid the Jews in their homes. The mob burned down the Jewish quarter and killed the few Jews upon whom they could lay their hands. Bishop Hermann, at great danger to himself, secretly conveyed the Jews from their Christian hiding places to Christian homes in the country. The pilgrims discoverd the maneuver, hunted their prey in the villages and killed every Jew they found (June, 1096).

"In two of these villages 200 Jews were slain. In four others the Jews, surrounded by the mob, killed one another rather than be baptized. Mothers delivered of infants during these attacks slew them at birth.

"At Worms Bishop Allebranches received such of the Jews as he could into his palace and saved them. Upon the rest the Crusaders fell with the savagery of anonymity, killing many and then plundering and burning the homes of the Jews. Here many Jews commited suicide rather than repudiate their faith.

"Seven days later a crowd besieged the episcopal residence. The Bishop told the Jews that he could no longer hold bck the mob and advised them to accept baptism. The Jews asked to be left alone for a while. When the Boishop returned he found that nearly all of them had killed one another. The besiegers broke in and slew the rest. All in all, some 800 Jews died in this pogram at Worms (August 20, 1096).

"Peter the Venerable, the saintly Abbot of Cluny, advised Louis VII of France to begin by attacking the French Jews. 'I do not require you to put to death these accursed beings. God does not wish to annihilate them but, like Cain the fratricide, they must be made to suffer fearful torments and be preserved for greater ignominy for an existence more bitter than death.'

"Abbot Suger of St. Denis protested against this conception of Christianity and Louis VII contented himself with capital levies on rich Jews.

"But the German Jews were not let off with mere confiscation. A French monk, Rodolphe, leaving his monastery without permission, preached a pogrom in Germany.

"At Cologne Simon 'the Pious' was murdered and mutilated. At Speyer a woman was tortured on the rack to persuade her to Christianity.

"Again the secular prelates did all they could to protect the Jews. Bishop Arnold of Cologne gave them a fortified castle as refuge and allowed them to arm themselves. The Crusaders refrained from attacking the castle but killed any unconverted Jews that fell into their clutches.

"Archbishop Henry at Mainz admitted into his house some Jews pursued by a mob. The mob forced a way in and killed them before his eyes. The Archbishop appealed to St. Bernard, the most influential Christian of his time. Bernard replied with a strong demunciation of Rodolphe and demanded an end to violence against the Jews. When Rodolphe continued his campaign, Bernard came in person to Germany and forced the monk to return to his monstery.

"Shortly thereafter the mutilated body of a Christian was found at Wurzburg. Christians charged Jews with the crime, attacked them despite the protests of Bishop Embicho and killed twenty.

"Many others, wounded, were tended by Christians (1147). The Bishop buried the dead in his garden. From Germany the idea of beginning the Crusades at home passed back to France and Jews were massacred at Carentan, Rameru, and Sully.

"In Bohemia 150 Jews were murderd by Crusaders.

"In 1235 an unsolved murder of Baden was laid to the Jews and a massacre ensued.

"In 1243 the entire Jewish population of Belitz, near Berlin, was burned alive on the charge that some of them had defiled a consecrated Host.

"In 1283 the accusation of ritual murder was raised at Mainz and despite all the efforts of Archbishop Werner, ten Jews were killed and Jewish homes were pillaged.

"In 1285 a like rumor excited Munich. 180 Jews fled for refuge to a synagogue. The mob set fire to it and all 180 were aburned to death. A year later forty Jews were killed at Oberwesel on the charge that they had drained the blood of a Christian.

"In 1298 every Jew in Rottingen was burned to death on the charge of desecrating a sacramental wafer. Rindfleisch, a pious baron, organized and armed a band of Christians sworn to kill all Jews. They completely exterminated the Jewish community at Wurzburg and slew 698 Jews in Nuremberg. The persecution spread and in half a year 140 congregations were wiped out.

"The Jews of Germany, having repeatedly rebuilt their communities after such attacks, lost heart, and in 1286 many Jewish families left Mainz, Worms, Speyer, and other German towns and migrated to Palestine to live in Islam.

"Houses were looted and destroyed, deeds and bonds were burned and the surviving Jews were left almost penniless. The English kings were now borrowing from the Christian bankers of Florence or Cahors. They no longer needed the Jews and found it troublesome to protect them.

"In 1290 Edward I ordered the 16,000 remaining Jews of England to leave the country by November1, abandoning all their immovable realty and all their collectible loans. Many were drowned in crossing the Channel in small boats. Some were robbed by the ships' crews. Those who reached France were told by the government that they must leave by Lent of 1291.

"In France, too, the spiritual climate changed for the Jews with the Crusades against the Turks in Asia and the Albigensian heretics of Languedoc.

"Bishops preached anti-Semitic sermons that stirred the people. At Beziers an attack upon the Jewish quarter was a regular rite of Holy Week. Finally (1160) a Christian prelate forbade such preaching but required the Jewish community to pay a special tax every Palm Sunday. At Toulouse the Jews were forced to send a representative to the cathedral each Good Friday to receive publicly a box on the ears as a mild reminder of everlasting guilt.

"In 1171 several Jews were burned at Blois on a charge of using Christian blood in Passover rites. Seeing a chance to turn a pious penny, King Philip Augustus ordered all the Jews in his realm to be imprisoned as poisoners of Christian wells and then released them on payment of a heavy ransom (1180).

"A year later he banished them, confiscated all their realty, and gave their synagogues to the Church. In 1190 he had eighty Jews of Orange killed because one of his agents had been hanged by the city authorities for murdering a Jew.

"In 1198 he recalled the Jews to France and so regulated their banking business as to secure large profits to himself.

"In 1236 Christian crusaders invaded the Jewish settlements of Anjou and Poitou -- especially those at Bordeaux and Augouleme -- and bade all Jews be baptized. When the Jews refused, the crusaders trampled 3000 of them to death under their horses' hoofs. Pope Gregoy IX condemned the slaughter but did not raise the dead.

"St. Louis advised his people not to discuss religion with Jews. In 1254 he banished the Jews from France, confiscating their property and their synagogues. A few years later he readmitted them and restored their synagogues. They were rebuilding their comnmunities when Philip the Fair (1306) had them all imprisoned, confiscated their credits and all their goods except the clothes they wore and expelled them, to the number of 100,000, with provisions for one day.

"In Provence, Italy, Sicily and in the Byzantine Empire after the ninth century there were only minor persecutions of the Jews. They found means of protecting themselves in Christian Spain. Even in Germany, England and France the periods of peace were long.

"A generation after each tragedy the Jews there were again numerous and some were prosperous. Nevertheless their traditions carried down the bitter memory of those tragic interludes.

"The days of peace were made anxious by the ever-present danger of pogroms. Every Jew had to learn by heart the prayer to be recited in the moment of martyrdom.

"The pursuit of wealth was made more feverish by the harassed insecurity of its gains. The gibes of gamins in the street were ever ready to greet the wearers of the yellow badge.

"The ignominy of a helpless and secluded minority burned into the soul, broke down individual pride and interracial amity and left in the eyes of the northern Jew that somber Judenschmerz -- the sorrow of the Jews -- which recalls a thousand insults and injuries.

"A Jewish merchant is a dead scholar. He envies and generously honors the man who, escaping the fever of wealth, pursues in peace the love of learning and the mirage of wisdom. The Jewish traders and bankers who went to the fairs of Troyes stopped on the way to hear the great Rashi expound the Talmud.

"So, amid commercial cares, or degrading poverty, or moral contumely, the Jews of the Middle Ages continued to produce grammarians, theologians, mystics, poets, scientists, and philosophers.

"For a while (1150-1200) only the Moslems equaled them in widespread literacy and intellectual wealth. They had the advantage of living in contact or communication with Islam. Many of them read Arabic. The whole rich world of medieval Moslem culture was open to them. They took from Islam in science, medicine, and philosophy what they had given in religion to Mohammed and the Koran.

"Their poets kept to Hebrew but accepted Arabic meters and poetic forms. In Christendom the Jews spoke the language of the people among whom they lived but wrote their literature, and worshiped Yahveh, in the ancient tongue.

"After Maimonides the Jews of Spain, fleeing from Almohad persecution, abandoned Arabic for Hebrew as their literary medium. The revival of Hebrew was made possible by the devoted labors of Jewish philologists. The Old Testament text hd become difficult to understand through lack of vowels and punctduation. Three centuries of scholarship -- from ths seventh to the tenth -- evolved the 'Masoretic' (tradition sanctioned) text by adding vowel points, accent strokes, punctuation marks, verse separations, and marginal notes.

"Thereafter any literate Jew could read the Scriptures of his people.

"Profiting from this widespread scholarship, Hebrew poetry emancipated itself from Arabic exemplars, developed its own forms and themes, and produced in Spain alone three men quite equal to any triad in the Moslem or Christian literature of their age.

"Solomon ibn Gabirol, known to the Christian world as the philosoopher Avicebron, was prepared by his personal tragedy to voice the feelings of Israel. This 'poet among philosophers and philosopher among poets,' as Heine called him, was born at Malaga about 1021. He lost both parents early and grew up in a poverty that inclined him to morose contemplation.

"His verses caught the fancy of Yekutiel ibn Hassan, a high official in the Moslem city-state of Saragossa. There for a time Gabirol found protection and happiness and sang the joy of life. But Yekutiel was assassinated by enemies of the emir and Gabirol fled.

"For years he wandered through Moslem Spain, poor and sick, and so thin that 'a fly could now bear me up with ease.' Samuel ibn Naghdela, himself a poet, gave him refuge at Granada. There Solomon wrote his philosophical works and pledged his poetry to wisdom. Presumably his impetuous pride caused his quarrel with Samuel.