clothes and ran away. He also says, I fulfilled in my- self these words : ' Wisdom gives life to them tliat have it' (Eccles. vi, 12). In case of a bite the man will die ; what, tlieu, is the remedy? Abai says lie must take the skin of a male adder and write upon it these words: ' I, M., the son of the woman N., upon the skin of a male adder, I write against thee, Kanti, Kanti, K/irus.' Some say, ' Kandi, Kandi, Klurus, .lah, Jah, Lord of hosts, Amen, Amen, Selah.' Let him also cast off his clothes and bury them in the graveyard for twelve months of the year; then let him take them up and burn them in an oven, and let him scatter the ashes at the parting of the roads. But during these twelve months of the year, when he drinks water, let him drink out of nothing but a brass tube, lest he should see tVie pliantom-form of the diemon and be endangered. This was tried by Abba the son of Martha, who is the same as Abba the son of Manjumi. His mother made a gold- en tube for him."
In the face of such extravagancies, we are not sur- prised at the following statement made by a modern Jewish writer, H. Hurwitz, in an essay preceding his Ilehreio Tales (Lond. 182G), p. 34 sq. :
"The Talmud contains many things which every en- lightened Jew must sincerely wish had either never ap- peared I here, or should, at least, loui; ago have been ex- punged from its pages. . . . Some of these sayings are objectionable per .se ; others are, indeed, susceptible of expliuiations, but without them are calculated to produce false and erroneous iinpiessions. Of the former desciip- tion are all those extravagancies rel.itiug to the extent of Paradise, the dimensions of Gehinnoin, the size of Levia- than, and the shor habnr, the freaks of Ashmodai, etc., idle tales borrowed most probably from the Parthians and Arabiaus, to whom the Jews were subject, before the prom- ulgation of the Talmud. . . . How these objectionable passages came at all to be inserted, can only l)e accounted for from the ijreat reverence with which the Israelites of those days used to regard their wise men, and which made them look upon every word and expression tliat dropped from the mouth of their instructors as so many precious sayitigs well worthy of being preserved. These they wrote down for their own i)rivate information, to- gether Nvith more important matters, and when, in afier- tiines, these writings were collected in order to be em- bodied in one entire work, the collectors, either from want of proper discrimination or from some pions motive, suf- fered them to remain, and thus they were handed down to posterity. That the wiser portion of the nation never approved of them is well known. Nay, that some of the Talmudists themselves regard them with no favorable eye is plain from the bitter terms in which they spoke against them [for example, Jelioshua ben Levi, who ex- claims: "He who writes them down will have no portion in the world to come; he who explains them will be scorched"]. ... I admit, also, that there are many and various contradictions in the Talmud, and, indeed, it would be a miracle if there were none. For the work contains not the opinions of only a few individuals liv- ing in the same society, under precisely similar circum- stances, but of hundreds, nay, thousands, of learned men of various talents, living in a long series of ages, in dif- ferent countries, and under the most diversified condi- tions. ... To believe that its multifarious contents are all dictates of unerring wisdom is as extravagant as to suppose that all it contains is founded in error. Like all other productions of unaided humanity, it is not free from mistakes and prejudices, to remind us that the writers were fallible men, and that unqualified admiration must be reserved for the works of divine inspiration, which we ought t<i study, the better to adore and obey the all-per- fect Anthor. But while I should be among the first to protest airainst any confusion of the Talmudic rills with the ever-flowiu2f stream of Holy Writ, I do not hesitate to avow my doubts whether there exists any uninspired work of equal antiquity that contains more interesting, more various and valuable iuformation than that of the still-existing remains of the ancient Hebrew sages."
But while we admire the candor of this Jewish writer, we must confess that not all of his coreligionists act on the same principle, as the sequel will prove. An arti- cle in the Qiiarterli/ Review for October, 18G7, with the heading "What is the Talmud?" has taken the world by surprise. Such a panegyric the Talmud most likely never had. Written so learnedly, and in a style so at- tractive, about a subject utterly unknown to the world at large, the stir it has created is not to be wondered at, and the more so because this article contained sentences wliich could not have einanated from a Jew. But the
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wTiter was a Jew, Mr. E. Deutsch (since deceased), and 1 what. Isaac said to Jacob, "The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are tlie hands of Esau," must be apjilied to the author of " What is the Talmud V" We cannot ])ass over tiiis article by merely alluding to it; it de- serves our full attention, on accoimt of the mischief it has already wrought, and must work, in the minds of those who are not able to correct the erroneous state- ments contained in it.