"When the masters of the law entered and left the aculeniy, thev used to offer up a short but fervent pr.iyer; a praver of t'hauks that they had been a hie to carry out their "task thus far, and a prayer, further, that no evil inii;ht arise at their hands, that Iliey iiiiLrht not have fall- en into error, that Ihey might not declare pure that which was impure, and impure that which was pure" (p. 5S>.
Against this we oiiset the following:
"The wise men have informed us that when the teach- er entered the house of learning, he said, 'May it please thee, O Lord my God, that I may not be the cause of any offence, nor err in anything as regards the Halakah, that mv companions may "rejoice over me, and that I may not say of things unclean they are clean, and things clean that they are uhcleau, and that my ci)mi)anions may not err in anything as regards the Halakah, and that I may re- joice over them.' And when the teacher left the house of learning he said, 'I thank thee, my God, that thou hast given me my portion among those who sit in the house of learning and not among those who sit at the corners of the streets. For 1 rise up early, and they rise up eariy : I rise np early to occupy myself in things concennng the law, they rise np early to occupy themselves in things which are useless. I work and they work: I work and receive a reward, they work and receive no reward. 1 rim and they run : I run to everlasting life, and they run to the pit of destruction.' "
Is not this prayer like that of the Pharisee in the gos- pel? (Luke xviii, 11.)
After having touched upon the most vital points of the Talmud — which, as we believe, has been done sine ira et studio, but in accordance w'ith the old saying, Amicus Plato, amicus Aristot.eles,sed nuujis arnica Veri- tas— we will now subjoin some of the opinions on the Talmud by different authors. D'lsraeli, in his Genius of Judaism (p. 88), says :
"The Mishna, at first considered as the'perfection of human skill and industry, at length was discovered to be a vast, indisresled heap of contradictory decisions. It was a supplement of the law of Moses which itself required a supplement. Composed in curt, uuconnected sentences, such as would occur in conversation, designed to be got by rote by the students from the lips of their oracles, the
whole was at length declared to be not even intelligible, and served oidy to perplex or terrify the scrupulous He- brew. Such is the nature of traditions when they are fairly brought together and submitted to the eye.
" The Mishna now only served as a text (the "law of Mo- ses being sliL'htly regarded) to call fortli interminable ex- positinns. The very sons of the founder of the Mishna set the example by pretending that they underslond what their father meant. The work once begun, it was found difficult to get rid of the workmen. The sons of the 'Holy' were succeeded by a long line of other rulers of their divinity schools, under the title, aptly descriptive, of the Amora'im, or (lictatars. These were the founders of the new despotism : afterwards, wanderers in the laby- rinth they had themselves cunstructed, roved the Sebura- ini, or ojiiiiidiiiKts, no hniger dictating, but iiiferrinL', opin- iiuis by keen sijecuhitions. As in the decline of empiie mere florid titles delight, rose Ihe Ueonim,, or sublime doc- tors, till at length, in the dissolution of this dynasty of theologians, they sank into the familiar, titular'honor of Rabbi, (ir master.
"The .Jews had incurred the solenni reproach in the days of .Tesus of having imnihilaled the word of God by the load of their traditions. The calandty l)ecame more fearful when, two centuries after, they received the fatal gift of their collected traditions, called Mishna, and still more fatal when, in the lapse of three subsequent centu- ries, the epoch of the liiial compilation, was produced the commentary graced with the title of the (ieviaia, 'com- pleteness,'(H' 'perfection.' It was imagined that the hu- man intellect had here touched its meridian. The na- tional mind was completely rabbinized. It became uni- form, stable, and peculiar.
"The Tahnud, or the Doctrinal, as the whole is called, was the work of nearly five hundred years. Heie, then, we find a prodigious mass of contradictory opinions, an intiuite nninher of casuistical cases, a logic of scholastic theolowy, some recondite wisdom, and much rambling do- tage: hiany puerile tales and Oriental fancies; ethics and sophisms, reasonings and uureasouings, subtle solutions, and maxims, and riddles; nothing in human life seems to have happened which these doctors have noi perple.x- ed or provided against, for their observations are as mi- nute as Swift exhausted in his [yirectiuns to Servants. The children of Israel, always children, were delighted as their Talmud increased its vohnne and their hardships. The Geniara was a kind oi a third law to elucidate the ^lishna, which was a second law, and which had thrown the first law, the law of Moses, into obscurity."
Dr. Isaac Da Costa, in his Israel and the Gentiles (N. Y. 1855, p. lit)), says:
"The Talmud is a most curions monument, raised with astonishing labor, yet made up of pnerilities. Like the present position of the Jew, away from his country, far from his Messiah, and in disobedience to his God, the Talmud itself is a chaos in which the most opposite ele- ments are found in juxtaposititni. It is a book which seems in some parts entirely devoid of common-sense, and in others tilled with deep meaning, ab<iiinding W'ith ab- surd subtleties and legal /»e»se, full of foolish tales and wild imaginations; but also coinaiuing aphorisms and parables which, except in their lack of the simple and sublime character of the Holy Writ, resemble in a degree the parables and sentences of the New Test. The Tal- mud is an immense heap of rubbish, at the bottom of which a few l^riiihl pearls of Kaslern wisdom are to be found. No book has ever expressed more faithfully the spirit of its authors. This we notice the more when com- l)Mring the Talmud with the Bible-the Bible, that Book of books, given to, and bij means of, the Israel of God ; the Talmud, the book composed by Israel without their God, in the time of their dispersion, their misery, and their degeneracy."