In this respect, however, a notable division existed among the Jews themselves, which has been transmit- ted to the modern rei^resentatives of the two great par- ties. The leading tenet of the Sadducees was the ne- gation of the leading tenet of their opponents. As the Pharisees asserted, so the Sadducees denied, that the Israelites were in possession of an oral law transmitted to them by Moses. The manner in which the Phari- sees may have gained acceptance for their own view is noticed elsewhere in this work [see Phauisee] ; but, for an equitable estimate of the Sadducees, it is proper to bear in mind emphatically how destitute of histori- cal evidence the doctrine was which they denied. That doctrine is, at the present day, rejected, probably by al- most all, if not by all. Christians; and it is, indeed, so foreign to their ideas that the greater number of Chris- tians have never even heard of it, though it is older than Christianity, and has been the support and con- solation of the Jews under a series of the most cruel and wicked persecutions to which any nation has ever lieen exposed during an ecjual number of centuries. It is likewise now maintained all over the world by those who are called the orthodox Jews. It is therefore de- sirable to know the kind of arguments by which, at the present day, in a historical and critical age, the doc- trine is defended. For this an opportunity has lately been given by a learned French Jew, grand-rabbi of the circumscription of Colniar (Klein, Le Juduisme, nv la Verile sur le Talmud [iMulhouse, 1859]), who still asserts as a fact the existence of a Mosaic oral law. To
do full justice to his views, the original work should be perused. But it is doing no injustice to his learning and ability to point out that not one of his arguments has a positive historical value. Thus he relics maiidy on tiie inconceivability (as will be again noticed in this article) that a divine revelation should not have ex- plicitly proclaimed the doctrine of a future state of re- wards and punishments, or that it should have promul- gated laws left in such an incomplete form and retjuir- ing so much explanation and so many additions as the laws in the Pentateuch. Now argimients of this kind may be sound or unsoimd ; based on reason or illogical; and for many they may have a philosophical or theo- logical value ; but they have no pretence to be regard- ed as historical, inasmuch as the assumed premises, which involve a knowledge of the attributes of the Su- preme Being and the manner in which he would be likely to deal with man. are far beyond the limits of historical verification. 'Ilie nearest approach to a his- torical argument is the following (p. 10) : "In the first place, nothing proves better the fact of the existence of the tradition than the belief itself in the tradition. An entire nation does not suddenly forget its religious code, its principles, its laws, the daily ceremonies of its worship to such a point that it could easily be persuad- ed that a new doctrine presented by some impostors is the true and only explanation of its law and has always determined and ruled its application. Holy Writ often represents the Israel'tPes as a stift'-necked people impa- tient of the religious yoke; and would it not be attrib- uting to them rather an excess of docility, a too great condescension, a blind obedience, to suppose that they suddenly consented to troidjlesomc and rigorous inno- vations which some persons might have wished to im- pose on them some fine morning? Such a supposition destroys itself, and we are obliged to acknowledge that the tradition is not a new invention, but that its birth goes back to the origin of the religion; and that, trans- ! mitted from father to son as the word of G(»d, it lived in the heart of the jieojile, identified itself with the blood, and was always considered as nn inviolable au- thority." But. if this passage is carefully examined, it will be seen that it does not supjily a single fact worthy of being regarded as a proof of a INlosaic oral law. In- dependent testimony of persons contemporary with J\Io- ses that he had transmitteil such a law to the Israelites would be historical evidence; the testimony of persons in the next generation as to the existence of such an oral law which their fathers told them came from Clo- ses wouhl have been secondary historical evidence; but the belief of the Israelites on the point twelve hundred years after iNIoses cannot, in the absence of any inter- mediate testimony, be deemed evidence of a historical fact. jMoreover, it is a mistake to assume that they who deny a Mosaic oral law imagine that this oral law was at some one time as one great system introduced suddenly among the Israelites. The real mode of con- ceiving what occurred is far different. After the re- turn from the Captivity, there existed probably among the Jews a large body of customs and decisions not con- tained in the Pentateuch ; and these had practical au- thority over the people long before they were attrib- uted to Moses. The only phenomenon of importance requiring explanation is, not the existence of the cus- toms sanctionetl by the oral law, but the belief accept- ed by a certain portion of the Jews that JMoses hail di- vinely revealed those customs as laws to the Israelites. To explain this historically from written records is im- possible, from the silence on the subject of the very scanty historical Jewish writings purporting to be writ- ten between the return from the Captivity in B.C.ooti and that uncertain period when the canon was finally closed, which probably could not have been very long before the death of Antiochns Epiphanes, B.C. 104. For all this space of time, a iieriod of about three hundred and seventy-two years, a period as long as from the acces- sion of Henry VIII to the present day, we have no He-