ART. II.-1. Le Talmud de Babylone, traduit en langue Française et complété par celui de Jérusalem, et par d'autres monumens de l'antiquité judaïque. Par l'ABBE L. CHIARINI. Vols. I. et II. Leipzic: 1831.

2. n. Eighteen treatises from the Mishna.

משניות

Translated

by the Rev. D. A. DE SOLA and the Rev. M. J. RAPHALL. London: 1845.

3. Novum Testamentum ex Talmude et Antiquitatibus Hebræorum illustratum. J. GERHARD MEUSCHEN. Lipsiæ: 1736. 4. Tractatus de Vaccâ Rubrâ. Ex auct. MOSES BEN MAIMON. Amstelodami: 1711.

5. Yoma. Additamenta ad Codicem de Die Expiationis. R. CHIJE. Vienna: 1744. Trad. B. UGOLINUS.

6. Tractatus Talmudicus Avoda Sara. Trad. G. EL EDZARDO. Hamb.

TE

1705.

HE profound, although tacit, distinction which the literature of the West has established between the principal and the complemental branches of the Jewish Law is an anomaly without historic parallel. There exists, indeed, a line of demarcation which is neither false nor shadowy; but its value has been exaggerated to a degree that is altogether disproportionate. Three great classes of Hebrew literature have been so venerated, though still imperfectly studied, as to yield a vital element of the Law, the Ethics, and even of what was formerly called the Science, of modern Europe. The main body of general opinion, down to our own time, has been guided and informed by three foreign elements, of nearly equal weight. These are the devout spirit of Judea, the discursive intellect of Greece, and the Law of Rome. The chivalry and feudality of the Teuton and the Celt were their own; the other elements of their civilisation are traceable to the three sources we have indicated.

But while not only the Law, but the earlier history, and the prophetical, poetical, and allegorical writings of the Hebrew seers and princes, before the time of the return from the Captivity of Babylon, occupy a foremost place in our veneration, that great body of judicial decisions, which bears the same relation to the Pentateuch that the decisions of our English judges hold to the Statute Book, has met with a neglect that is almost absolute. This neglect is the more marked from the fact that, on the one hand, some explanation is manifestly necessary for the intelligent comprehension of much of the

Pentateuch; while on the other hand those Jewish writings which are posterior to the final arrangement of the Sacred Books by Ezra, many of which are of inferior authority to those of the Mishna, are accepted by the Churches of the West under the quaint title of Deutero-Canonical. Linguistic ignorance alone can have led men to study the Apocrypha while they neglected the Talmud; but the latter is entombed in most crabbed Hebrew, the former books are accessible in Greek.

It is now six years since one of the most important of our contemporaries awakened an unusual degree of public attention by giving some account of the Talmud. An erudite familiarity with Oriental tongues illuminated this essay, which sparkled with the play of the imagination of the writer no less than with the gems which he produced from the obscurity of twelve folio Hebrew volumes. We learn with much regret, as these sheets are passing through the press, that a painful disease has carried off Mr. Deutsch, the accomplished author of that paper, and blighted the hope that he would apply his great powers and acquirements to a more thorough examination of the Talmudic writings. But brilliant as that essay was, it was superficial. It gave, we think, a very partial view of what the Talmud really is, and it did scant justice to many considerable labourers in the same field of inquiry. Mr. Deutsch spoke as if nobody, before himself, had written anything intelligible on the subject; but, to say nothing of the chapter devoted to it by Dean Milman in his History of the Jews,' the entire Mishna exists in a Latin version, the work of Surenhuse, which includes the partial translations of his predecessors. A German version was published by Rabe in 1760. Nineteen of the treatises are accessible in an English form. With regard to the Ghemara, twenty tracts of that of the Jerusalem Talmud have been translated by Ugolin, and two by Rabe; and three tracts of that of the Babylon Talmud have been translated by Ugolin, two by Rabe, and two by Edzard. Twenty-three more, from the pen of Ugolin, exist in MSS. In the British Museum* are to be found translations by Ulmann of six tracts, by Schneidius of two, and both text and comment of the very important treatisest Avoda Sara and Yoma-the first on Idolatry,' and the

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* The old catalogue, not the new, except the last-named tract. † A critical question of much interest arises from the very first pages of the Avoda Sara. A comparison of the Attic Calendar with the Acts of the Apostles (xvii. 33) leads to the conclusion that St. Paul was present at the festival of the OEOZENIA at Athens, on the 20th of the month Hecatombeon, in the first year of the 207th Olympiad; (the Court of Areopagus sat three days after-v. 19). This was in direct

second on the Day of Atonement.' While these works are far from having exhausted this enormous field of literary treasure, they are yet enough to enable a very modest scholarship to gain a correct idea of much that it contains.

We may thus well put the question, Is it rational to assume that we can fully comprehend either the ancient Law of the Jewish nation, or the references to, and comments on, that Law which we ascribe to the founders of Christianity, while we are ignorant of the great mass of comment and judicial decision which was, to the text of the Pentateuch, what the sententiæ of our judges are to the statute book? Or are we in a position to understand the most momentous reformation attempted within the province of history, without being aware of the thoughts and habits, the ethics and the creed, of the people among whom it originated? We shall be met, no doubt, by the familiar remark that the ancient law was divided into the moral and the ceremonial enactments; that the former are summarily 'comprehended in the ten Commandments;' and that the subtleties of the rabbins are exhausted on the second, with which Christendom has little concern. The reply is characterised by that simplicity which may often be observed when people speak confidently on matters with which they are but superficially acquainted. The division is so easy, that it is to be regretted that it is neither exhaustive nor accurate. Nor is it consistent with the doctrine of the Gospels.

For Christ Himself divided the Law into the two branches of duty to God and duty to man; or what we now term Religion and Ethics. He did so in language which was the faithful echo of the Oral Law. Under the former head ranked that long order of liturgic observances, centering on the existence of the Altar, the Temple, and the Holy City, which was committed to the guardianship of an hereditary priesthood. The greater part of these ordinances, by the full consent of the doctors of the Law, are in abeyance during the exile of Israel from Palestine. So fully is this the case, that the portions of the Talmud which relate to sacrifice, purifications, and the cereviolation of the Law, according to the Avoda Sara. So minute are the provisions against even apparent idolatry, that no Jew was to enter an idolatrous city within three days of a festival. He was not even to remove a thorn from his foot in the presence of a statue, lest he should seem to bow before it. Unless such provisions can be limited to a date posterior to the overthrow of the Jewish polity, it follows that St. Paul had, at this part of his career, emancipated himself much more thoroughly from the authority of the Law than his plea recorded in chap. xxviii. 17 would lead us to suppose.

monial portions of the Law, have been neglected and left untranslated by many who have approached the subject of Hebrew Ethics. But such questions as the obligation of prayer, of alms, and of fasting; as the prohibitions of malediction against one's fellow, and of oppressing the hired servant or the stranger; as the duty of support and instruction which a parent owes to his children; afford instances of numerous ethical injunctions of the Oral Law which are not even referred to in the Decalogue, and which are little more than intimated in the Pentateuch. As matters of daily practice, and of constant scholastic dispute among the twelve great sects into which the Jews, under the reign of the Idumean dynasty, were divided, they were brought repeatedly to the notice of Christ. Much of His recorded teaching specially relates to the contemporary controversies on these and similar points. He refers, with the utmost respect, to the Oral Law. The very language of the Mishna is employed verbatim by the writers of the New Testament. Can we imagine that we rightly understand the language which we so freely quote, while that great storehouse of doctrine, of which the new faith was the complement and the corrective, remains to us an utterly sealed book?

We may readily understand, as matter of literary history, how it came to pass that the doctors of the fourth century, and their followers and commentators, contented themselves with a very imperfect acquaintance with the subjects on which they undertook to dogmatise. But to acquiesce in a theory founded on so lame and crippled a basis is, at the present day, plainly indefensible. We are not forgetful of the labours of the German scholars, the pioneers in this as in so many other fields of study. Germany has been, as we shall show, in possession of a version of the Mishna for more than a century; and in the translation of such works as Ebrard's Introduction to the 'New Testament,' some knowledge of the Talmud filters into English thought. To Dr. Lightfoot's labours we have referred as exceptional. One of the most elegant and thoughtful scholars of the present day quotes the Mishna in his charming Sinai and Palestine; but specks of light like these only make the general darkness more visible-the systematic neglect more inexcusable.

The Hebrew of the Talmud is, it is true, excessively cramped and obscure. Divines who find but little difficulty in reading the original of books with which they are familiar in an English version, confess themselves entirely unable to master the dialect of the Mishna. The names of Talmudic scholars -Ugolin, Surenhuse, the Buxtorffs, Lightfoot, and one or

two more may be counted on the fingers. The last-named author, the chief English student of Hebrew literature, candidly admits his inability even to conjecture the meaning of some of the passages which he sought to interpret. Research into this province of thought has been chiefly confined to an age of more leisure than the present. But while such men as the elder Buxtorff grudged no time to set in order their views of the 'Synagoga Judaica,' and brought extraordinary erudition as well as heroic patience to the task, their labours are often vitiated and rendered useless by the strong prejudice under which they wrote. Thus, of one Jewish work of the fifteenth century, the Nizachon, or Victoria, of Rabbi Lipman (a work not to be found in the British Museum), John Buxtorff uses the mild and philosophic expression, quod ex ore ipsius Diaboli dictantis excepit. It is clear that a certain amount of wariness is needful in following such guides as these.

A very brilliant and noble exception, however, is to be mentioned in the person of the Abbé L. Chiarini, Professor of Oriental Languages at the Royal University of Warsaw, and member of various learned societies. This author published at Leipzig, in the year 1831, a translation of the first treatise of the Talmud,' including both Mishna and Ghemara, that is to say, both the text of, and the ancient comment on, that portion of the Oral Law which relates to what we may familiarly term the saying one's prayers. It is necessary to use this rather puerile phrase, as if we were to say a treatise on prayer, we might altogether mislead our readers. In the language of the modern English rabbins this treatise, BERACOTH, contains laws for regulating the daily prayers, and the ritual of divine worship. But, although the work is marked in the catalogue of the British Museum with the words 'no more volumes pub'lished,' it was, in the intention of the author, only the commencement of the great task of the translation into French of the entire Talmud, involving the collation of the two distinct versions or codices, known as the Talmud of Jerusalem, and that of Babylon. The labour of the translator has completed only one out of the sixty-eight treatises of which the Talmud is composed; but he has, in a preface of 230 octavo pages, given an analytical view of the entire work, which is of high critical value. While apparently hampered, in one or two places, by the fear lest his orthodoxy should be called in question, and while taking occasion to declare, in unequivocal terms, his submission to a guide who had not at the time of that publication claimed infallibility, a general candour and impartiality pervade the prolegomena of the Abbé which are extremely rare in any writing connected in any way with Judaism.