Talmudic Inspirations

that singular mental movement
which caused the best spirits of an entire nation
to concentrate, in spite of opposition, all their energies
for a thousand years upon the writing, and
for another thousand years upon
the commenting, of this one book…

Well does the Talmud supplement the Horatian "Habent sua fata libelli,"
by the words ''even the sacred scrolls in the Tabernacle."

HİSTORY OF TALMUD

Even “the” first edition (europian) was printed in hot haste, and without due care ; and every succeeding one, with one or two insignificant exceptions, presents a sadder spectacle.
In the Basle edition of 1578 — the third in point of time,
which has remained the standard edition almost ever since
— that amazing creature, the Censor, stepped in.
In his anxiety to protect the
" Faith" from all and every danger…
— for the Talmud was supposed to hide bitter things against Christianity
under the most innocent-looking words and phrases — this official did very wonderful things.
When he, for example, found some ancient Roman
in the book swearing by the Capitol or by “Jupiter of Rome” his mind instantly misgave him.
Surely this Roman must be a Christian, the Capitol the
Vatican, Jupiter the Pope.
And forthwith he struck out Ronie and substituted any other place he could think of.
A favorite spot seems to have been Persia, sometimes it was Aram or Babel.
So that this worthy Roman may be found unto this day swearing by the Capitol of Persia or
by the Jupiter of Aram and Babel.
the word "Gentile " occurred, the Censor was seized with the most frantic terrors.
A “Gentile” could not possibly be aught but a Christian ;
whether he lived in India or in Athens, in Rome or in Canaan ;
whether he was a good Gentile — and there are many such in the Talmud — or a wicked one. Instantly he christened him ; and christened him, as fancy moved him,
an "Egyptian," an "Aramaean," an "Amalekite," an "Arab," a "Negro;"

sometimes a whole "people."
We are speaking strictly to the letter!

a beginning made of a “critical” edition,
such as not merely Greek and Roman, Sanscrit and Persian classics,
but the veriest trash written in those languages
would have had ever so long ago.

There are innumerable variations, additions, and corrections to be gleaned
from the Codices at the Bodleian and the Vatican,
in the Libraries of Odessa, Munich, and Florence, Hamburg and Heidelberg, Paris and Parma.

in hurling anathemas and bulls and edicts of whole sale confiscation and
conflagration against this luckless book…

From Justinian, who, as early as 553 A.D.,
honored it by a special interdictory Novella, down to Clement VIII.

publicly burnt no less than six different times:
grotesquely calls the " Gemaroth Thalmud,"
in 1553 and 1555, Paul IV. in 1559, Pius V. in 1566, Clement VIII. in 1592 and 1599.

" Si tamen prodierit sine nomine Thalmud tolerari deberet."

Thus Honorius IV. writes to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1286
anent that "damnable book" [liber damniabilis],
admonishing him gravely and desiring him "vehemently"
to see that it be not read by anybody, since " all other evils flow out of it."

Clement V., in 1307,
before condemning the book, wished to know something of it,
and there was no one to tell him :
chairs be founded, for Hebrew, Chaldee, and Arabic,
as the three tongues nearest to the idiom of the Talmud.
The spots chosen by him were the Universities of Paris, Salamanca, Bologna, and Oxford.

a change took place in Germany:
One Pfefferkorn, a miserable creature enough, began,
in the time of the Emperor Maximilian,
to agitate for a new decree for the extermination of the Talmud…

Step by step,
hour by hour, the German Reformation was drawing nearer.
Reuchlin, the most eminent Hellenist and Hebraist of his time,
had been nominated to sit on the Committee which was to lend its learned
authority to the Emperor's decree.

in those days — the theological Faculty
of Mayence demanded it openly — than a total
" Revision and Correction " of the Hebrew Bible,
"in as much as it differed from the [Latin] Vulgate."

Reuchlin proclaiming the high importance of the
" Hebrew- Truth,"
as he emphatically called it…

He declined
the proposal, saying, honestly enough, that he knew
nothing of the book, and that he was not aware
of the existence of many who knew anything of it.

" Burning is but a ruffianly argument”
[Bacchanten-Argufftenf]
Where upon a wild out cry was raised against him as a Jew, a Judaizer,
a bribed renegade, and so on…

he repeated Clement's proposal to found
Talmudical chairs. At each German university… (Açılım –E.N.)

"As to burning it,"
he continues, in the famous Memorial addressed to the Emperor,
"if some fool came and said, Most mighty Emperor!
your Majesty should really suppress and burn the books of alchymy
[a fine argumentum ad hominem] because they contain blasphemous, wicked, and absurd things against our faith,
what should his Imperial Majesty reply to such a buffalo or ass
but this :
Thou art a ninny, rather to be laughed at than followed ?
Now because his feeble head cannot enter into the depths of a science, and cannot conceive it, and does understand things otherwise
than they really are, would you deem it fit to burn such books ?"


and Reuchlin, the peaceful student,
from a witness became a delinquent.
A whole literature of pamphlets, flying sheets, caricatures, sprang up.
University after University was appealed to against him.
No less than forty-seven sittings were held
by the theological Faculty of Paris,
which ended by their formal condemnation of Reuchlin.


Around him rallied, one by one,
Duke Ulrich of Wurtemberg, the Elector Frederick of Saxony,
Ulrich von Hutten, Franz von Sickingen
— he who finally made the Colognians pay their costs in the Reuchlin trial

— Erasmus of Rotterdam,
and that whole brilliant phalanx of the ''Knights of the Holy Ghost,"

the ''Hosts of Pallas Athene," the ''Tahnntphili,''
as the documents of the period variously styled them :
they whom we call the Humanists.


And their palladium and their war-cry was
— oh! wondrous ways of History — the Talmud!
to stand up for Reuchlin meant, to them, to stand up for " the Law ;
to fight for the Talmud was to fight for the Church!
" Non te," writes Egidio de Viterbo to Reuchlin,
" sed Legem : ton Thalmud, sed Ecclesiam'


The rest of the story is written in the " Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum,"
and in the early pages of the German Reformation.
The Talmud was not burnt this time.
On the contrary, its first complete edition was printed. And in the same year of Grace 1520 a.d., when this first edition went through the press at Venice,
Martin Luther burnt the Pope's bull at Wittenberg.

Part Two:

We shall also introduce a summary of its law,
speak of its metaphysics, of its moral philosophy,
and quote many of its proverbs and saws — the
truest of all gauges of a time.

human and divine, it may best be judged
by analogy and comparison with other legal codes,
more especially with the Justinian Code and its Commentaries.
What the uninitiated have taken
for exceptional “Rabbinical" subtleties,
or, in matters relating to the sexes,
for gross offences against modern taste, will then cause the Talmud
to stand rather favorably than otherwise.

But, above all, it is necessary to transport ourselves,
following Goethe's advice, to its birthplace
— Palestine and Babylon — the gorgeous East itself,
where all things glow in brighter colors,
and grow into more fantastic shapes:

" Willst den Dichter du verstehen,
Musst in Dichter's Lande gehen."

the Talmud is more than a book of laws. It is a microcosm,
embracing, even as does the Bible, heaven and
earth. It is as if all the prose and the poetry, the
science, the faith and speculation of the Old World
were, though only in faint reflections, bound up in
it in mice.

the return from the Babylonish captivity. One of the
most mysterious and momentous periods in the history of humanity is
that brief space of the Exile.
What were the influences brought to bear
upon the captives during that time, we know not.

But this we know, that from a reckless, lawless,
godless populace,
they returned transformed into
a band of Puritans. [and how and why?]
the
people now began to press round these brands
plucked from the fire
— the scanty records of their faith and history
— with a fierce and passionate love,
a love stronger even than that of wife and child.

the keenest as well as
the most poetical minds of the nation remained fixed upon them.
"Turn it and turn it again,"
says the Talmud,
with regard to the Bible, 'for everything is in it."
''Search the Scriptures!" is
the distinct utterance of the New Testament.

Its technical name is already contained in the Book of Chronicles.
It is "Midrash"
(to study, expound) — a term which the
Authorized Version renders by " Story. "

There is scarcely a more fruitful source of mis-conceptions upon this subject
than the liquid nature, so to speak, of its technical terms.

Thus Midrash, from the abstract " expounding,"
came to be applied, first to the " exposition " itself
— even as our terms " work, investigation, enquiry,"
imply both process and product ; and finally, as a
special branch of exposition — the legendary — was
more popular than the rest, to this one branch only
and to the books that chiefly represented it.

four of the chief methods
were found in the Persian word "Paradise",
spelt in vowelless Semitic fashion, PRDS.
Each one of these mysterious letters was taken,
mnemonically, as the initial of some technical word
that indicated one of these four methods:

1- The one called P aimed at the simple understanding of words and things, in accordance with the primary exegetical law of the Talmud,

"that no verse of the Scripture ever practically travelled beyond its literal meaning" — though it might be explained, homiletically and otherwise, in innumerable new ways:
Autrement. Et Derechef ad iterum.
2- The second, R \remes\,
means Hint, i. e., the discovery of the indications contained in
certain seemingly superfluous letters and signs in Scripture.
These were taken to refer to laws
not distinctly mentioned, but either existing traditionally
or newly promulgated.
This method, when more generally applied, begot a kind of
memoria technica a stenography akin to the "Notarikon" of the Romans. Points and notes were added to the margins of scriptural,
and the foundation of the Massorah,
or diplomatic preservation of the text, was thus laid.

3- The third, D , as homiletic application of
that which had been to that which was and would be,
of prophetical and historical dicta to the actual condition of things.
It was a peculiar kind of sermon,
with ail the aids of dialectics and poetry, of parable, gnome, proverb, legend, and the rest,
exactly as we find it in the New Testament.

4- The fourth, S,
stood for sody secret, mystery.
This was the Secret Science [İlm-ü Ledün], into which but few were initiated.
It was theosophy, metaphysics, angelology,
a host of wild and glowing visions of things beyond earth.
Faint echoes of this science survive in Neoplatonism,
in Gnosticism, in the Kabbalah, in " Hermes Trismegistus."
But few were initiated into these things of
The Creation " and of "The Chariot,"
as it was also called, in allusion to Ezekiel's vision.
Yet here again the power of the vague and mysterious was so strong,
that the word Paradise gradually indicated this last branch,
the secret science only.
Later, in Gnosticism, it came to mean the " Spiritual Christ."


the modern investigator finds himself plunged at the first sight of these
luxuriant Talmudical wildernesses…

Schooled in
the harmonizing, methodizing systems of the West
— systems that condense, and arrange, and classify,
and give everything its fitting place and its fitting
position in that place — he feels almost stupefied here.
The language, the style, the method, the very sequence of things
(a sequence that often appears as logical as our dreams),
the amazingly varied nature of these things
— everything seems tangled, confused, chaotic.
It is only after a time that the student learns
to distinguish between two mighty currents in the book
— currents that at times flow parallel, at times seem to work upon
each other, and to impede each other's action :
the one emanating from the brain,
the other from the heart
— the one prose, the other poetry-
the one carrying with it all those mental faculties
that manifest themselves in arguing, investigating,
comparing, developing, bringing a thousand points
to bear upon one and one upon a thousand ;
the other springing from the realms of fancy, of imagination, feeling, humor,
and above all from that precious combination of still,
almost sad, pensiveness with quick catholic sympathies,
which in German is called Gemüth.

The logical faculties turned to the legal portions
in Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy
— developing, seeking, and solving a thousand real
or apparent difficulties and contradictions with
what, as tradition, had been living in the hearts
and mouths of the people from time immemorial.

transformed the whole into
a vast series of themes almost musical
in their wonderful and capricious variations…
The first is called " Halachah" a term applied
both to the process of evolving legal enactments
and the enactments themselves.
The other, " Haggadah " (Legend, Saga) not so much in our modern
sense of the word, though a great part of its contents comes under that head,
but because it was only a "saying," a thing without authority

a play of fancy, an allegory, a parable, a tale,
that pointed a moral and illustrated a question,
that smoothed the billows of fierce debate,
roused the slumbering attention,
and was generally — to use its own phrase — a "comfort and a blessing."

the legal and the legendary, is divided into Mishnah and Gemara:

The Mishnah, ( to learn, to repeat)…
It simply means "Learning," like Gemara, which, besides, indicates
"complement " to the Mishnah — itself a complement to the Mosaic code,
but in such a manner that in developing and enlarging, it supersedes it.
The Pentateuch remained under all circumstances the immutable, divinely given constitution, the written law : in contradistinction to it, the Mishnah, together with the Gemara, was called the oral,
or "unwritten" law, not unlike the unwritten,
the Roman " Lex Non Scripta," the Sunnah (Sünnet), or common law.

the whole History of Jurisprudence is more obscure than the origin,
development, and completion of this "Oral Law."

things that were irredeemably lost with the [destruction] first temple were
the " Urim and Thummim " of the highpriest — the oracle.
With Malachi the last prophet had died...

a certain number of hermeneutical rules is not unlike those used in the Roman schools
(inferences, conclusions from the minor to the major and vice versa, analogies of ideas or objects, general and special statements, etc.)

The often uncompromising severity of the
Pentateuch, especially in the province of the penal
law, had certainly become much softened down
under the milder influences of the culture of later
days. Several of its injunctions, which had become
impracticable, were circumscribed, or almost constitutionally abrogated, by the introduction of exceptional formalities.
"Law" was in the hands of the " Scribes," who, according to the New Testament,
" sit in the seat of Moses."
We shall speak presently of the "Pharisees" with whom the word is often coupled.
[i.e. gagné la guerre contre les Sadekees!]

The Babylonian Gemara is the expression of the academies of
Syra, Nehardea, Pum-Veditha, Mahusa, and other
places, during six or seven generations of continuous development.
This "Babylonian" Talmud is couched in "Western Aramaean."


The Babylonian Talmud is about four times as large as that of Jerusalem.
Its thirty-six treatises now cover, in our editions,
printed with the most prominent commentaries
(Rashi and Tosafoth), exactly 2947 folio leaves in
twelve folio volumes, the pagination of which is
kept uniform in almost all editions. If, however,
the extraneous portions are subtracted, it is only
about ten or eleven times as large as the Mishnah,
which was redacted just as many generations be-
fore the Talmud.

How the Talmud itself became by degrees what
the Mishnah had been to the Gemara, and what
the Scripture had been to the early Scribes, viz.

a Text; how the "Amoraim" (speakers),

"Saboraim," and "Gaonim," those Epigoni of the
" Scribes," made it the centre of their activity for
centuries; what endless commentaries, disserta-
tions, expositions, responses, novellae, abstracts,
etc., grew out of it, we cannot here tell. Only
this much we will add, that the Talmud, as such,
was never formally accepted by the nation, by
either Ge'heral or Special Council. Its legal

decisions, as derived from the highest authorities,
certainly formed the basis of the religious law, the
norm of all future decisions : as undoubtedly the
Talmud is the most trustworthy canon of Jewish
tradition. But its popularity is much more due to
an extraneous cause. During the persecutions
against the Jews in the Persian empire, under
Jesdegerd II., Firuz, and Kobad [Abad Kubad], the schools were
closed for about eighty years. The living develop-
ment of the law being stopped, the book obtained
a supreme authority, such as had probably never
been dreamt of by its authors.

curious history of words !
The bread which the Semites had cast upon the waters, in the archaic
Phoenician times, came back to them after many days. If they had given to the early Greeks the names for weights and measures, for spice and aromas, every one of which is Hebrew : if they had imported the "sapphire, jasper, emerald," the fine materials for garments,

and the garments themselves
if the musical instruments, the plants, vessels, writing materials, and last, not least, the "alphabet " itself, came from the Semites : the Greek and Latin idioms repaid them in the Talmudical period with full interest,

to the great distress of the later scholiasts and lexicographers.
The Aramaic itself was, as we said, the language of the common people. It was, in itself, a most pellucid and picturesque idiom, lending itself admirably
not only to the epigrammatic terseness of the Gemara, but also to those profoundly poetical conceptions of the daily phenomena, which had penetrated even into the cry of the watchmen, the password of the temple-guards, and the routine-formula of the levitical functionary. Unfortunately, it was too poetical at times.
Matters of a purely metaphysical nature, which afterwards grew into dogmas through its vague phraseology, assumed very monstrous shapes indeed. But it had become in
the hands of the people a mongrel idiom ; and, though gifted with a fine feeling for the distinguishing characters of each of the languages then
in common use ("Aramaic lends itself best to elegies, Greek to hymns, Hebrew to prayer, Roman to martial compositions," as a common saying has
it), they yet mixed them all up. After all, it was but the faithful reflex of those who made this idiom an enduring language. These “Masters of the Law" formed the most mixed assembly in the world.
There were not only natives of all the parts of the world-wide Roman empire among them, but also denizens of Arabia and India ; a fact which accounts for many phenomena in the Talmud. But there is hardly anything of domestic or public purport, which was not called either by its Greek or Latin name, or by both, and generally in so questionable a shape, and in such
obsolete forms, that both classical and Semitic scholars have often need to go through a whole course of archaeology and antiquities before unravelling it.
Save only one province, that of agriculture. This alone, together with some other trades, had retained the old homely Semitic words : thereby indicating, not, as ignorance might be led to conclude, that the nation was averse to it, but exactly the contrary :

that from the early days of Joshua
they had never ceased to cherish the thought of sitting under their own vine and fig-tree. We refer for this point to the idyllic picture given in the Mishnah of the procession that went up to Jerusalem with the first-fruits, accompanied

by the sound of the flute, the sacrificial bull with gilt horns and an olive-garland round his head proudly marching in front.

The Talmud does, indeed, offer us
a perfect picture of the cosmopolitanism and luxury of those final days of Rome, such as but few classical or postclassical writings contain.
We find mention made of
Spanish fish,
of Cretan apples,
Bithynian cheese,
Egyptian lentils and beans,
Greek and Egyptian pumpkins,
Italian wine,
Median beer,
Egyptian Zyphus : garments were imported from bitum),
the room in which they lived and slept (),
the cup (cyathus, phiala potoria) out of which they drank,
the eating and drinking itself (oenogarum, collyra, acraton, opsonium, etc.).
Of their dress we have the ( sagum, dalmatica, braccae, chirodota).
The words sandalium, solea, soleus, talaria, impilia, indicate the footgear.
Ladies adorned themselves with the catella, cochlear, and other sorts of rings and bracelets, and in general whatever appertained to a Greek or Roman lady's fine apparel.
Among the arms which the man wore are mentioned the loyyrj, the spear, the fidyatpa

(a word found in Genesis), the pugio.
Pelusium and India,
shirts from Cilicia,
and veils from Arabia.
To the Arabic, Persian, and Indian
materials contained, in addition to these, in the
Gemara, a bare allusion may suffice. So much we venture to predict, that when once archaeological and linguistic science shall turn to this field,
they will not leave it again soon…
*

And for a general picture of it we shall refer to Bunyan,
who, speaking of his own book, which — mutatis mutandis —
is very Haggadistic, unknowingly describes the Haggadah as accurately as can be :

" . . . . Would'st thou divert thyself from melancholy ?

Would'st thou be pleasant, yet be far from folly ?

Would'st thou read riddles and their explanation ?

Or else be drowned in thy contemplation ?

Dost thou love picking meat ? Or would'st thou see?

A man i' the clouds, and hear him speak to thee ?

Would'st thou be in a dream, and yet not sleep .''

Or, would'st thou in a moment laugh and weep ?

Would'st lose thyself, and catch no harm ?

And find thyself again without a charm?

Would'st read thyself, and read thou know'st not what ?

And yet know whether thou art blest or not

By reading the same lines ? O then come hither,

And lay this book, thy head and heart together...”

Extraits from- The Talmud, by Emanuel Deutch, 1895, Philadelpia