Chapter XIV: The Revival of the Schools: Their Work

=1. One of History’s Miracles.=――If, shivering in the winter, we stand in a frozen field, full of dry brown trees, all stumps and twigs and branches, looking all alike and all lifeless, we can hardly believe that, six months hence, that bare field will be a blooming orchard, with the sunlight flickering down on it through a canopy of pink and white and green. It seems a miracle, and in a sense it is one. Like nature, history, too, has her miracles, and both sorts of marvels are easy to understand when we remember that ‘kings of the earth and all people,’ like ‘snow and hail and stormy wind’ עשָֹׁה דְבָרוֹ, ‘fulfil His word.’ Hadrian left Judea a desert, and the life, as he thought, crushed out of Judaism. He was hardly dead――he died on the first day of the year 138――when the seemingly sapless twigs began tremblingly to put out their little tender shoots. What one may call the oak of the forest, the glorious Temple, was hopelessly shattered by the storm, but, to keep up the simile, little cuttings from it were planted, and watered with tears, and they took root and grew. Small meeting-houses for prayer became general throughout the country. And these meeting-houses served, too, a double purpose, showing the intimate practical relation which exists between charity and religion. ‘He prayeth well who loveth well.’ These little buildings were used also as temporary homes for poor strangers, who were therein provided with free board and lodging. The recital of the קִדּוּשׁ in our synagogues on the eves of Sabbaths and holy days, and of the הַבְדָּלָה at the going out of Sabbaths and holy days, is a remnant of this institution. And in these ancient, humble synagogues, as in our grander modern ones, the presence of ten men (_minyan_) made a sufficient beginning of a congregation. One after another, too, the schools of Palestine reopened, and by the year 175 the Sanhedrin was in active work, with Simon, the sixth president in direct line from Hillel, at its head.

=2. The Schools: their Work.=――The head-quarters of the schools of the west were fixed at Tiberias, and the centre of the eastern group was at Sura. The נָשִׂא, or Prince, was the patriarch of the western Jews; and the רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא, or Prince of the Captivity, ruled the eastern division. But there was a great difference, both of social and of religious position, between the patriarch and the prince. The patriarch in the west was president of the Sanhedrin, and generally distinguished by learning and knowledge of the Law; the prince, in the east, was merely a political vassal of the Persian or Parthian court. Some ‘princes’ acquired distinction in the knowledge of the Law, but it was an accident of their position, and not a cause or a consequence of it. Each eastern school had its own president. The high colleges, or Kallahs, were not always sitting; they met only for some months during the year. The work they did was not quite on the same lines as the university education of these days, although the name Kallahs may possibly bear a like meaning. Some commentators find the root of the word in כל, which means all or universal. The teaching was certainly that, in every sense. A week before each of the festivals popular lectures were given, and any one who liked might enter the halls. Tents were often put up to accommodate the extra numbers. One teacher of the period is said to have had 1,200 regular pupils of his own. The professors, however, did not deliver lectures, of which their students took more or less attentive notes. The instruction in these colleges was carried on by means of discussion and debate. Question was met by counter-question, and answers were often wrapped up in a parable or an allegory. The widest digressions were encouraged. The mere mention of some historical personage who had lived somewhere would lead perhaps to a long debate on political geography; this might glide off into a description of the physical peculiarities of the place or the people named, and this again into an animated botanical or even physiological discourse. All sorts of subjects were included in the ‘course’ of study――ethics, metaphysics, jurisprudence, and all the science that the period was capable of. Astronomy was one of the favourite subjects, and a certain famous scholar named Samuel, who died about the year 250, and who was a friend of Shapor, king of Persia, said, ‘The paths of the heavenly bodies are as clear to me as the streets of Nehardea.’

=3. The Masters of the Schools.=――If the method of instruction differed somewhat from our modern sort, no less different were the instructors. Many of the most eminent ‘doctors’ were only humble tradesmen. Tentmakers or shoemakers often, or carpenters, or weavers, or bakers. One of them, Rabbi Zadok, distinctly taught, ‘Use the Law, not as a crown to shine with, nor as a spade to dig with.’ Their practice gave expression to their belief that labour is one form, and perhaps not the least admirable form, of praise. They hated idleness, and they loved learning. They managed to give full employment to their heads and their hands, and they kept their hearts too in active and healthy condition, since the good of others rather than self-culture was the aim of their studies. The _Tanaim_[6] did not indulge in writing books, but they made good shoes, and good tents, and good loaves, and they turned out good and fairly educated young Jews by the score. So we, their descendants, may be grateful both for what they did and for what they did not do.

=4. The Moral Influence of the Schools.=――Dispersed as the Jews were amongst all people, these schools became a breakwater against the floods of barbarous ignorance and ungodly cultivation which surged around. The schools gave a religious education in the widest sense of the word, since the word of God supplied the text for every discussion and for every discourse. A guide for health, a code for justice, a theme for literature, a field for every branch of historic and scientific inquiry, was sought and found in the Bible. ‘Turn it, and turn it again,’ says the Mishnah, ‘for everything is in it.’ The ‘Law’ was to the Jew a treasury of knowledge as well as a ‘tree of life.’ The minor moralities, the everyday virtues of sobriety, and of content, and of cheerfulness, the students must have learnt by example in the persons of their humble and hard-working teachers.

=5. The Political Influence of the Schools.=――Politically, these schools united the Jews and kept them a nation. Each community was visited in turn by a legate of the Patriarch, and this brought the whole of the scattered people into close and intimate relations. And besides this official connection with one another, there was the feeling of freemasonry which always exists among scholars, and which keeps up a bond of mutual interest. The constitution of the schools, too, helped and confirmed this sense of community. There were no class distinctions in the Kallahs, no broad line of division between ‘town and gown’――absolutely no differences, save of character and of brain power, between student and student, or even between student and professor. Those who taught and those who learnt were all workers, and all of the people. This old Jewish school system produced a democracy of a very pure and patriotic sort, and with no opening for demagogues.

=6. The Literary Influence of the Schools.=――The literary influence was the most lasting of all, for the Talmud was its outcome. ‘Moses commanded unto us a law.’ From the very first, the ‘Law’ had to be explained and applied. The unwritten record of the numberless instances in which it had been so explained and applied, from the time of Moses unto that of Ezra, had become by this date an enormous traditional store. There had come to be a commentary and a precedent attaching to every phrase and almost to every word in the Pentateuch. The comments on the Law dated from its giving, on Sinai. Take, as an instance, the command, ‘Ye shall dwell in booths.’ It looks at first simple enough. But questions would soon arise. Did the ‘ye’ mean men, women, and children? did the ‘dwell’ include sleeping and eating? of what sort and material were the ‘booths’ to be? All such points were endless subjects for commentary, and were practically settled by custom. Commentary by this time had grown to an unmanageable bulk, and custom, in dispersion, had grown somewhat uncertain and unsettled. Whilst the Temple stood, and the people dwelt in their own land, wise and educated men were always at hand to expound the Law, and there was no need for all the shifting wealth of tradition to be stored, as it were, in one bank. But when the schools were scattered, and might at any time be closed, the fear grew that the currency, so to speak, might be debased, and perhaps some valuable bits of it altogether lost. A resolve was gradually formed to make the oral Law into a written one, and to turn the traditions of seventeen centuries into an authoritative code. In one sense it was a pity, for wise men, who obtained a knowledge of the Law of Moses with its traditional interpretation through _vivâ voce_ instruction, were better able to get at the true spirit of the Law and of the tradition than those who had to rely on the dead letter of books. Once written down, misunderstandings might creep in, and what had been useful as a guiding rein might be twisted by awkward hands into a yoke or a halter. There was a danger even of very earnest folks receiving this new written law with so much enthusiasm that they would count it as a second revelation, and hold it equal with the Law itself. But few things are unmixed good or unmixed evil. In most matters there is a balance to be struck, and here it was certainly better to risk some drawbacks from making the oral Law into a written one, than to face the grave chance of its being by degrees forgotten altogether. To Hillel, 30 years B.C., had first occurred the idea of collecting and sifting the enormous traditional store; and, about the year 200, Jehudah the Prince, or Jehudah the Holy, as he is often called, the seventh president of the Sanhedrin in succession from Hillel, seriously began the work of compilation. It was no light work. Rills from the ‘fount of living waters’ which first flowed at Sinai had run into two channels――Halacha, rule; and Hagada, legend――the one an arguing and legal sort of commentary on the Law, the other a chatty and poetic and discursive one. Jehudah ha-Nasi gathered up all the vast store of Halacha; the traditions and interpretations of the wilderness, the decisions of the judges, the constitutional customs under the kings, the earnest communings of the exile, the vivid expoundings of Ezra, and the later commentaries and discussions in the schools. Jehudah ha-Nasi classified all this accumulation of Halacha, and by the year 200, he had arranged it all, under six different headings, into some five hundred chapters. Rabbi Jehudah’s compilation became known as the Mishnah, from the root שָׁנָה, to learn by heart, as contrasted with Mikra――which stood for Bible-reading, from קָרָא, to read from a book. The Mishnah contains nearly four thousand rules, under the six heads of Seeds, Festivals, Women, Civil and Criminal law, Sacrificial laws, and laws of Cleanliness. To this code, later on, was added the Gemara, which is a sort of complement and commentary to the Mishnah, and includes the store of Hagada. Mishnah and Gemara together form the Talmud. And as the Talmud literature grew, which was a literature more or less intended for the learned, and was the result of learned discussions in the schools, there grew up also a system of popular lectures, and Biblical expositions and sermons for the people. These discourses were given in the synagogues, and formed the basis of the Midrashim literature (Midrash, from דָּרַשׁ, to expound). The language of the Talmud is partly Rabbinical Hebrew, partly Aramaic. There are two Talmuds in existence, the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud. The Babylonian one is the more perfect and authoritative, and was completed by a certain learned Rabbi Ashi, about the year 500. Long before that date the Palestine schools, one after the other, had to be closed, and the Palestinian scholars had mostly emigrated to Babylon.