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I believe the world, and particularly this city, would cut a very poor figure without commerce; and then there is something poetical in the idea of doing business after the Armenian fashion, dealing with dark-faced Lascars and Rabbins of the Sephardim. Yes, should the Armenian insist upon it, I will accept a seat at the desk, opposite the Moldavian clerk.
In Padua, Berlin, and Metz there are seminaries for the education of rabbins, which supply with able doctors the synagogues of Italy, Germany, and France. There is also a rabbinical school in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Polish rabbins and Talmudists, however, are the most celebrated. The revised Old Testament is expected to appear during 1884.
Hence arose a new form of written Hebrew, called rabbinical from its origin and use among the rabbins. It borrowed largely from many contemporary languages, and though it became richer and more regular in its structure, it retained little of the strength and purity of the ancient Hebrew.
This example attests the great respect entertained by the Hebrews for the organs of generation; but we have a further proof of this reverence for them in the fact that, when taking a solemn oath, they placed their hand upon them in token of its inviolability: When Abraham, addressing "his oldest servant of his house, that ruled over all that he had," is made to say, "Put I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh, and I will make thee swear, by the Lord, the God of Heaven, and the God of the earth that thou shalt not take a wife unto my son, of the daughters of the Canaanites:" and when Jacob, at the point of death, called his son Joseph, and said unto him, "If now I have found grace in thy sight, put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh, and deal kindly and truly with me; bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt," the Hebrew text has been incorrectly translated in both these instances; for, according to learned commentators, it is not the thigh, but the phallus that is meant; such tact having, in the opinion of the Rabbins, been introduced for the purpose of doing honour to circumcision.
The law has told him, though a denizen in an icy clime, that he must dwell for seven days in a bower, and that he must build it of the boughs of thick trees; and the Rabbins have told him that these thick trees are the palm, the myrtle, and the weeping willow. Even Sarmatia may furnish a weeping willow.
"We, the Rabbins and Elders of this place, impressed with the urgency of the case, and moved by compassion for our brethren, and further induced by the report which is current throughout the world, of the generous and philanthropic sentiments which animate you and fill your hearts, ever open to the miseries of the oppressed, feel persuaded that you will exert yourselves to do all you possibly can, in these distressing circumstances.
The Mosaic books contained rules no longer adapted to the situation of the nation, and many difficult questions arose to which their law afforded no satisfactory solution. The rabbins undertook to supply this defect, partly by commentaries on the Mosaic precepts, and partly by the composition of new rules.
The claim is one of that legendary type that the Rabbins of old handed down for centuries, and which were believed to be true, until modern investigation proved their falsity, or like the imagination of artists who attempt to paint historical events without consulting details, historical, and geographical.
Lee, in his "Temple of Solomon", has devoted a chapter to this Stone of Foundation, and thus recapitulates the Talmudic and Rabbinical traditions on the subject: "Vain and futilous are the feverish dreams of the ancient Rabbins concerning the Foundation Stone of the temple.
A great multitude of scholars have been before us in their examination; what is their verdict? First we have the verdict of the traditionalists, those, I mean, who accept the Jewish tradition, and believe with the rabbins that Moses wrote the whole of the first five books of the Bible.
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