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It marked, therefore, a great step in the religious work of Israel; yet by the schools of rabbis who felt the hard hand of its offspring upon their people it was regarded as a long misfortune, to be blotted from memory. What seemed so ominous to them was that the annihilation of the nation came at the same time as the cleavage in the religion.
Like the Jewish Rabbis they were content to go down to posterity as the authors of a few sayings, and these are mostly contributions to a common stock with no pretension to be systems of philosophy. The Upanishads leave an impression of a society which, if reposeful, was also mentally alert and tolerant to an unusual degree. Much was absent that occupied the intelligence of other countries.
I will tell you: We are neither a people, nor a brotherhood, we are but a flock the holy flock of the Lord God, and the whole earth is an altar for us. Thereon we are laid either as burnt offerings sacrificed by the other peoples, or as victims bound by the precepts of our own Rabbis. A flock wandering in the waste desert, sheep set upon on all sides by the wolves.... We cry out in vain!
But Jesus stood by the pillars and listened to the disputants with astonishment. The next day they inspected the city as far as the crowds rendered it possible. Joseph wished to visit the grave of his noble ancestor, and pushed through the crowds that filled the dark, narrow streets, noisy with buyers and sellers, donkey-drivers, porters, shouting rabbis, and an endless stream of pilgrims.
But others nodded approvingly and wagged their filthy heads and said that when the fool had been chastised the evil spirit would depart from him. Once more the cloud of passing time descended and was lifted. Then the walls of the house were opened and in a low arched chamber the rabbis sat about a black table.
The old instinct of self-preservation, which turned Jews from lambs into lions, holding their ground to the last, asserted itself again. As the Talmudic rabbis excluded certain books from the Canon, as the study of even the Jewish philosophers was later proscribed by certain French rabbis, so the Russian rabbis laid the ban upon whatever savored of German "Aufklärerei."
"I can tell you I expect nothing until we have expelled all our Jewish princes and Rabbis and become Romans out and out. The Emperor of Rome is the true Messiah. All the rest should be impaled." So they gave vent to their various opinions. The Temple authorities rubbed their hands in satisfaction. "He is not clever enough to be dangerous.
In Vilna, Grodno, Brest, Slutsk, Minsk, Pinsk, etc., the ban was hurled against the dissenters by the most prominent rabbis. Israel was divided into two hostile camps. But soon everything was changed. Hasidim and Mitnaggedim discovered that while they were fighting each other, a common enemy was undermining the ground on which they stood.
The rabbis have told us that there is a tradition of the elders a rule as holy as the law itself that a man may deny his father in a certain way without sin. It is a strange rule, and it must be very holy or it would not be so strange.
It should be remembered that the Halakah was not consolidated till the second or third century, and in Philo's time it was in the process of formation by different schools of rabbis. But the passage quoted in an earlier chapter, about adding to the law, proves his reverence for the oral law.
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