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His biographers make him quote them according to the translations in the Aramean tongue; his principles of exegesis, as far as we can judge of them by those of his disciples, much resembled those which were then in vogue, and which form the spirit of the Targums and the Midrashim. The schoolmaster in the small Jewish towns was the hazzan, or reader in the synagogues.
Besides the rav and the dayyan there were other men whose callings were holy, the shohat, who knew how cattle and fowls should be killed; the hazzan and the other officers of the synagogue; the teachers of Hebrew, and their pupils. It did not matter how poor a man was, he was to be respected and set above other men, if he were learned in the Law.
The synagogues were thus really little independent republics, having an extensive jurisdiction. Like all municipal corporations, up to an advanced period of the Roman empire, they issued honorary decrees, voted resolutions, which had the force of law for the community, and ordained corporal punishments, of which the hazzan was the ordinary executor.
He entered the synagogue, and stood up to read; the hazzan offered him the book, he unrolled it, and reading the parasha or the haphtara of the day, he drew from this reading a lesson in conformity with his own ideas.
The audience had the right of making objections and putting questions to the reader; so that the meeting soon degenerated into a kind of free assembly. It had a president, "elders," a hazzan, i.e., a recognized reader, or apparitor, deputies, who were secretaries or messengers, and conducted the correspondence between one synagogue and another, a shammash, or sacristan.
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