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When the history of the Jewish schools in the ages which immediately preceded and followed the birth of Christianity shall be written, no one will make any scruple of attributing to Hillel, Shammai, Gamaliel the maxims ascribed to them by the Mishnah and the Gemara, although these great compilations were written many hundreds of years after the time of the doctors in question.
Rabbi Gamaliel, Rabbi Chananiah, and many others had frequent correspondence with far distant places, and as soon as the Mishnah acquired a fixed form, even though it was not immediately committed to writing, the recourse to letters became much more common.
When on one occasion he expounded before his pupils the conclusion, which he had reached after a profound scientific investigation, that the text of the Mishnah had in many cases been wrongly interpreted by the Gemara, he was taken to task by a conference of Lithuanian rabbis and barely escaped excommunication.
How great would be the interest attaching to the synagogue of Tell-Houm were we to admit such an hypothesis! The great synagogue of Kefr-Bereim seems to me the most ancient of all. Its style is moderately pure. That of Kasyoun bears a Greek inscription of the time of Septimus Severus. James ii. 3; Mishnah, Megilla, iii. 1; Rosh Hasshana, iv. 7, etc.
Satanow pleaded for the language of the Mishnah as forming part of the Hebrew linguistic stock, but the moment was not propitious to the reform of the prevailing literary style suggested by him. On the whole, as was intimated before, the literary movement called forth by the Meassefim produced nothing, or almost nothing, of permanent value.
He went first to his disciple Joshua, saying: "O my son, be mindful of the love with which I treated thee by day and by night, teaching thee mishnah and halakah, and all arts and sciences, and implore now for my sake God's mercy, for perhaps through thee He may take pity upon me, and permit me to enter the land of Israel."
Pupils of the compilers of the Mishnah proceeded to Babylon to spread its influence, and they naturally maintained a correspondence with their chiefs in Palestine. Rab and Samuel in particular, among the Amoraim, were regular letter-writers, and Rabbi Jochanan replied to them. Towards the end of the third century this correspondence between Judea and Babylon became even more active.
In his unflinching determination to get at the truth, he did not shrink from criticising Rashi and the Shulhan 'Aruk, and dared to interpret some parts of the Mishnah differently from the explanation given in the Gemara.
In the first are "the martyr victims of the government," like Rabbi Akiba and his colleagues; in the second those who were drowned; in the third Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai and his disciples; in the fourth those who were carried off in the cloud of glory; in the fifth the penitents, who occupy a place which even a perfectly pious man cannot obtain; in the sixth are the youths who have not tasted of sin in their lives; in the seventh are those poor who studied Bible and Mishnah, and led a life of self-respecting decency.
And not they only, for our own Jewish treasure, the Mishnah, grew up, if not literally, at least metaphorically, in the open air, in the vineyard of Jamnia.
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