Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 8, 2025
His profound scholarship, the gentleness and sincerity of his writings, earned for him the respect of even the most orthodox. Ahijah ha-Shiloni is a defense of Talmudic Judaism against its Christian detractors. The contemporaries of Levinsohn exaggerated the importance of the literary part of his work.
Moreover, the Jewish masses, refusing to follow the lead of the handful of Russified Jewish intellectuals, live entirely apart and remain in the throes of talmudic fanaticism and hasidie obscurantism.
Whether his journey was devotional or commercial, the rites of religion formed part of the traveller's preparations for the start. The Prayer for Wayfarers is Talmudic in origin. It may be found in many prayer books, and I need not quote it. But one part of it puts so well, in a few pregnant words, the whole story of danger, that I must reproduce them.
In response to Rabbi Hayyim's appeal contributions came pouring in, a new and spacious school-house was erected, and Volozhin became a Talmudic Oxford. To be a student there was both an indication of superiority and a means to proficiency.
His great delight was to tackle some intricate maze of Talmudic reasoning. This he would do with ferocious zest, like a warrior attacking the enemy, flashing his tortoise snuff-box as if it were his sword. When away from his books or when reading some of the fantastic tales in them he was meek and gentle as a little bird.
This piece of autobiography in the preface to a Talmudic treatise by Reuben of Zamoscz might have been written by many others, too. But there were also the goodly number led thither by thirst for knowledge, whose remarkable abilities attracted the admiration of Jew and Gentile alike.
But there is this difference between the Hebrew and the masonic traditions, that the Talmudic scholar recited them as truthful histories, and swallowed, in one gulp of faith, all their impossibilities and anachronisms, while the masonic student has received them as allegories, whose value is not in the facts, but in the sentiments which they convey.
Gabirol nowhere betrays his Jewishness in the "Fons Vitæ." He never quotes a Biblical verse or a Talmudic dictum. He does not make any overt attempt to reconcile his philosophical views with religious faith. The treatise is purely speculative as if religious dogma nowhere existed to block one's way or direct one's search.
But the perhaps subtle intimation that the desire to commit adultery is as reprehensible as the act, and the rather extravagant statement that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, these, originally, were perhaps uniquely Talmudic.
The most welcome of guests, even more welcome than long-distance travellers, or globe-trotters, were the Bachurim and travelling Rabbis. The Talmudic Rabbis were most of them travellers. Akiba's extensive journeys were, some think, designed to rouse the Jews of Asia Minor generally to participate in the insurrection against Hadrian.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking