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Updated: June 21, 2025
She cited the cases of former Talmudists, poor and friendless like myself, who had studied at the universities, fighting every inch of their way, till they had achieved success as physicians, lawyers, writers. She spoke passionately, often with the absurd acerbity of her mother.
At a very early period, families who lived in a friendly manner, fell upon a method of securing their children to each other by what is called in the sacred writings Betrothing. This was agreeing on a price to be paid for the bride, the time when it should be paid, and when she should be delivered into the hands of her husband. There were, according to the Talmudists, three ways of betrothing.
Jewish criminals escaped justice by invoking the power of the Catholic priesthood and promising to become converted to Christianity. And now and then even Talmudists left the fold, as, for instance, Carl Anton, the Courland pupil of Eybeschütz, who became professor of Hebrew at Hamsted, and wrote numerous works on Judaism.
But in the course of time the casuistic method, originally a mere pastime, became the approved method of study, and produced what is known as pilpul. Scholars wasted days and nights in heaping Ossa upon Pelion, in reconciling difficulties which no logic could harmonize. Here the Gaon found the first and most urgent need for reform. The Talmudists, he declared, were not infallible.
Why is there nothing left of those sciences, and sophists, and Cabalists, and Talmudists, but words, while we are so exceptionally happy? Surely the signs are identical. There is the same self-satisfaction and blind confidence that we, precisely we, and only we, are on the right path, and that the real thing is only beginning with us.
The pious middle class Jews, and even the poor, considered it their duty to supply the needs of the young Talmudists, and the ambition of the latter was satisfied by the general good feeling that prevailed in their favor.
Baffled, he fell back on scholastic argumentation, but in vain did he turn the weapons of Talmudic dialectic against the Talmudists themselves. Not even his discovery by cabbalistic calculations that the Pope's name and office were predicted in the Old Testament availed to draw the Jews, and it was only in the streets that he came upon the scowling faces of his brethren.
Yet there have ever been found stalwart champions of the right, ready to insist that a lie is a sin per se, and therefore not to be justified by any advantage or profit in its utterance. Prominent in the earlier recorded discussions of the centuries concerning the admissibility of the lie, are those of the Jewish Talmudists and of the Christian Fathers.
Thus it was among the Greeks the sophists, then among the Christians the mystics, gnostics, scholastics, among the Hebrews the Talmudists and Cabalists, and so on everywhere, down to our own times.
L. Ginzberg well says, 'while study of the Law was to Talmudists the very acme of piety, the mystics accorded the first place to prayer, which was considered as a mystical progress towards God, demanding a state of ecstasy. The Jewish mystic must invent means for inducing such a state, for Judaism cannot endure a passive waiting for the moving spirit.
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