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JUDAISM
By
ISRAEL ABRAHAMS, M.A.
READER IN TALMUDIC AND RABBINIC LITERATURE
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
FOREWORD
The writer has attempted in this volume to take up a few of the most
characteristic points in Jewish doctrine and practice, and to explain
some of the various phases through which they have passed, since the
first centuries of the Christian era.
The presentation is probably much less detached than is the case
with other volumes in this series. But the difference was scarcely
avoidable. The writer was not expounding a religious system which has
no relation to his own life. On the contrary, the writer is himself a
Jew, and thus is deeply concerned personally in the matters discussed
in the book.
The reader must be warned to keep this fact in mind throughout. On the one
hand, the book must suffer a loss of objectivity; but, on the other hand,
there may be some compensating gain of intensity. The author trusts,
at all events, that, though he has not written with indifference, he
has escaped the pitfall of undue partiality.
I. A.
CONTENTS
I. THE LEGACY FROM THE PAST
II. RELIGION AS LAW
III. ARTICLES OF FAITH
IV. SOME CONCEPTS OF JUDAISM
V. SOME OBSERVANCES OF JUDAISM
VI. JEWISH MYSTICISM
VII. ESCHATOLOGY
VIII. THE SURVIVAL OF JUDAISM
SELECTED LIST OF BOOKS ON JUDAISM
JUDAISM
CHAPTER I
THE LEGACY FROM THE PAST
The aim of this little book is to present in brief outline some of the
leading conceptions of the religion familiar since the Christian Era
under the name Judaism.
The word 'Judaism' occurs for the first time at about 100 B.C., in the
Graeco-Jewish literature. In the second book of the Maccabees (ii. 21,
viii. 1), 'Judaism' signifies the religion of the Jews as contrasted with
Hellenism, the religion of the Greeks. In the New Testament (Gal. i. 13)
the same word seems to denote the Pharisaic system as an antithesis to
the Gentile Christianity. In Hebrew the corresponding noun never occurs
in the Bible, and it is rare even in the Rabbinic books. When it does
meet us, _Jahaduth_ implies the monotheism of the Jews as opposed
to the polytheism of the heathen.
Thus the term 'Judaism' did not pass through quite the same transitions
as did the name 'Jew.' Judaism appears from the first as a religion
transcending tribal bounds. The 'Jew,' on the other hand, was originally
a Judaean, a member of the Southern Confederacy called in the Bible
Judah, and by the Greeks and Romans Judaea. Soon, however, 'Jew' came
to include what had earlier been the Northern Confederacy of Israel as
well, so that in the post-exilic period _Jehudi_ or 'Jew' means an
adherent of Judaism without regard to local nationality.
Judaism, then, is here taken to represent that later development of
the Religion of Israel which began with the reorganisation after the
Babylonian Exile (444 B.C.), and was crystallised by the Roman Exile
(during the first centuries of the Christian Era). The exact period
which will be here seized as a starting-point is the moment when the
people of Israel were losing, never so far to regain, their territorial
association with Palestine, and were becoming (what they have ever since
been) a community as distinct from a nation. They remained, it is true,
a distinct race, and this is still in a sense true. Yet at various
periods a number of proselytes have been admitted, and in other ways
the purity of the race has been affected. At all events territorial
nationality ceased from a date which may be roughly fixed at 135 A.D.,
when the last desperate revolt under Bar-Cochba failed, and Hadrian drew
his Roman plough over the city of Jerusalem and the Temple area. A new
city with a new name arose on the ruins. The ruins afterwards reasserted
themselves, and Aelia Capitolina as a designation of Jerusalem is familiar
only to archaeologists.
But though the name of Hadrian's new city has faded, the effect of
its foundation remained. Aelia Capitolina, with its market-places and
theatre, replaced the olden narrow-streeted town; a House of Venus reared
its stately form in the north, and a Sanctuary to Jupiter covered, in the
east, the site of the former Temple. Heathen colonists were introduced,
and the Jew, who was to become in future centuries an alien everywhere,
was made by Hadrian an alien in his fatherland. For the Roman Emperor
denied to Jews the right of entry into Jerusalem. Thus Hadrian completed
the work of Titus, and Judaism was divorced from its local habitation.
More unreservedly than during the Babylonian Exile, Judaism in the Roman
Exile perforce became the religion of a community and not of a state;
and Israel for the first time constituted a Church. But it was a Church
with no visible home. Christianity for several centuries was to have a
centre at Rome, Islam at Mecca. But Judaism had and has no centre at all.
It will be obvious that the aim of the present book makes it both
superfluous and inappropriate to discuss the vexed problems connected with
the origins of the Religion of Israel, its aspects in primitive times,
its passage through a national to an ethical monotheism, its expansion
into the universalism of the second Isaiah. What concerns us here is
merely the legacy which the Religion of Israel bequeathed to Judaism as
we have defined it. This legacy and the manner in which it was treasured,
enlarged, and administered will occupy us in the rest of this book.
But this much must be premised. If the Religion of Israel passed through
the stages of totemism, animism, and polydemonism; if it was indebted
to Canaanite, Kenite, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and other foreign
influences; if it experienced a stage of monolatry or henotheism (in
which Israel recognised one God, but did not think of that God as the
only God of all men) before ethical monotheism of the universalistic
type was reached; if, further, all these stages and the moral and
religious ideas connected with each left a more or less clear mark in
the sacred literature of Israel; then the legacy which Judaism received
from its past was a syncretism of the whole of the religious experiences
of Israel as interpreted in the light of Israel's latest, highest, most
approved standards. Like the Bourbon, the Jew forgets nothing; but unlike
the Bourbon, the Jew is always learning. The domestic stories of the
Patriarchs were not rejected as unprofitable when Israel became deeply
impregnated with the monogamous teachings of writers like the author
of the last chapter of Proverbs; the character of David was idealised
by the spiritual associations of the Psalter, parts of which tradition
ascribed to him; the earthly life was etherialised and much of the sacred
literature reinterpreted in the light of an added belief in immortality;
God, in the early literature a tribal non-moral deity, was in the later
literature a righteous ruler who with Amos and Hosea loved and demanded
righteousness in man. Judaism took over as one indivisible body of sacred
teachings both the early and the later literature in which these varying
conceptions of God were enshrined; the Law was accepted as the guiding
rule of life, the ritual of ceremony and sacrifice was treasured as a holy
memory, and as a memory not contradictory of the prophetic exaltation of
inward religion but as consistent with that exaltation, as interpreting
it, as but another aspect of Micah's enunciation of the demands of God:
'What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with thy God?'
Judaism, in short, included for the Jew all that had gone before. But
for St. Paul's attitude of hostility to the Law, but for the deep-seated
conviction that the Pauline Christianity was a denial of the Jewish
monotheism, the Jew might have accepted much of the teaching of Jesus as
an integral part of Judaism. In the realm of ideas which he conceived as
belonging to his tradition the Jew was not logical; he did not pick and
choose; he absorbed the whole. In the Jewish theology of all ages we find
the most obvious contradictions. There was no attempt at reconciliation
of such contradictions; they were juxtaposed in a mechanical mixture,
there was no chemical compound. The Jew was always a man of moods, and
his religion responded to those varying phases of feeling and belief
and action. Hence such varying judgments have been formed of him and his
religion. If, after the mediaeval philosophy had attempted to systematise
Judaism, the religion remained unsystematic, it is easy to understand
that in the earlier centuries of the Christian Era contradictions
between past and present, between different strata of religious thought,
caused no trouble to the Jew so long as those contradictions could be
fitted into his general scheme of life. Though he was the product of
development, development was an idea foreign to his conception of the
ways of God with man. And to this extent he was right. For though men's
ideas of God change, God Himself is changeless. The Jew transferred the
changelessness of God to men's changing ideas about him. With childlike
naivete he accepted all, he adopted all, and he syncretised it all as best
he could into the loose system on which Pharisaism grafted itself. The
legacy of the past thus was the past.
One element in the legacy was negative. The Temple and the Sacrificial
system were gone for ever. That this must have powerfully affected
Judaism goes without saying. Synagogue replaced Temple, prayer assumed
the function of sacrifice, penitence and not the blood of bulls supplied
the ritual of atonement. Events had prepared the way for this change and
had prevented it attaining the character of an upheaval. For synagogues
had grown up all over the land soon after the fifth century B.C.; regular
services of prayer with instruction in the Scriptures had been established
long before the Christian Era; the inward atonement had been preferred
to, or at least associated with, the outward rite before the outward
rite was torn away. It may be that, as Professor Burkitt has suggested,
the awful experiences of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the
Temple produced within Pharisaism a moral reformation which drove the Jew
within and thus spiritualised Judaism. For undoubtedly the Pharisee of the
Gospels is by no means the Pharisee as we meet him in the Jewish books.
There was always a latent power and tendency in Judaism towards inward
religion; and it may be that this power was intensified, this tendency
encouraged, by the loss of Temple and its Sacrificial rites.
But though the Temple had gone the Covenant remained. Not so much in
name as in essence. We do not hear much of the Covenant in the Rabbinic
books, but its spirit pervades Judaism. Of all the legacy of the past
the Covenant was the most inspiring element. Beginning with Abraham, the
Covenant established a special relation between God and Abraham's seed. 'I
have known him, that he may command his children and his household after
him, that they may keep the way of the Lord to do righteousness and
judgment' (Gen. xviii. 19). Of this Covenant, the outward sign was the
rite of circumcision. Renewed with Moses, and followed in traditional
opinion by the Ten Commandments, the Sinaitic Covenant was a further
link in the bond between God and His people. Of this Mosaic Covenant
the outward sign was the Sabbath. It is of no moment for our present
argument whether Abraham and Moses were historical persons or figments
of tradition. A Gamaliel would have as little doubted their reality as
would a St. Paul. And whatever Criticism may be doing with Abraham, it
is coming more and more to see that behind the eighth-century prophets
there must have towered the figure of a, if not of the traditional,
Moses; behind the prophets a, if not the, Law. Be that as it may, to the
Jew of the Christian Era, Abraham and Moses were real and the Covenant
unalterable. By the syncretism which has been already described Jeremiah's
New Covenant was not regarded as new. Nor was it new; it represented
a change of stress, not of contents. When he said (Jer. xxxi. 33),
'This is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel, after
those days, saith the Lord; I will put my law in their inward parts, and
in their heart will I write it,' Jeremiah, it has been held, was making
Christianity possible. But he was also making Judaism possible. Here and
nowhere else is to be found the principle which enabled Judaism to survive
the loss of Temple and nationality. And the New Covenant was in no sense
inconsistent with the Old. For not only does Jeremiah proceed to add in
the self-same verse, 'I will be their God, and they will be my people,'
but the New Covenant is specifically made with the house of Judah and of
Israel, and it is associated with the permanence of the seed of Israel
as a separate people and with the Divine rebuilding of Jerusalem. The
Jew had no thought of analysing these verses into the words of the true
Jeremiah and those of his editors. The point is that over and above,
in complementary explanation of, the Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenants with
their external signs, over and above the Call of the Patriarch and the
Theophany of Sinai, was the Jeremian Covenant written in Israel's heart.
The Covenant conferred a distinction and imposed a duty. It was a bond
between a gracious God and a grateful Israel. It dignified history,
for it interpreted history in terms of providence and purpose; it
transfigured virtue by making virtue service; it was the salt of life,
for how could present degradation demoralise, seeing that God was
in it, to fulfil His part of the bond, to hold Israel as His jewel,
though Rome might despise? The Covenant made the Jew self-confident and
arrogant, but these very faults were needed to save him. It was his only
defence against the world's scorn. He forgot that the correlative of the
Covenant was Isaiah's 'Covenant-People'--missionary to the Gentiles and
the World. He relegated his world-mission (which Christianity and Islam
in part gloriously fulfilled) to a dim Messianic future, and was content
if in his own present he remained faithful to his mission to himself.
Above all, the legacy from the past came to Judaism hallowed and
humanised by all the experience of redemption and suffering which had
marked Israel's course in ages past, and was to mark his course in
ages to come. The Exodus, the Exile, the Maccabean heroism, the Roman
catastrophe; Prophet, Wise Man, Priest and Scribe,--all had left their
trace. Judaism was a religion based on a book and on a tradition; but
it was also a religion based on a unique experience. The book might
be misread, the tradition encumbered, but the experience was eternally
clear and inspiring. It shone through the Roman Diaspora as it afterwards
illuminated the Roman Ghetto, making the present tolerable by the memory
of the past and the hope of the future.
CHAPTER II
RELIGION AS LAW
The feature of Judaism which first attracts an outsider's attention, and
which claims a front place in this survey, is its 'Nomism' or 'Legalism.'
Life was placed under the control of Law. Not only morality, but religion
also, was codified. 'Nomism,' it has been truly said, 'has always
formed a fundamental trait of Judaism, one of whose chief aims has ever
been to mould life in all its varying relations according to the Law,
and to make obedience to the commandments a necessity and a custom'
(Lauterbach, _Jewish Encyclopedia_, ix. 326). Only the latest
development of Judaism is away from this direction. Individualism is
nowadays replacing the olden solidarity. Thus, at the Central Conference
of American Rabbis, held in July 1906 at Indianapolis, a project to
formulate a system of laws for modern use was promptly rejected. The
chief modern problem in Jewish life is just this: To what extent, and
in what manner, can Judaism still place itself under the reign of Law?
But for many centuries, certainly up to the French Revolution, Religion
as Law was the dominant conception in Judaism. Before examining the
validity of this conception a word is necessary as to the mode in which
it expressed itself. Conduct, social and individual, moral and ritual,
was regulated in the minutest details. As the Dayan M. Hyamson has
said, the maxim _De minimis non curat lex_ was not applicable to
the Jewish Law. This Law was a system of opinion and of practice and of
feeling in which the great principles of morality, the deepest concerns of
spiritual religion, the genuinely essential requirements of ritual, all
found a prominent place. To assert that Pharisaism included the small
and excluded the great, that it enforced rules and forgot principles,
that it exalted the letter and neglected the spirit, is a palpable libel.
Pharisaism was founded on God. On this foundation was erected a structure
which embraced the eternal principles of religion. But the system, it
must be added, went far beyond this. It held that there was a right and
a wrong way of doing things in themselves trivial. Prescription ruled
in a stupendous array of matters which other systems deliberately left to
the fancy, the judgment, the conscience of the individual. Law seized upon
the whole life, both in its inward experiences and outward manifestations.
Harnack characterises the system harshly enough. Christianity did not add
to Judaism, it subtracted. Expanding a famous epigram of Wellhausen's,
Harnack admits that everything taught in the Gospels 'was also to be
found in the Prophets, and even in the Jewish tradition of their time. The
Pharisees themselves were in possession of it; but, unfortunately, they
were in possession of much else besides. With them it was weighted,
darkened, distorted, rendered ineffective and deprived of its force by a
thousand things which they also held to be religious, and every whit as
important as mercy and judgment. They reduced everything into one fabric;
the good and holy was only one woof in a broad earthly warp' (_What
is Christianity?_ p. 47). It is necessary to qualify this judgment,
but it does bring out the all-pervadingness of Law in Judaism. 'And thou
shalt speak of them when thou sittest in thine house, when thou walkest by
the way, when thou liest down and when thou risest up' (Deut. vi. 7). The
Word of God was to occupy the Jew's thoughts constantly; in his daily
employment and during his manifold activities; when at work and when
at rest. And as a correlative, the Law must direct this complex life,
the Code must authorise action or forbid it, must turn the thoughts and
emotions in one direction and divert them from another.
Nothing in the history of religions can be cited as a complete parallel to
this. But incomplete parallels abound. A very large portion of all men's
lives is regulated from without: by the Bible and other sacred books; by
the institutions and rites of religion; by the law of the land; by the
imposed rules of accepted guides, poets, philosophers, physicians; and
above all by social conventions, current fashions, and popular maxims.
Only in the rarest case is an exceptional man the monstrosity which,
we are told, every Israelite was in the epoch of the Judges--a law
unto himself.
But in Judaism, until the period of modern reform, this fact of human
life was not merely an unconscious truism, it was consciously admitted.
And it was realised in a Code.
Or rather in a series of Codes. First came the _Mishnah_, a Code
compiled at about the year 200 A.D., but the result of a Pharisaic
activity extending over more than two centuries. While Christianity was
producing the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament--the work in large
part of Jews, or of men born in the circle of Judaism--Judaism in its
other manifestation was working at the Code known as the _Mishnah_.
This word means 'repetition,' or 'teaching by repetition'; it was an
oral tradition reduced to writing long after much of its contents had
been sifted in the discussions of the schools. In part earlier and in
part later than the _Mishnah_ was the _Midrash_ ('inquiry,'
'interpretation'), not a Code, but a two-fold exposition of Scripture;
homiletic with copious use of parable, and legalistic with an eye
to the regulation of conduct. Then came the _Talmud_ in two
recensions, the Palestinian and the Babylonian, the latter completed
about 500 A.D. For some centuries afterwards the Geonim (heads of the
Rabbinical Universities in Persia) continued to analyse and define
the legal prescriptions and ritual of Judaism, adding and changing in
accord with the needs of the day; for Tradition was a living, fluid
thing. Then in the eleventh century Isaac of Fez (Alfasi) formulated
a guide to Talmudic Law, and about a hundred years later (1180)
Maimonides produced his _Strong Hand_, a Code of law and custom
which influenced Jewish life ever after. Other codifications were made;
but finally, in the sixteenth century, Joseph Caro (mystic and legalist)
compiled the _Table Prepared_ (_Shulchan Aruch_), which, with
masterly skill, collected the whole of the traditional law, arranged
it under convenient heads in chapters and paragraphs, and carried down
to our own day the Rabbinic conception of life. Under this Code, with
more or less relaxation, the great bulk of Jews still live. But the
revolt against it, or emancipation from it, is progressing every year,
for the olden Jewish conception of religion and the old Jewish theory
of life are, as hinted above, becoming seriously undermined.
Now in what precedes there has been some intentional ambiguity in
the use of the word Law. Much of the misunderstanding of Judaism has
arisen from this ambiguity. 'Law' is in no adequate sense what the Jews
themselves understood by the nomism of their religion. In modern times
Law and Religion tend more and more to separate, and to speak of Judaism
as Law _eo ipso_ implies a divorce of Judaism from Religion. The
old antithesis between letter and spirit is but a phase of the same
criticism. Law must specify, and the lawyer interprets Acts of Parliament
by their letter; he refuses to be guided by the motives of the Act, he
is concerned with what the Act distinctly formulates in set terms. In
this sense Judaism never was a Legal Religion. It did most assiduously
seek to get to the underlying motives of the written laws, and all the
expansions of the Law were based on a desire more fully to realise the
meaning and intention of the written Code. In other words, the Law was
looked upon as the expression of the Will of God. Man was to yield to
that Will for two reasons. First, because God is the perfect ideal of
goodness. That ideal was for man to revere, and, so far as in him lay,
to imitate. 'As I am merciful, be thou merciful; because I am gracious,
be thou gracious.' The 'Imitation of God' is a notion which constantly
meets us in Rabbinic literature. It is based on the Scriptural text:
'Be ye holy, for I the Lord am holy.' 'God, the ideal of all morality,
is the founder of man's moral nature.' This is Professor Lazarus'
modern way of putting it. But in substance it is the Jewish conception
through all the ages. And there is a second reason. The Jew would not
have understood the possibility of any other expression of the Divine
Will than the expression which Judaism enshrined. For though he held that
the Law was something imposed from without, he identified this imposed
Law with the law which his own moral nature posited. The Rabbis tell us
that certain things in the written Law could have been reached by man
without the Law. The Law was in large part a correspondence to man's moral
nature. This Rabbinic idea Lazarus sums up in the epigram: 'Moral laws,
then, are not laws because they are written; they are written because
they are laws.' The moral principle is autonomous, but its archetype is
God. The ultimate reason, like the highest aim of morality, should be
in itself. The threat of punishment and the promise of reward are the
psychologic means to secure the fulfilment of laws, never the reasons for
the laws, nor the motives to action. It is easy and necessary sometimes
to praise and justify eudemonism, but, as Lazarus adds, 'Not a state to
be reached, not a good to be won, not an evil to be warded off, is the
impelling force of morality, but itself furnishes the creative impulse,
the supreme commanding authority' (_Ethics of Judaism_, I. chap,
ii.). And so the Rabbi of the third century B.C., Antigonos of Socho, put
it in the memorable saying: 'Be not like servants who minister to their
master upon the condition of receiving a reward; but be like servants
who minister to their master without the condition of receiving a reward;
and let the Fear of heaven be upon you' (Aboth, i. 3).
Clearly the multiplication of rules obscures principles. The object of
codification, to get at the full meaning of principles, is defeated by
its own success. For it is always easier to follow rules than to apply
principles. Virtues are more attainable than virtue, characteristics than
character. And while it is false to assert that Judaism attached more
importance to ritual than to religion, yet, the two being placed on one
and the same plane, it is possible to find in co-existence ritual piety
and moral baseness. Such a combination is ugly, and people do not stop
to think whether the baseness would be more or less if the ritual piety
were absent instead of present. But it is the fact that on the whole
the Jewish codification of religion did not produce the evil results
possible or even likely to accrue. The Jew was always distinguished for
his domestic virtues, his purity of life, his sobriety, his charity,
his devotion. These were the immediate consequence of his Law-abiding
disposition and theory. Perhaps there was some lack of enthusiasm,
something too much of the temperate. But the facts of life always
brought their corrective. Martyrdom was the means by which the Jewish
consciousness was kept at a glowing heat. And as the Jew was constantly
called upon to die for his religion, the religion ennobled the life
which was willingly surrendered for the religion. The Messianic Hope
was vitalised by persecution. The Jew, devotee of practical ideals,
became also a dreamer. His visions of God were ever present to remind
him that the law which he codified was to him the Law of God.