Just one century after Jesus, Judaism lay in ruins. Its centerpiece the Temple was gone, and so was any hope for Jewish Independence, crushed with the last uprising of 135 AD. A new and vibrant Jewish religion was gaining strength, molded and refined in the fires of persecution. Its name was Christianity. With the latter on the rise and Judaism in a freefall, the miracle that Judaism survived was no thanks to the so-called “Judaeo-Christian tradition,” but in spite of it.
It was not the Torah, nor the TaNaKh, that would save the Jewish identity, but the Talmud and the Midrash, the inspired work of several generations of Jewish rabbis from Ishmael and Akiva, Hillel and Shammai, and Johanan ben Zakkai, and probably much earlier, to Judah Ha-Nasi, until finally, and most regrettably, closing the books, with the deaths of Rav Ashi and Rabina bar Huna, the latter in 499 AD, if one wishes to uphold the traditional Christian chronology, or in 499 CE, if one prefers to refer to the “Common Era.”
Now, here is why and how it happened, in my opinion, that the Talmud and the Midrash literally saved the Jews, with some indispensable assistance from the emergent and triumphant Christian “superpower.” In fact, the newly established Christian power saved Judaism by persecuting it.
(By the same token, early Christianity itself had been saved by Roman persecution, and, very much later, the Soviet power would save the Russian Christianity, by recreating the conditions of persecution of those early Christians, which would assure, as was designed to assure, the unstoppable success and eventual triumph of the Russian Orthodox Church. By the same token, in the same 20th century, Hitler’s Third Reich, bent on destroying the Jews, succeeded only in establishing them as a world superpower. And, by the same token, today the historically illiterate America and historically delirious Western Europe are the chief contributors to a historic reemergence of the Islamic superpower, previously suffering from seemingly irreconcilable internal struggles, by the West declaring a war on Islam and by persecuting (burning, ridiculing, and desecrating) Islam’s Holy Book, the Koran.)
Now, how does the Talmud fit in here? Unlike the Third Reich, which persecuted the Jews as a race, rather than as a religion, Christianity was officially putting the emphasis on religion, and thus the chief symbol of Judaism as a religion had to become its target. For very understandable reasons, the Christian Church in the Middle Ages could not persecute the Torah, or the TaNaKh, moreover, it believed that the Biblia Hebraica, being the “Word of God,” should eventually bring about a wholesale conversion of the Jews to Christianity. Thus the culprit had to be the Talmud, becoming the object of the most relentless persecution, the perennial Jewish martyr, which was destined to become the symbol of Jewish national identity, denounced by enemies and friends alike, burned in countless public bonfires and abhorred to the point that the Jews had to disguise its name Talmud under less familiar names, such as Gemara, which was the second, interpretative, part (the other one being the Mishna) of the Talmud.
Rejected by some Jewish scholars as a rabbinical fabrication, by others as a casus belli between Christianity and the Jews, with the Jews purportedly destined to lose, it was later smugly dismissed as an obstacle to emancipation and progress by the Westernized and secularized heirs of the Haskala, the Jewish version of the Enlightenment, as the most conspicuous fossil of a pre-historic era, which, for some reason, did not want to go away.
Once I am on the subject of Talmudic denunciations, a very different reason for rejection was posited by the great Jewish mystics of the incomparable Kabbalah, which I will later have another chance to discuss, with some undisguised admiration. Comparing it to a bothersome shell obscuring the unimaginable wealth of the mysterious secrets of the Torah’s Hebrew characters, the Kabbalists pushed their anti-Talmudic argument not so much to disparage the Talmud, as to validate their own inimitable method of inquiry, which they must have found threatened by the awesome authority of the Talmud.
However, just as much as the works of the Kabbalah unquestionably belong to the Gold Reserve of Human Thought, the same ought to hold true for the treasures of the Talmud, and any attempt to deny this fact must be attributed not so much to a principled opinion, as to crass ignorance.
Thus as masterpieces of the human genius both, they shall be always standing together. But as the rescuer of the Jewish identity, the Talmud shall always remain in a class by itself, just as Isaac Luria’s Tikkun Olam, as the most inspired embodiment of the Jewish nation-idea, shall also forever stand alone.
My next couple of entries will demonstrate that the Talmud is still standing today not just as a quintessential Jewish symbol, but as the unsung epitome of the best method of education money cannot buy…
It was not the Torah, nor the TaNaKh, that would save the Jewish identity, but the Talmud and the Midrash, the inspired work of several generations of Jewish rabbis from Ishmael and Akiva, Hillel and Shammai, and Johanan ben Zakkai, and probably much earlier, to Judah Ha-Nasi, until finally, and most regrettably, closing the books, with the deaths of Rav Ashi and Rabina bar Huna, the latter in 499 AD, if one wishes to uphold the traditional Christian chronology, or in 499 CE, if one prefers to refer to the “Common Era.”
Now, here is why and how it happened, in my opinion, that the Talmud and the Midrash literally saved the Jews, with some indispensable assistance from the emergent and triumphant Christian “superpower.” In fact, the newly established Christian power saved Judaism by persecuting it.
(By the same token, early Christianity itself had been saved by Roman persecution, and, very much later, the Soviet power would save the Russian Christianity, by recreating the conditions of persecution of those early Christians, which would assure, as was designed to assure, the unstoppable success and eventual triumph of the Russian Orthodox Church. By the same token, in the same 20th century, Hitler’s Third Reich, bent on destroying the Jews, succeeded only in establishing them as a world superpower. And, by the same token, today the historically illiterate America and historically delirious Western Europe are the chief contributors to a historic reemergence of the Islamic superpower, previously suffering from seemingly irreconcilable internal struggles, by the West declaring a war on Islam and by persecuting (burning, ridiculing, and desecrating) Islam’s Holy Book, the Koran.)
Now, how does the Talmud fit in here? Unlike the Third Reich, which persecuted the Jews as a race, rather than as a religion, Christianity was officially putting the emphasis on religion, and thus the chief symbol of Judaism as a religion had to become its target. For very understandable reasons, the Christian Church in the Middle Ages could not persecute the Torah, or the TaNaKh, moreover, it believed that the Biblia Hebraica, being the “Word of God,” should eventually bring about a wholesale conversion of the Jews to Christianity. Thus the culprit had to be the Talmud, becoming the object of the most relentless persecution, the perennial Jewish martyr, which was destined to become the symbol of Jewish national identity, denounced by enemies and friends alike, burned in countless public bonfires and abhorred to the point that the Jews had to disguise its name Talmud under less familiar names, such as Gemara, which was the second, interpretative, part (the other one being the Mishna) of the Talmud.
Rejected by some Jewish scholars as a rabbinical fabrication, by others as a casus belli between Christianity and the Jews, with the Jews purportedly destined to lose, it was later smugly dismissed as an obstacle to emancipation and progress by the Westernized and secularized heirs of the Haskala, the Jewish version of the Enlightenment, as the most conspicuous fossil of a pre-historic era, which, for some reason, did not want to go away.
Once I am on the subject of Talmudic denunciations, a very different reason for rejection was posited by the great Jewish mystics of the incomparable Kabbalah, which I will later have another chance to discuss, with some undisguised admiration. Comparing it to a bothersome shell obscuring the unimaginable wealth of the mysterious secrets of the Torah’s Hebrew characters, the Kabbalists pushed their anti-Talmudic argument not so much to disparage the Talmud, as to validate their own inimitable method of inquiry, which they must have found threatened by the awesome authority of the Talmud.
However, just as much as the works of the Kabbalah unquestionably belong to the Gold Reserve of Human Thought, the same ought to hold true for the treasures of the Talmud, and any attempt to deny this fact must be attributed not so much to a principled opinion, as to crass ignorance.
Thus as masterpieces of the human genius both, they shall be always standing together. But as the rescuer of the Jewish identity, the Talmud shall always remain in a class by itself, just as Isaac Luria’s Tikkun Olam, as the most inspired embodiment of the Jewish nation-idea, shall also forever stand alone.
My next couple of entries will demonstrate that the Talmud is still standing today not just as a quintessential Jewish symbol, but as the unsung epitome of the best method of education money cannot buy…
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