By the early eighth century, the Jewish communities, which still retained precarious footholds in the Greek and Latin worlds, found themselves cocooned in a vast Islamic theocracy, which they had in a sense spawned and renounced, and which now held the key to their very survival. But, by now, they had developed their own life-support system, the Talmud, and its unique formula for self-government–the cathedocracy.
