History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

edited into a book called the Mishnah,

The Jerusalem Talmud, more correctly called the Talmud of the West, was completed by the end of the fourth century AD, and the Babylonian Talmud a century later. Each has folios of commentary dealing with the tractates of the Mishnah. This formed the third layer.

Thereafter further layers were added:

Perushim, or commentaries, on both...

Rashi’s on the Babylonian Talmud in the el...

Hiddushim or novellae, which compare and reconcile different sources, so producing new rulings or halakhot, the classic novellae being composed on the Babylonian...

(She’elot u-Teshuvot) or written answers by leading scholars to q...

The last of the layers consisted of attempts to simplify and codify this enormous mass of material, by such outstanding scholars as Isaac Alfasi, Maimonides, Jacob ben Asher and Joseph ...

From the fifth to the eleventh centuries, which is known as the age of the gaons or geonim, scholars worked to produce collective rulings and compila...

Later, in what is known as the rabbinic age, rulings were decentralized and individual scholars domin...

living body of communal law, dealing with actual cases and real people.

Only in the nineteenth century, by which time many Jews had been emancipated and had ceased to live in judicial autonomy, did the study of Jewish halakhah begin to become academic

There is, then, no system in the history of the world which has sought for so long to combine moral and ethical teaching with the practical exercise of civil and criminal jurisprudence.

Eventually, in the Age of Enlightenment, it came to be seen as irredeemably backward, even positively abhorrent by many educated Jews, as well as by non-Jewish society. But it had many remarkable strengths too, and it gave to the Jews a moral and social world-view which is civilized and practical and proved extremely durable.

The notion of human life being sacred, because created in God’s image, was the central precept of Jewish ethics,

As men are all equally made in God’s image, they have equal rights in any fundamental sense.

the real rulers of the Jewish community, as was natural in a society under divine law, were the courts.

The Torah bound the Jews together as one body and one soul.156 Just as the individual man benefited from the worth of his community, so he was obliged to contribute to it.

Every Jew is a surety for every other Jew.

One of the most important developments in the history of the Jews, one of the ways in which Judaism differed most strongly from primitive Israelite religion, was this growing stress on peace. After 135 AD,

The concentration on external peace and internal harmony, and the study of the means whereby both could be promoted, were essential for a vulnerable people without the protection of the state, and were clearly one of the main objects of Torah commentary. In this it was brilliantly–one might almost say miraculously–successful. The Torah became a great cohesive source. No people have ever been better served by their public law and doctrine.

From the second century AD onwards, the sectarianism which had been such a feature of the Second Commonwealth virtually disappeared, at any rate to our view, and all the old parties were subsumed in rabbinical Judaism.

Equally important, however, was another characteristic of Judaism: the relative absence of dogmatic theology.

Judaism is not so much about doctrine–that is taken for granted–as behaviour; the code matters more than the creed. The lasting achievement, then, of the sages was to transform the Torah into a universal, timeless, comprehensive and coherent guide to every aspect of human conduct.

knowing God through the Law became the summation of Judaism. It made Judaism inward-looking, but it gave it the strength to survive in a hostile world.

Christianity became the norm throughout the Roman empire in the late fourth century and paganism began to disappear. As it did so, the Jews became conspicuous–a large, well-organized, comparatively wealthy minority, well educated and highly religious, rejecting Christianity not out of ignorance but from obstinacy. They became, for Christianity, a ‘problem’, to be ‘solved’.

During the late-fourth and fifth centuries, Jews living in Christian societies had most of their communal rights and all their privileges withdrawn.

during the early Christian era, Judaism spread in north Arabia and some tribes became wholly Jewish.

Mohammed.

What he seems to have wished to do was to destroy the polytheistic paganism of the oasis culture by giving the Arabs Jewish ethical monotheism in a language they could understand and in terms adapted to their ways.

Islam quickly created a theory and practice of forcible conversion,

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.

Some Jews had always been town-dwellers, but in the Dark Ages they became almost exclusively so. Their European settlements, nearly all in towns, were very ancient.

though the Jews were widely scattered, they were not numerous. From being about eight million at the time of Christ, including 10 per cent of the Roman empire, they had fallen by the tenth century to between one million and one and a half million.

In all areas, and at all periods, Jews were being assimilated and blending into the surrounding populace.

in Europe, the Jews played a critically important role in Dark Age urban life.

The Jews carried with them certain basic skills: the ability to compute exchange-rates, to write a business letter and, perhaps even more important, the ability to get it delivered along their wide-spun family and religious networks.

The ancient Israelite religion had always supplied a strong motivation to work hard.

With the rise of rabbinic Judaism after 70 AD, its economic impact increased. Historians have frequently noticed, at different periods and in diverse societies, that the weakening of clericalism tends to strengthen economic dynamism. During the second century AD, clericalism virtually disappeared from Jewish societies. The Temple priests, the Sadducees, the teeming servitors of a state-supported religion all vanished. The rabbis, who replaced the clerics, were not a parasitic caste.

Rabbinical Judaism was a gospel of work because it demanded that Jews make the fullest possible use of God’s gifts.

Its intellectual approach pushed in the same direction. Economic progress is the product of rationalization. Rabbinical Judaism is essentially a method whereby ancient laws are adapted to modern and differing conditions by a process of rationalization. The Jews were the first great rationalizers in world history. This had all kinds of consequences as we shall see, but one of its earliest, in a worldly sense, was to turn Jews into methodical, problem-solving businessmen. A great deal of Jewish legal scholarship in the Dark and Middle Ages was devoted to making business dealings fair, honest and efficient.

the Ummayid dynasty, who made themselves caliphs, and treated the Jews with extraordinary favour and tolerance.

The richer and more liberal a Moslem dynasty, the more vulnerable it became to the envy and fanaticism of a fundamentalist sect. If it fell, the Jews under its aegis were immediately exposed to the evil logic of their dhimmi status.

The Almohads carried their fanaticism into Spain from the year 1146. Synagogues and yeshivot were shut down.

As under the Visigoth Christians, Jews converted at sword-point often practised their religion secretly and were distrusted by the Moslems. They were forced to wear a special blue tunic with absurdly wide sleeves and, instead of a turban, a long blue cap in the shape of a donkey’s packsaddle.

Maimonides

both the archetype and the greatest of the cathedocrats.

the greater the knowledge of Torah, the greater the right to rule, especially over Jews.

the Jewish cathedocracy was usually a family affair.

Scholastic dynasties sprang originally from scribal lines