History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

the Pentateuch itself, which was essentially complete before the Exile, though some editing clearly went on after the Return. This is the basic body of written Jewish law, on which all else rests. Then come the books of the prophets, the psalms and wisdom literature, canonization of which was completed, as we have seen, under Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, between 70 and 132 AD. To this were added various non-canonical works essential to the study of Jewish religion and history: the Greek translation of the Bible, or Septuagint; the works of Josephus; the Apocrypha and various papyri.

The next layer or stage was the sorting out and writing of Oral Law, which had been accumulating for centuries. This was a practice termed Mishnah, meaning to repeat or study, since it was originally memorized and recapitulated. Mishnah consisted of three elements: the midrash, that is the method of interpreting the Pentateuch to make clear poin...

particular points; and the aggadah or homilies, including anecdotes and legends used to convey understanding of...

After the Bar Kokhba revolt, and culminating in the work of Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi and his school at the end of the second century AD, this material was edited into a book called the Mishnah, the epitome of ‘repetition’. It has six orders, each divided into a variable number of tractates.

In addition to the Mishnah, there is a collection of sayings and rulings by the tannaim, four times larger in

bulk, known as the Tosefta.

Of course, immediately the Mishnah was complete, further generations of scholars–who were, it should be remembered, determining legal theory in the light of actual cases–began to comment upon it. By this time, since the rabbinic methods had spread to Babylonia, there were two centres of commentary, in Eretz Israel and in the Babylonian academies. Both produced volumes of Talmud, a word meaning ‘study’ or ‘learning’, which were compiled by the various generations of the amoraim. 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 the Talmuds, of which the outstanding example was Rashi’s on the Babylonian Talmud in the eleventh century; and Hiddushim or novellae, which compare and reconcile different sources, so producing new rulings or halakhot, the classic novellae being composed on the Babylonian Talmud in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries. There was another layer of responsa prudentium (She’elot u-Teshuvot) or written answers by leading scholars to questions put to them. 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 Caro, from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. From the fifth to the eleventh centuries, which is known as the age of the gaons or geonim, scholars worked to pro...

epilogue, from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, came the age of the a...

But mainstream, rabbinical Judaism rejected a body-soul dichotomy, just as it rejected the good powers/evil powers of gnosticism.

The Christian idea that, by weakening the body through mortification and fasting, you strengthened the soul, was anathema to Jews. They had ascetic sects as late as the first century AD, but once rabbinical Judaism established its dominance, the Jews turned their backs forever on

monasticism, hermitry and asceticism.

Over a whole range of human behaviour, the Jewish watchword was continence or temperance, not abstinence.

a Jew, in order to save his life, could violate any commandment save three: those against idolatry, adultery-incest, and murder.

It was an important principle of the Mishnah that each man is a symbol of all humanity, and whoever destroys one man destroys, in a sense, the principle of life, just as, if he saves one man, he rescues humanity.

As God owns all and everyone, he is an injured party in all offences against fellow men. A sin against God is serious but a sin against a fellow man is more serious since it is against God too. God is ‘the Invisible Third’.

It is no accident that slavery among the Jews disappeared during the Second Commonwealth, coinciding with the rise of Pharisaism, because the Pharisees insisted that, as God was the true judge in a court of law, all were equal there: king, high-priest, free man, slave. This was one of their prime differences with the Sadducees. The Pharisees rejected the view that a master was responsible for the actions of his slaves, as well as his livestock, since a slave, like all men, had a mind of his own. That gave him status in the court, and once he had legal status, slavery could not work.

the Jews never accepted the legal implications of anointing. All David’s acts of arbitrary power were roundly condemned in the Bible and Ahab’s getting possession of Naboth’s vineyard is presented as a monstrous crime. These were reasons why kingship did not mix with Judaism: the Jews wanted a king with all the duties and none of the rights of kingship.

The truth is, the real rulers of the Jewish

community, as was natural in a society under divine law, were the courts. One stresses the court, not the judge, since one of the most important axioms was that men could not constitute solitary judges: ‘Judge not alone, for none may judge alone save One.’

The principle that the Law must be acceptable to the community as a whole was implicit in Judaic jurisprudence and sometimes explicit: ‘Any decree which the court imposes on the community and which the majority of the community does not accept, has no force.’

Man was seen both as an individual, with rights, and as member of a community, with obligations. No system of justice in history has made more persistent and on the whole successful efforts to reconcile individual and social roles–another reason why the Jews were able to keep their cohesion in the face of otherwise intolerable pressures.

The sages were the first jurisprudents to accord all men the right to their dignity.

Man was not only equal before the Law, he was physically free. The sages and rabbis were extraordinarily reluctant to use imprisonment as a punishment

Communal obligations need to be understood within the assumptions of Jewish theology. The sages taught that a Jew should not regard these social duties as burdens but as yet more ways in which men showed their love for God and righteousness. The Jews are sometimes accused of not understanding freedom as well as the Greeks, but the truth is that they understood it better, grasping the point that the only true freedom is a good conscience–a concept St Paul carried from Judaism into Christianity.

Implicit in the Bible is the holistic notion that one man’s sin, however small, affects the entire world, however imperceptibly, and vice versa. Judaism never allowed the principle of individual guilt and judgment, however important, to override completely the more primitive principle of collective judgment, and by running the two in tandem it produced a sophisticated and enduring doctrine of social responsibility which is one of its greatest contributions to humanity. The wicked are the shame of all, the saints are our pride and joy.

Every Jew is a surety for every other Jew. If he sees a fellow sinning, he must remonstrate and if possible prevent it–otherwise he sins too.

The Torah and its superstructure of commentaries formed a moral theology as well as a practical system of civil and criminal law. Hence though it was very specific and legalistic on particular points, it always sought to reinforce the temporal authority of the courts by appeals to spiritual factors and sanctions.

The Jews were the first to introduce the concept of repentance and atonement, which became a primary Christian theme also.

The aim was always to keep the Jewish community cohesive.

It was more important to promote peace than to do nominal justice.

The idea of peace as a positive state, a noble ideal which is also a workable human condition, is another Jewish invention.

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.

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.

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.

The absence of the state was a huge blessing.

the Jews usually avoided the positive dogmas which the vanity of theologians tends to create and which are the source of so much trouble.

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.

Mohammed’s development of a separate religion began when he realized that the Jews of

Medina were not prepared to accept his arbitrarily contrived Arab version of Judaism.

At all events, Mohammed was rebuffed, and he thereafter gave a deliberate new thrust to Islamic monotheism. He altered the nature of the Sabbath and changed it to Friday. He changed the orientation of prayers from Jerusalem to Mecca. He redated the principal feast. Most important of all, he declared that most of the Jewish dietary laws were simply a punishment for their past misdeeds, and so abolished them, though he retained the prohibitions on pork, blood and carcasses, and some of the slaughtering rules.

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.

Ideally, then, every public personality ought to be a distinguished scholar, and every scholar should help to rule.

The notion of two brothers helping each other to resolve the conflicting claims of study and commentary, on the one hand, and judicial administration and other public duties on the other, is one reason why the Jewish cathedocracy was usually a family affair.

A scholar could give a sermon, write an expository epistle and serve as an assistant judge. But only a doctor, with the title of Member of the Academy, understood the sources of Law and the literature expounding them, and could deliver a learned judgement.22

The academic gaons and their senior doctors demanded similar treatment. They were addressed with sonorous titles and gave elaborate blessings and curses. They formed a hereditary sacral-academic nobility, not unlike the mandarins in China.