Judaism

by Israel Abrahams

Since the epoch of the Great Sanhedrin, there has been no central authority recognised throughout Jewry. The Jewish organisation has long been congregational. Since the fourth century there has been no body with any jurisdiction over the mass of Jews. At that date the Calendar was fixed by astronomical calculations. The Patriarch, in Babylon, thereby voluntarily abandoned the hold he had previously had over the scattered Jews, for it was no longer the fiat of the Patriarch that settled the dates of the Festivals. While there was something like a central authority, the Canon of Scripture had been fixed by Synods, but there is no record of any attempt to promulgate articles of faith. During the revolt against Hadrian an Assembly of Rabbis was held at Lydda. It was then decided that a Jew must yield his life rather than accept safety from the Roman power, if such conformity involved one of the three offences: idolatry, murder, and unchastity (including, incest and adultery). But while this decision throws a favourable light on the Rabbinic theory of life, it can in no sense be called a fixation of a creed. There were numerous synods in the Middle Ages, but they invariably dealt with practical morals or with the problems which arose from time to time in regard to the relations between Jews and their Christian neighbours. It is true that we occasionally read of excommunications for heresy. But in the case, for instance, of Spinoza, the Amsterdam Synagogue was much more anxious to dissociate itself from the heresies of Spinoza than to compel Spinoza to conform to the beliefs of the Synagogue. And though this power of excommunication might have been employed by the mediaeval Rabbis to enforce the acceptance of a creed, in point of fact no such step was ever taken.

Since the time of Moses Mendelssohn (1728-1786), the chief Jewish dogma has been that Judaism has no dogmas. In the sense assigned above this is clearly true. Dogmas imposed by an authority able and willing to enforce conformity and punish dissent are non-existent in Judaism. In olden times membership of the religion of Judaism was almost entirely a question of birth and race, not of confession. Proselytes were admitted by circumcision and baptism, and nothing beyond an acceptance of the Unity of God and the abjuration of idolatry is even now required by way of profession from a proselyte. At the same time the earliest passage put into the public liturgy was the Shema' (Deuteronomy vi. 4-9), in which the unity of God and the duty to love God are expressed. The Ten Commandments were also recited daily in the Temple. It is instructive to note the reason given for the subsequent removal of the Decalogue from the daily liturgy. It was feared that some might assume that the Decalogue comprised the whole of the binding law. Hence the prominent position given to them in the Temple service was no longer assigned to the Ten Commandments in the ritual of the Synagogue. In modern times, however, there is a growing practice of reading the Decalogue every Sabbath day.

What we do find in Pharisaic Judaism, and this is the real answer to Harnack (supra, p. 15), is an attempt to reduce the whole Law to certain fundamental principles. When a would-be proselyte accosted Hillel, in the reign of Herod, with the demand that the Rabbi should communicate the whole of Judaism while the questioner stood on one foot, Hillel made the famous reply: 'What thou hatest do unto no man; that is the whole Law, the rest is commentary.' This recalls another famous summarisation, that given by Jesus later on in the Gospel. A little more than a century later, Akiba said that the command to love one's neighbour is the fundamental principle of the Law. Ben Azzai chose for this distinction another sentence: 'This is the book of the generations of man,' implying the equality of all men in regard to the love borne by God for His creatures. Another Rabbi, Simlai (third century), has this remarkable saying: 'Six hundred and thirteen precepts were imparted unto Moses, three hundred and sixty-five negative (in correspondence with the days of the solar year), and two hundred and forty-eight positive (in correspondence with the number of a man's limbs). David came and established them as eleven, as it is written: A psalm of David—Lord who shall sojourn in Thy tent, who shall dwell in Thy holy mountain? (i) He that walketh uprightly and (ii) worketh righteousness and (iii) speaketh the truth in his heart. (iv) He that backbiteth not with his tongue, (v) nor doeth evil to his neighbour, (vi) nor taketh up a reproach against another; (vii) in whose eyes a reprobate is despised, (viii) but who honoureth them that fear the Lord. (ix) He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not; (x) He that putteth not out his money to usury, (xi) nor taketh a bribe against the innocent. He that doeth these things shall never be moved. Thus David reduced the Law to eleven principles. Then came Micah and reduced them to three, as it is written: 'What doth the Lord require of thee but (i) to do justice, (ii) to love mercy, and (iii) to walk humbly with thy God? Then came Habbakuk and made the whole Law stand on one fundamental idea, 'The righteous man liveth by his faith' (Makkoth, 23 b).

This desire to find one or a few general fundamental passages on which the whole Scripture might be seen to base itself is, however, far removed from anything of the nature of the Christian Creeds or of the Mohammedan Kalimah. And when we remember that the Pharisees and Sadducees differed on questions of doctrine (such as the belief in immortality held by the former and rejected by the latter), it becomes clear that the absence of a formal declaration of faith must have been deliberate. The most that was done was to introduce into the Liturgy a paragraph in which the assembled worshippers declared their assent to the truth and permanent validity of the Word of God. After the Shema' (whose contents are summarised above), the assembled worshippers daily recited a passage in which they said (and still say): 'True and firm is this Thy word unto us for ever…. True is it that Thou art indeed our God … and there is none beside Thee.'

After all, the difference between Pharisee and Sadducee was political rather than theological. It was not till Judaism came into contact, contact alike of attraction and repulsion, with other systems that a desire or a need for formulating Articles of Faith was felt. Philo, coming under the Hellenic spirit, was thus the first to make the attempt. In the last chapter of the tract on the Creation (De Opifico, lxi.), Philo enumerates what he terms the five most beautiful lessons, superior to all others. These are—(i) God is; (ii) God is One; (iii) the World was created (and is not eternal); (iv) the World is one, like unto God in singleness; and (v) God exercises a continual providence for the benefit of the world, caring for His creatures like a parent for his children.

Philo's lead found no imitators. It was not for many centuries that two causes led the Synagogue to formulate a creed. And even then it was not the Synagogue as a body that acted, nor was it a creed that resulted. The first cause was the rise of sects within the Synagogue. Of these sects the most important was that of the Karaites or Scripturalists. Rejecting tradition, the Karaites expounded their beliefs both as a justification of themselves against the Traditionalists and possibly as a remedy against their own tendency to divide within their own order into smaller sects. In the middle of the twelfth century the Karaite Judah Hadassi of Constantinople arranged the whole Pentateuch under the headings of the Decalogue, much as Philo had done long before. And so he formulates ten dogmas of Judaism. These are—(i) Creation (as opposed to the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the world); (ii) the existence of God; (iii) God is one and incorporeal; (iv) Moses and the other canonical prophets were called by God; (v) the Law is the Word of God, it is complete, and the Oral Tradition was unnecessary; (vi) the Law must be read by the Jew in the original Hebrew; (vii) the Temple of Jerusalem was the place chosen by God for His manifestation; (viii) the Resurrection of the dead; (ix) the Coming of Messiah, son of David; (x) Final Judgment and Retribution.

Within the main body of the Synagogue we have to wait for the same moment for a formulation of Articles of Faith. Maimonides (1135-1204) was a younger contemporary of Hadassi; he it was that drew up the one and only set of principles which have ever enjoyed wide authority in Judaism. Before Maimonides there had been some inclination towards a creed, but he is the first to put one into set terms. Maimonides was much influenced by Aristotelianism, and this gave him an impulse towards a logical statement of the tenets of Judaism. On the other side, he was deeply concerned by the criticism of Judaism from the side of Mohammedan theologians. The latter contended, in particular, that the biblical anthropomorphisms were destructive of a belief in the pure spirituality of God. Hence Maimonides devoted much of his great treatise, Guide for the Perplexed, to a philosophical allegorisation of the human terms applied to God in the Hebrew Bible. In his Commentary on the Mishnah (Sanhedrin, Introduction to Chelek), Maimonides declares 'The roots of our law and its fundamental principles are thirteen.' These are—(i) Belief in the existence of God, the Creator; (ii) belief in the unity of God; (iii) belief in the incorporeality of God; (iv) belief in the priority and eternity of God; (v) belief that to God and to God alone worship must be offered; (vi) belief in prophecy; (vii) belief that Moses was the greatest of all prophets; (viii) belief that the Law was revealed from heaven; (ix) belief that the Law will never be abrogated, and that no other Law will ever come from God; (x) belief that God knows the works of men; (xi) belief in reward and punishment; (xii) belief in the coming of the Messiah; (xiii) belief in the resurrection of the dead.'

Now here we have for the first time a set of beliefs which were a test of Judaism. Maimonides leaves no doubt as to his meaning. For he concluded by saying: 'When all these principles of faith are in the safe keeping of a man, and his conviction of them is well established, he then enters into the general body of Israel'; and, on the other hand: 'When, however, a man breaks away from any one of these fundamental principles of belief, then of him it is said that he has gone out of the general body of Israel and he denies the root-truths of Judaism.' This formulation of a dogmatic test was never confirmed by any body of Rabbis. No Jew was ever excommunicated for declaring his dissent from these articles. No Jew was ever called upon formally to express his assent to them. But, as Professor Schechter justly writes: 'Among the Maimonists we may probably include the great majority of Jews, who accepted the Thirteen Articles without further question. Maimonides must have filled up a great gap in Jewish theology, a gap, moreover, the existence of which was very generally perceived. A century had hardly lapsed before the Thirteen Articles had become a theme for the poets of the Synagogue. And almost every country can show a poem or a prayer founded on these Articles' (Studies in Judaism, p. 301).

Yet the opposition to the Articles was both impressive and persistent. Some denied altogether the admissibility of Articles, claiming that the whole Law and nothing but the Law was the Charter of Judaism. Others criticised the Maimonist Articles in detail. Certainly they are far from logically drawn up, some paragraphs being dictated by opposition to Islam rather than by positive needs of the Jewish position. A favourite condensation was a smaller list of three Articles: (i) Existence of God; (ii) Revelation; and (iii) Retribution. These three Articles are usually associated with the name of Joseph Albo (1380-1444), though they are somewhat older. There is no doubt but that these Articles found, in recent centuries, more acceptance than the Maimonist Thirteen, though the latter still hold their place in the orthodox Jewish Prayer Books. They may be found in the Authorised Daily Prayer Book, ed. Singer, p. 89.

Moses Mendelssohn (1728-1786), who strongly maintained that Judaism is a life, not a creed, made the practice of formulating Articles of Judaism unfashionable. But not for long. More and more, Judaic ritual has fallen into disregard since the French Revolution. Judaism has therefore tended to express itself as a system of doctrines rather than as a body of practices. And there was a special reason why the Maimonist Articles could not remain. Reference is not meant to the fact that many Jews came to doubt the Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch. But there were lacking in the Maimonist Creed all emotional elements. On the one hand, Maimonides, rationalist and anti-Mystic as he was, makes no allowance for the doctrine of the Immanence of God. Then, owing to his unemotional nature, he laid no stress on all the affecting and moving associations of the belief in the Mission of Israel as the Chosen People. Before Maimonides, if there had been one dogma of Judaism at all, it was the Election of Israel. Jehuda Halevi, the greatest of the Hebrew poets of the Middle Ages, had at the beginning of the twelfth century, some half century before Maimonides, given expression to this in the famous epigram: 'Israel is to the nations like the heart to the limbs.'