4. The Moral Influence of the Schools.—Dispersed as the Jews were amongst all people, these schools became a breakwater against the floods of barbarous ignorance and ungodly cultivation which surged around. The schools gave a religious education in the widest sense of the word, since the word of God supplied the text for every discussion and for every discourse. A guide for health, a code for justice, a theme for literature, a field for every branch of historic and scientific inquiry, was sought and found in the Bible. ‘Turn it, and turn it again,’ says the Mishnah, ‘for everything is in it.’ The ‘Law’ was to the Jewa treasury of knowledge as well as a ‘tree of life.’ The minor moralities, the everyday virtues of sobriety, and of content, and of cheerfulness, the students must have learnt by example in the persons of their humble and hard-working teachers.

5. The Political Influence of the Schools.—Politically, these schools united the Jews and kept them a nation. Each community was visited in turn by a legate of the Patriarch, and this brought the whole of the scattered people into close and intimate relations. And besides this official connection with one another, there was the feeling of freemasonry which always exists among scholars, and which keeps up a bond of mutual interest. The constitution of the schools, too, helped and confirmed this sense of community. There were no class distinctions in the Kallahs, no broad line of division between ‘town and gown’—absolutely no differences, save of character and of brain power, between student and student, or even between student and professor. Those who taught and those who learnt were all workers, and all of the people. This old Jewish school system produced a democracy of a very pure and patriotic sort, and with no opening for demagogues.

6. The Literary Influence of the Schools.—The literary influence was the most lasting of all, for the Talmud was its outcome. ‘Moses commanded unto us a law.’ From the very first, the ‘Law’ had to be explained and applied. The unwritten record of the numberless instances in which it had been so explained and applied, from the time of Moses unto that of Ezra, had become by this date an enormoustraditional store. There had come to be a commentary and a precedent attaching to every phrase and almost to every word in the Pentateuch. The comments on the Law dated from its giving, on Sinai. Take, as an instance, the command, ‘Ye shall dwell in booths.’ It looks at first simple enough. But questions would soon arise. Did the ‘ye’ mean men, women, and children? did the ‘dwell’ include sleeping and eating? of what sort and material were the ‘booths’ to be? All such points were endless subjects for commentary, and were practically settled by custom. Commentary by this time had grown to an unmanageable bulk, and custom, in dispersion, had grown somewhat uncertain and unsettled. Whilst the Temple stood, and the people dwelt in their own land, wise and educated men were always at hand to expound the Law, and there was no need for all the shifting wealth of tradition to be stored, as it were, in one bank. But when the schools were scattered, and might at any time be closed, the fear grew that the currency, so to speak, might be debased, and perhaps some valuable bits of it altogether lost. A resolve was gradually formed to make the oral Law into a written one, and to turn the traditions of seventeen centuries into an authoritative code. In one sense it was a pity, for wise men, who obtained a knowledge of the Law of Moses with its traditional interpretation through vivâ voce instruction, were better able to get at the true spirit of the Law and of the tradition than those who had to rely on the dead letter of books. Once written down, misunderstandings might creep in, and whathad been useful as a guiding rein might be twisted by awkward hands into a yoke or a halter. There was a danger even of very earnest folks receiving this new written law with so much enthusiasm that they would count it as a second revelation, and hold it equal with the Law itself. But few things are unmixed good or unmixed evil. In most matters there is a balance to be struck, and here it was certainly better to risk some drawbacks from making the oral Law into a written one, than to face the grave chance of its being by degrees forgotten altogether. To Hillel, 30 years B.C., had first occurred the idea of collecting and sifting the enormous traditional store; and, about the year 200, Jehudah the Prince, or Jehudah the Holy, as he is often called, the seventh president of the Sanhedrin in succession from Hillel, seriously began the work of compilation. It was no light work. Rills from the ‘fount of living waters’ which first flowed at Sinai had run into two channels—Halacha, rule; and Hagada, legend—the one an arguing and legal sort of commentary on the Law, the other a chatty and poetic and discursive one. Jehudah ha-Nasi gathered up all the vast store of Halacha; the traditions and interpretations of the wilderness, the decisions of the judges, the constitutional customs under the kings, the earnest communings of the exile, the vivid expoundings of Ezra, and the later commentaries and discussions in the schools. Jehudah ha-Nasi classified all this accumulation of Halacha, and by the year 200, he had arranged it all, under six different headings, into some fivehundred chapters. Rabbi Jehudah’s compilation became known as the Mishnah, from the root [a]‏שָׁנָה‎], to learn by heart, as contrasted with Mikra—which stood for Bible-reading, from [a]‏קָרָא‎], to read from a book. The Mishnah contains nearly four thousand rules, under the six heads of Seeds, Festivals, Women, Civil and Criminal law, Sacrificial laws, and laws of Cleanliness. To this code, later on, was added the Gemara, which is a sort of complement and commentary to the Mishnah, and includes the store of Hagada. Mishnah and Gemara together form the Talmud. And as the Talmud literature grew, which was a literature more or less intended for the learned, and was the result of learned discussions in the schools, there grew up also a system of popular lectures, and Biblical expositions and sermons for the people. These discourses were given in the synagogues, and formed the basis of the Midrashim literature (Midrash, from [a]‏דָּרַשׁ‎], to expound). The language of the Talmud is partly Rabbinical Hebrew, partly Aramaic. There are two Talmuds in existence, the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud. The Babylonian one is the more perfect and authoritative, and was completed by a certain learned Rabbi Ashi, about the year 500. Long before that date the Palestine schools, one after the other, had to be closed, and the Palestinian scholars had mostly emigrated to Babylon.

CHAPTER XV.
CHRISTIANITY A STATE RELIGION.

1. How the new faith spread among the Heathen.—Whilst the growth from the seed which Moses had sown was being threshed out in the schools, the gleanings of the apostle Paul were being garnered as harvest in high places. The new religion had made progress in its first three hundred years of existence, but without the practice of universal love which it professed to teach. The Christian command, ‘Love one another,’ was being, indeed, even less generally obeyed three hundred years after the death of Jesus than had been the Mosaic injunction on which it was founded, ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself,’ three hundred years after the death of Moses. But notwithstanding that sects in Christianity were already both plentiful and pugnacious, the new faith was driving paganism to the wall, and it is not difficult to understand how it was that this had come about. To Jews, the dogma of a Trinity was, and always is, unthinkable; but to heathens it was a welcome thinning of the ranks of their crowded Olympus. Christianity gave them a much purer and simpler idea of Divinity than they had hitherto held, and such selections from the old morality as they were bidden to accept with the new doctrine were not of an irksome sort. All the observances, and many of the restraints, of the Jewish Law, Paul, we know, had cast aside, and thus his teaching had been well received by the heathen almost from the first. Paul was accommodating,and proselytes in the early days had been won by persuasion; but Christianity, grown stronger, had grown aggressive, and by the end of the third century it had become a political as well as a religious danger to pagan supremacy. In the year 306, when Constantine, after a struggle, had succeeded in gaining the imperial dignity, he clearly saw the advantage which putting himself at the head of the Christian party would secure to him. He faced both ways for a while, but before the end of his reign Christianity was the state religion of Rome.

2. The First Christian Emperor.—Constantine was sixty-two years old at the time of his formal conversion. He had been a quite comfortable heathen all these sixty-two years, and on his accession had ruled at first with fairness and justice. But when political motives, and his mother, the Empress Helena, who was an ardent believer in the new doctrine, had united to make him change his faith, he changed with it his character. He became both cruel and unjust. It seemed as if he really could not understand why, if he were converted, pagans, or Jews either, should remain unconverted. He never could grasp the fact that he, in his unconverted state, had been a heathen; whilst the Jews, in their unconverted state, were Jews. But this really made all the difference.

3. Constantine legislates on the Subject: the Effects.—Constantine tried to force the Jews into Christianity by making Judaism difficult to them and distasteful to others. All sorts of harsh and oppressive measures were passed into law. Throughout the Roman dominionsJewish subjects were forbidden to hold slaves or property, and, unless baptized, every office in state or army was closed to them. No new synagogues were allowed to be built, and restrictions were put upon Jewish forms of worship. On the place in Jerusalem where the Temple had stood a grand church was raised to the memory of Jesus. The permission to make occasional pilgrimages to the ruins of the city was withdrawn. Jews might no longer draw near the walls of Jerusalem and buy the privilege of weeping there. Constantius, the son and successor of Constantine, was just as zealous in the new faith as his father, and quite as unsuccessful in his object. His Jewish subjects did not become converts to Christianity, but crowds of them throughout the Roman Empire left their homes, and joined their brethren in Babylon and Mesopotamia, or made new settlements on the shores of the Tigris and Euphrates. The schools of Palestine were gradually closed, and the power of the Patriarch, with his followers so thinned, naturally declined. It was one of the last of the patriarchs, Hillel II., who fixed the permanent Jewish calendar which is still in force. Before his time each president, for the time being, of the Sanhedrin had, month by month, fixed the date of the new moon by observation, and had settled at the beginning of each year, by calculation, what the character of the year was to be, whether a leap year or an ordinary year. Gamaliel, who died in 420, was the very last patriarch [a]‏נָשִׂיא‎], or president, of the Sanhedrin.

4. Jews in the East under Persian Rule.—The Eastern Jews, reinforced by these Western ones, remained under their Persian masters unmolested for quite another century. The Persians were fire-worshippers, and their simple belief forbade persecution under the name of religion. The sun was their divinity, and every morning as they stood on the hilltops to salute it as it rose, and watched it shining impartially on sea and on land, on the pinnacles of a king’s palace and on the twigs of a bird’s nest, they made a beautiful meaning out of the beautiful sight. They saw that there was no limit and no selection in their sun-god’s rays. As he warmed the roses into life, he did not stay to ask if they were going to be white roses or red ones. So these Persians who worshipped the sun tried humbly to imitate its wide and generous ways. They did not stay to ask any questions of their fellow-citizens, but like the sun with the roses, so long as each was good ‘according to its kind,’ gave each his due share of warmth and light with the rest. Thus, under the kindly protection of the fire-worshippers, the Babylonian schools flourished when the Palestinian schools were closed. And as the patriarch of the West lost his followers, the reigning Prince of the Captivity [a]‏רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא‎] gained extra state and influence. He came to be greatly respected by all the scholars of the period, whether native subjects of Persia or immigrants from the Western world.

5. Julian the Apostate.—The zeal of the early converts, and the legislation of the first two Christian Emperors, made life very difficult to the Jews; and Christianity, in the name of which they werepersecuted, grew very distasteful to them. When on the death of Constantius, in 360, an emperor was crowned who proclaimed himself a pagan, there was great and barely concealed delight amongst the Jewish subjects of Rome. One’s estimate of men or things depends so much on the point of view. By the fathers of the Church this pagan Emperor is called Julian the Apostate; by the heads of the Synagogue he must have been looked upon as a saviour. Immediately on his accession he declared all the persecuting laws to be a dead letter; he reduced taxes, abolished disabilities, and finally gave permission to the Jews to rebuild their Temple. Great were the rejoicings wherever this good news travelled. East and west, throughout the Roman dominions, Jews met and congratulated each other, and all hastened to send gifts and contributions to Jerusalem, like as in the old days when the Tabernacle was furnished in the wilderness by loving, liberal hands, which had to be ‘restrained from giving.’ Those on the spot set to work with a will, and the walls rose as by magic; and it really seemed to the Jews, in the exalted mood they were in, as if the ruins were helping to transform themselves into the Temple. It was all like a dream—so hurried, and so wonderful, and so unreal. Julian’s whole reign only lasted three years. He was crowned Emperor in 360, and he died in 363, and his death put a stop to it all. Even before his death a check had come. There had been a slight earthquake, or explosion, on the site of the ruins, which had greatly startled and terrified the excitable workmen. Thisincident gave rise to all sorts of tales of supernatural interference with their purpose; and very soon the work, so enthusiastically begun, was despairingly abandoned. A new and Christian Emperor was crowned in Rome, and the old bad state of things was re-established. Altogether, this brief lapse into paganism in the middle of the fourth century is like a flash of lightning from out dense thunder-clouds. It just enables us to see the surrounding ‘thick darkness.’