[67] [The Novellæ or Novel Constitutions were so called because they were posterior in time to the Institutes and other digests of the Roman Emperors, especially Justinian.]
[68] Rabbi Gamaliel the Elder flourished about the end of the first century. Some suppose that he added a nineteenth prayer to the Shamunah Ashara, the “eighteen” composed by Ezra and the men of the Great Congregation, and which is still used by the British and other Jews. Others attribute it to Rabbi Samuel the Lesser, a disciple of Gamaliel, whilst others make it of even more modern date.
[69] The derided myth has been amply vindicated by the Rev. John Mills (The British Jews, p. 409) and by N. M. Schwab (Introduction, p. xxviii). The latter writer would be valuable, if he could only be impartial. Unfortunately he writes with all the animus of a Hebrew (pp. xxxviii and xxxix), and not a few of the prejudices of a Frenchman (p. xxvii). This is the more regrettable, as the reading public will be wholly in his hands and he can make the Talmud say what he pleases.
[70] [It is the [Greek: ζυθος: zythos] or Egyptian beer mentioned by Herodotus, ii. 77. Later the term was extended to the cerevisia and other beers of European nations; hence the obsolete word zythepsary ([Greek: ζυθος: zythos], and [Greek: εψω: epsô], to boil), a brewery.]
[71] Here, however, we can hardly find the Talmud alone guilty. Its anthropopathisms are merely exaggerations of what is found in the books of Moses when the Creator is subject to wrath, sorrow, repentance, jealousy, and other human passions of the baser kind. In fact, it would be difficult to detect in the Rabbinical ordinances anything which is not built upon the Mosaic text; they have greatly added to the Law, which, methinks, is their great sin in the eyes of Christians, and they have in many cases carried it out to absurdity—corruptio optimi fit passima.
[72] This Pope in a.d. 1286 wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury directing him to have a care lest any one read a book from which all evils flow. Pope Pius IV., when authorizing a new edition, expressly stipulated that it should be published without the title of Talmud, which appears to have been a kind of Shibboleth, “Si tamen prodierit sine nomine Talmud, tolerari deberet.” Such was the terror which it inspired in the ecclesiastical mind.
[73] An ad captandum vulgus verdict. It is thus modified by the next sentence: “All the latter Gavním [luminaries of the Jewish Law] agree that Christians are reckoned as our own brethren, and are not included in the term Nakhrím [strangers].”
[74] Dr. Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine, iii. 331.
[75] After the second expulsion of the Templars, Sultan Bibars repeopled Safed with a colony from Damascus, and local tradition asserts that of these many were Kurds.
[76] [The Empress of Constantinople.]