Chapters on Jewish Literature | Page 5

Abuya. When the latter forsook Judaism, Meir remained true to Elisha. He devoted himself to the effort to win back his old friend, and, though he failed, he never ceased to love him. Again, Meir was famed for his knowledge of fables, in antiquity a branch of the wisdom of all the Eastern world. Meir's large-mindedness was matched by his large-heartedness, and in his wife Beruriah he possessed a companion whose tender sympathies and fine toleration matched his own.
The fourth generation of Tannaim is overshadowed by the fame of Judah the Prince, Rabbi, as he was simply called. He lived from 150 to 210, and with his name is associated the compilation of the Mishnah. A man of genial manners, strong intellectual grasp, he was the exemplar also of princely hospitality and of friendship with others than Jews. His intercourse with one of the Antonines was typical of his wide culture. Life was not, in Rabbi Judah's view, compounded of smaller and larger incidents, but all the affairs of life were parts of the great divine scheme. "Reflect upon three things, and thou wilt not fall into the power of sin: Know what is above thee--a seeing eye and a hearing ear--and all thy deeds are written in a book."
The Mishnah, which deals with things great and small, with everything that concerns men, is the literary expression of this view of life. Its language is the new-Hebrew, a simple, nervous idiom suited to practical life, but lacking the power and poetry of the Biblical Hebrew. It is a more useful but less polished instrument than the older language. The subject-matter of the Mishnah includes both law and morality, the affairs of the body, of the soul, and of the mind. Business, religion, social duties, ritual, are all dealt with in one and the same code. The fault of this conception is, that by associating things of unequal importance, both the mind and the conscience may become incapable of discriminating the great from the small, the external from the spiritual. Another ill consequence was that, as literature corresponded so closely with life, literature could not correct the faults of life, when life became cramped or stagnant. The modern spirit differs from the ancient chiefly in that literature has now become an independent force, which may freshen and stimulate life. But the older ideal was nevertheless a great one. That man's life is a unity; that his conduct is in all its parts within the sphere of ethics and religion; that his mind and conscience are not independent, but two sides of the same thing; and that therefore his religious, ethical, ?sthetic, and intellectual literature is one and indivisible,--this was a noble conception which, with all its weakness, had distinct points of superiority over the modern view.
The Mishnah is divided into six parts, or Orders (Sedarim); each Order into Tractates (Massechtoth); each Tractate into Chapters (Perakim); each Chapter into Paragraphs (each called a Mishnah). The six Orders are as follows:
ZERAIM ("Seeds"). Deals with the laws connected with Agriculture, and opens with a Tractate on Prayer ("Blessings").
MOED ("Festival"). On Festivals.
NASHIM ("Women"). On the laws relating to Marriage, etc.
NEZIKIN ("Damages"). On civil and criminal Law.
KODASHIM ("Holy Things"). On Sacrifices, etc.
TEHAROTH ("Purifications"). On personal and ritual Purity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
THE MISHNAH.
Graetz.--History of the Jews, English translation, Vol. II, chapters 13-17 (character of the Mishnah, end of ch. 17).
Steinschneider.--Jewish Literature (London, 1857), p. 13.
Schiller-Szinessy.--Encyclopedia Britannica (Ninth Edition), Vol. XVI, p. 502.
De Sola and Raphall.--Eighteen Tractates from the Mishnah (English translation, London).
C. Taylor.--Sayings of the Jewish Fathers (Cambridge, 1897).
A. Kohut.--The Ethics of the Fathers (New York, 1885).
G. Karpeles.--A Sketch of Jewish History (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1895), p. 40.
AQUILA.
F.C. Burkitt.--Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. X, p. 207.
CHAPTER II
FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS AND THE JEWISH SIBYL
Great national crises usually produce an historical literature. This is more likely to happen with the nation that wins in a war than with the nation that loses. Thus, in the Maccabean period, historical works dealing with the glorious struggle and its triumphant termination were written by Jews both in Hebrew and in Greek. After the terrible misfortune which befell the Jews in the year 70, when Jerusalem sank before the Roman arms never to rise again, little heart was there for writing history. Jews sought solace in their existing literature rather than in new productions, and the Bible and the oral traditions that were to crystallize a century later into the Mishnah filled the national heart and mind. Yet more than one Jew felt an impulse to write the history of the dismal time. Thus the first complete books which appeared in Jewish literature after the loss of nationality were historical works written by two men, Justus and Josephus, both of whom bore an active part in the most recent of the wars which they recorded. Justus