Excerpt from The Talmud
The most talented could therefore hardly hope to succeed in sketching its character, even though he had penetrated deeply into its nature. It is, however, of less consequence what the Talmud is in itself than what was its influence on history, on those generations whose education it chiefly controlled." I shall, however, attempt to fulfil my task to the best of my ability. I gladly accepted the invitation of your Society to lecture on this subject, as my experience teaches me that the prejudice against the Talmud, against that unfailing well-spring of our moral and immortal strength, has now become more pronounced among our own people than even among non-Jews.
The technical definition of the Talmud is as follows: It consists of six main divisions called Orders. Each Order contains a number of treatises (tractates), and each treatise is divided into chapters. Each chapter is headed by a Mishnah - i.e., some legal decision as transmitted by the senior rabbis, the Tanaites, and finally fixed by Rabbi Judah the Patriarch. Every Mishnah is followed by a full discussion by the junior rabbis, the Amorites, who lived after Rabbi Jehudah, and that part is called Gemara, study. Both together, the Mishnah and the Gemara, are designated as the Talmud. In the latest edition published in Wilna, with the best-known commentaries, it fills eighteen large folio volumes.
Let me, however, try to illustrate its significance by calling it a kaleidoscope or cinematograph of thought, of spiritual progress. We can now by a great stretch of imagination think of the possibility of seeing the historical development of a nation during many centuries portrayed by a cinematograph. Those rapidly changing life-like pictures might show us a nation in the process of its development, how it gradually grows and progresses by commerce and industry, by its political defeats and victories, and other similar phases of its national life. But no kaleidoscope has as yet been invented that could illustrate the process of the spiritual, intellectual, and moral development of a nation. The Talmud might be likened to such an apparatus. It is a work whose compilation and completion occupied almost seven centuries, and which engaged the whole intellectual capacity of over 2,000 eminent Jewish scholars.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Talmud (Classic Reprint) (Judah Leo Landau)