STOP
Early Journal Content on JSTOR, Free to Anyone in the World
This article is one of nearly 500,000 scholarly works digitized and made freely available to everyone in
the world byJSTOR.
Known as the Early Journal Content, this set of works include research articles, news, letters, and other
writings published in more than 200 of the oldest leading academic journals. The works date from the
mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries.
We encourage people to read and share the Early Journal Content openly and to tell others that this
resource exists. People may post this content online or redistribute in any way for non-commercial
purposes.
Read more about Early Journal Content at http://about.istor.org/participate-istor/individuals/early-
journal-content .
JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary source objects. JSTOR helps people
discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content through a powerful research and teaching
platform, and preserves this content for future generations. JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit
organization that also includes Ithaka S+R and Portico. For more information about JSTOR, please
contact support@jstor.org.
626 THE JEWISH QUAETERLY REVIEW
PEOFESSOE SCHUEEE ON LIFE UNDEE
THE JEWISH LAW\
I MUCH appreciate the generous welcome with which
this Society greeted the proposal of a Jewish member to
read a paper on Life under the Pharisaic Law. I have
nothing very fresh to tell you ; indeed my purpose is
rather to protest that what has already been said by
Jewish apologists should have been wholly overlooked by
Prof. Schiirer in the new edition of his great book. I may
claim one accidental qualification for my present task.
I have lived, and in a sense still live, under the Pharisaic
Law myself. I have felt its limitations, I have groaned
under its lack of sensibility to all that we call aesthetic.
I have resented its narrowness, its nationalism, on the one
hand, and its claim to the Jew's undivided allegiance on
the other. It does not apply to all men, yet it asks the
whole man when it does apply to him. But I have also
known the Law's manifold joys, its power of hallowing
life, its sturdy inculcation of right, its sobriety of discipline,
its laudable attempt to associate ritual with heart service,
its admission that the spirit giveth life, its refusal to accept
that the letter killeth. I have known men devoted to the
minutest ritual details, yet simple, spiritual, saintly. Thus
I have enough sympathy with the Law to do it justice, not
enough sympathy to do it the injustice of unqualified
flattery. The scorn and indignation of Jesus rouse
answering echoes in my own consciousness, as in the
' A paper read before the Society of Historical Theology at Oxford on
Feb. 2, 1899.
PROF. SCHURER ON LIFE UNDER JEWISH LAW 627
consciousness of all honest Jews. But many modern
theologians go far beyond Jesus in their onslaught upon
Pharisaic legalism. They accept the letter of his attack,
but reject its spirit. He criticized the defects of the Law,
they attribute a double dose of original sin to the very
Law itself, under which Jesus was nurtured and from
which he derived so much inspiration. A Jew has a ready
heart for the reproof of Jesus, he cannot tolerate the
Pauline doctrine that the Law is the strength of sin.
There were many failures among the observers of the
law, but the cause of the failure was not always the Law
itself As Prof. Wallace writes : " This we may be sure of,
that Judaism would not have lasted through the fearful
ordeal of mediaevalism, had it not been something nobler
than a mere system of rules, codified into endless multi-
plicity of detail. Do not let us abuse the Law because of
the lawyera (some of whom must be bad) ; or charge the
righteous with the petty conceits of Pharisaism." To
this I add, that the life which I have lived under the
Law convinces me that Prof. Cheyne is right in asserting
that amidst the thorns of legalism there are delightful
blooms, the efflorescence of the religious spirit of Judaism.
Against Prof. Schiirer's judgment based on books, I can
protest an experience based on life. Literature may be
a criticism of life, but in cases such as this, life is also a
criticism of literature.
Of course I do not maintain that a theologian is dis-
qualified from criticizing the Law unless he be bom and
bred in the Synagogue. But there is no other branch of
research in which the evidence of facts is so disregarded as
in the science of theology. Here we deal with principles
which affect men's lives, and we rarely turn to those lives
as the touchstone by which to judge our principles.
Rabbinic theology is concerned not with an extinct race
or a primitive and obsolete theory of being. The race
now numbers more individuals than when Jesus moved
on earth, the devotion to the theory is greater now than
628 THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW
ever. Hence, the theologian who would understand the
Pharisees must cast an occasional glance into the life of
Judaism to-day. And it is not as though Schurer's
criticism assumes merely the function of a criticism of
hooks or even of actions. It is a criticism of motives
and feelings, of the heart and mind as well as of the social
organism. Surely the outsider ought to attach some
importance to the evidence of insiders on questions which
strike to the inmost root of being. The only reason for
refusing to listen to Jews about Judaism, as it actually
affects their consciousness and their conscience, would be
a conviction that Jews cannot be trusted as witnesses, that
they are sure to perjure themselves in order to win
a dialectical victory. But this is a charge which Schiirer —
who has few scruples of charity where the Pharisees are
concerned — evidently hesitates to bring. The evidence
tendered by Jews must indeed be severely cross-examined,
but it should be heard. An even more serious charge
against Schiirer and the scholars who blindly follow him
is this. Granted that they are justified in founding their
criticism of the Law on books, they ought at least to read
the books. I think that this Oxford Society will go with
me in holding that the critics of the Law should qualify
themselves to read the originals of the documents on which
they rely. Now Prof. Schiirer seems to confess that he
has no first-hand knowledge of the Rabbinical writings.
This confession I infer externally from his citing the
Mishnah from translations and from his omission of the
original texts of Mishnah and Talmud from his splendid
lists of authorities, and internally from his limited know-
ledge and actual mistakes. This fact, that Schiirer relies
on second-hand sources, accounts for the remarkable coin-
cidence that the whole of the section which deals with
"Das Leben unter dem Gesetz" is exactly and verbally
reproduced from his former edition. A stray reference or
two have been added, and a phrase has been modified in
a foot-note. But in all these years he has not felt impelled
PEOF. SCHiJEEK ON LIFE UNDEE JEWISH LAW 629
to revise a single syllable of this, the most dogmatic
chapter of his great work. " Littera scripta manet." This
would have been simply impossible were Schiirer a real
student of Rabbinical literature. That literature is so
vast, so difficult, so ill-arranged, so beset with contrary
cun-ents, that no real student of it but would find him-
self constantly compelled to re-examine his material, to
recast his conclusions, to amend, to modify, to reconsider,
to add, to retract. Besides, an opinion about the Rabbinical
theology sometimes depends on an impression derived from
extensive reading of the Talmud as a whole, not from
particular passages cited by controversialists. And what
is the second-hand material to which Schiirer so often
trusts? Prof. Dalman in his new work. Die Worte Jesu,
severely censures the mechanical reliance placed by modern
theologians on the very class of writers references to whom
form the staple of Schiirer's notes. Jewish students have
been crying this out in the wilderness for many a long year.
Perhaps a hearing will be given now to Dalman's vigorous
plea against dilettantism — I use Dalman's own word — in
the ranks of Christian critics of Rabbinism. Lightfoot,
Schottgen, Eisenmenger, Wettstein, and even the canonical
Weber, are all pronounced obsolete or inadequate by
Dalman. Yet if you take these sources away, what is left
to most theologians who write on the religion of the
Pharisees ?
It is, I can assure you, not a pleasant duty to speak
adversely of Schiirer's great work. There is a Rabbinic
proverb, " Into a well from which thou hast drunk water,
cast no stones." I am deeply indebted to Schiirer, as every
student of his period must be. His new edition converts
a great book into an even greater. My admix-ation for it
is not measured or conditioned by my opinion of the one
particular section to which I am devoting myself this
evening. Schiirer is a prince of bibliographers, an ideal
critic and historian. He is learned, he is judicious, and
only occasionally dogmatic enough to refuse to modify
VOL. XI. X X
630 THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW
a literary opinion such as e.g. on the authenticity of the
Vita Contemplativa. But when he deals with the Pharisaic
Law his learning hecomes antiquated, and his judgment
biassed. His mind is closed against new impressions.
Even where his statements have been directly challenged he
does not so much as refer to his challengers. He has been
taken to task for mistranslations ; these remain unaltered.
The facts of actual life under the Law have been brought
to his notice ; he has refused to listen. The heading
"Irrwege" still figures as the title of one of Schiirer's
subdivisions on the Law. Wrong ways indeed the Rabbis
trod, but they never strayed into the "Irrwege" which
Prof. Schiirer attributes to them.
Let me first point to some specific mistakes in which
Prof. Schiirer has persisted. He had a whole chapter on
the " Reinheitsgesetze," in which he enumerates the baleful
effects of these laws of ritual cleanness on the daily life of
the Jews. But Mr. Montefiore in his criticism of Schiirer
adduced strong evidence to show that these laws applied
only to priests and to laymen visiting the temple ; that
under normal circumstances laymen might contract un-
cleanness without scruple. He further argues, and I quite
agree with him, that all " those distinctions respecting the
various capacities of different utensils to contract unclean-
ness, over which Prof. Schiirer makes merry . . . are merely
the precipitate of the discussions of the schools, and were
probably unknown to nine-tenths of the pious and observant
Israelites in the age of Christ." Of this serious criticism
Schiirer takes no note, yet it is obvious that if true, as
I hold it is, it vitiates much of Schiirer's argument.
Maimonides even contends that the laws of uncleanness
were designed to " keep people away from the Sanctuary,
and to prevent them from entering it whenever they
liked." In other words these ritual minutiae were a safe-
guard against the danger of making a mechanical ritual
use of the Temple.
Even worse is it with Schiirer's treatment of the Rabbinic
PEOF. SCHiJRER ON LIFE UNDER JEWISH LAW 63I
legislation regarding vows and oaths. He not only ignores
the patent facts that Jesus' famous " Yea, yea ; Nay, nay "
is exactly paralleled in the Talmud, that the Rabbis held
the breach of one's spoken word as grievous a sin as
idolatry, that such an oflfence estranged the offender from
the Divine presence ; not only does Schiirer refuse to notice
this side of the oath question at all, but on the basis of
assured mistranslations he founds the charge that the
Pharisees departed from morality and ignored the"H6chste
Pietatspflicht " in the matter of vows and oaths (pp. 493-4).
To prove the former charge Schiirer cites the Mishnah
Shebuoth iv. 13, but he confounds patur, i. e. free from
legal penalty, with w,utar, i. e. morally lawful. To prove
the second charge he adduces Mishnah Nedarim ix. i,
which he both mistranslates and misintei-prets. These
errors have been long ago brought to Schiirer's notice by
Prof. Schechter, but the passage remains unaltered in
Schiirer's new edition.
This is the method not of the historian but of one
determined to formulate an indictment. Schiirer does not
criticize the Law, he condemns it. He passes the severest
sentence without any recommendation to mercy. Why
should he be merciful when he can see no extenuating
circumstances ? He does not analyse the good and evil of
the Rabbinic system, for to him it is wholly evil. Toy and
Wendt agree that Jesus was directing his anger at excep-
tional villains, but Schiirer, when he condescends for
a moment to admit that there were a few good Pharisees,
proceeds at once to qualify his admission by a vigorous
repetition of his general condemnation. And what a con-
demnation it is ! The Jew obeyed the Law from the meanest
motives of reward, his religious and moral life was com-
pletely externalized, his conscience was silenced, he could
not distinguish between the highest moral truth and the
trivialities of a ceremonial ritual. Formal accuracy in
carrying out the law, not the doing of the good as such,
was the end aimed at. The Jew was crushed under a
XX a
632 THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW
burden of duties; the Sabbath and everything elae was
subjected to the minutest and most wearisome regulations.
Even prayers were only uttered to fulfil a duty, and thus
all living piety was destroyed. Fasting was an external-
ized means of putting pressure on God. A composition
with the letter of the Law was sought at the sacrifice of
honesty. At every step, at every hour, throughout his
life, the Jew was tortured by dead and deadening formulas.
Life was a torment to the earnest man, while those who
attained to mastership in the Law almost inevitably sank
into the vice of pride and self-righteousness. And this is
Prof. Schurer's whole account of Life under the Law ! In
his Apologetics, if I remember aright, Dr, Brace discusses
Jewish legalism as one of God's experimental failures in
the evolution of a perfect religion. If Prof. Schiirer has
given a true account of that legalism, the experiment
must have been devised not by God but by the devil.
Underlying Prof. Schurer's whole case against the
Pharisaic religion is the assumption that a life of the
spirit is incompatible with a very fully developed ritual.
He makes little effort to prove that this incompatibility
actually manifested itself; he rather assumes it as a logical
necessity. Because the letter often casts out the spirit, he
concludes that letter and spirit can never nest together.
But there is no church without ritual, letter and spirit
always coexist. That ritual meets a real need of the
spirit, follows from its universality in all forms of religion.
The question as to the result of the combination of spirit
and letter can therefore never be solved a priori, but must
in each case be submitted to the test of experience and of
fact.
Schiirer, assuming a prion that spirit and letter are
mutually exclusive, is incapable of putting Rabbinism to
this test. He cannot find anything spiritual in Rabbinism,
because he has decided that nothing spiritual can be there.
And when anything that betokens inwardness forces itself
upon his notice, he feels justified, nay bound, to explain it
PROF. SCHUBER ON LIFE UNDER JEWISH LAW 633
away. Christian theologians give to every saying of Jesus
the widest and most generous extension that the sayings
can possibly bear. And it is right to do so. No Jew
should seek to belittle any of the great and inspiring
utterances of the Prince of Peace. The world must make
the most and not the least of its spiritual treasures. But
when a Rabbi says a good thing, theologians will only
allow to it the minimum of meaning that the words extort
from them. On the one side generosity, on the other
grudging. It would need, however, the whole evening
to illustrate this double dealing as between the Law and
the Gospel. We are told that the Jewish God was a King
exacting homage, but when the Gospel uses the Jewish
expression "the Kingdom of Heaven," Dr. Fairbau-n rightly
points out that the Divine paternity and the Divine
sovereignty are complementary ideas. The Jewish God
is far oflf because he is located in heaven, but when the
Lord's prayer addresses " our father in heaven," Canon
Gore comments, " not in heaven because he is far oif, but
because he is raised above all the ignorance and pollution
of man." The Jew, we are told, had a communal not
a personal soul, but when the Lord's prayer opens "our
father," Mr. Gore remarks, " I must begin with losing my
selfishness, with recollecting that I am only one of the
great body of God's children." But not only are Rabbinic
expressions pressed against Rabbinism with an uncritical
rigour, but its good things are treated with the sneer of the
special pleader. When in the Pirke Ahoth Antigonos of
Socho said, " Be not as slaves that minister to the master
with a view to receive recompense," Schiirer declares that
this "is by no means a correct expression of the ground
principle of Pharisaic Judaism." Mai-ti, by the way, calls
the same saying " abnorm." This is like the Bible ci-itics
who pronounce Jonah a freak, but Esther typically Jewish.
Yet Jonah is read in every Synagogue on the day of
Atonement, and Antigonos' saying is more often on
a Jewish preacher's lips than any other Rabbinic maxim.
634 THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW
Again, when R. Eleazer inveighs against those who make
of prayer an appointed duty, a denunciation repeated over
and over again in the Rabbinic literature, Schiirer brushes
it aside as an inconsistency. It is an inconsistency with
Pharisaic Judaism as it is conceived by Schiirer, not with
Pharisaic Judaism as it really is. Just as the writers of
some of the most spiritual Psalms in the Psalter loved the
Temple and its ritual with an intense affection, just as
Hillel could present at once the ideal of spirituality and
the ideal of devotion to the technicalities of legalism, just
as in mediaeval times Ibn Gebirol could write that purest,
most spiritual of meditations, " the Royal Crown " and then
proceed to draw up a metrical survey of the 613 command-
ments of the Pentateuch, so have I known a modern Jew,
who refused to knock at his own door on the Sabbath, yet
died in early manhood a martyr to his spiritual aspirations.
This is the essential fact about the Jewish legalism.
Together with the trivial, the legal, the ritual, which
Schiirer treats as the whole of Pharisaism, there were the
spiritual, the ennobling, the joyous elements which Schiirer
discards as abnormal or inconsistent.
Many Pharisees undoubtedly held an external view of
the Law as something imposed from without, and they
regai'ded themselves as bound to obey it because it was
the Law. This unfortunately applies to all revealed
religions, for the ideal " Not my will but thine " is to many
Christians an ideal, I fear, only because it is written in
a text. But the external view of the Law was not the
final statement of the belief of the higher Jewish mind.
The Pharisees attempted to reduce the Law to general
principles. One expounded it as the outcome of such
fundamental morals as "Love thy neighbour as thyself."
Another held that the Law was summed up in the great
saying of Micah, " What does the Lord require of thee but
to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy
God." This betokened a sense that the Law itself requu-ed
a sanction. In his new treatise Die Ethik des Judenthv/nis,
PROF. SCHURER ON LIFE UNDER JEWISH LAW 635
Prof. Lazarus offers ample proof that some Rabbis held the
Law not moral because it was commanded, but commanded
because it was moral. The commandments were not
commandments because they were written, but they were
written because they were commandments. So when pre-
existent, creative wisdom is in Ben Sira identified with the
Law, the Law is law because it flows from the fount of
wisdom, not wise because it is Law. Hence, again, the
doctrine found in early Rabbinical writings that the Law
was revealed because it was necessary, not necessary
because it was revealed. There were laws indeed which
were only known from revelation — these were the cere-
monies, but there were laws which, without revelation,
man must have discovered for himself. These included
the fundamentals of social morals, the prohibition of murder,
robbery, adultery, Schlirer seems to be quite oblivious of
this distinction, but it became an established principle in
Jewish theology. Maimonides explains it in the sixth of
his eight chapters on Ethics, while Ibn Ezra in his Founda-
tion of Morah distinguishes as primary those laws of
morality which are ingrained in the human heart and
not derived from revelation. Though one usually thinks
of the Decalogue as the expression of revelation par
excellence, Ibn Ezra actually includes among the primary,
self-discoverable laws the whole of the Decalogue with the
exception of the ordinance of the Sabbath. To Ibn Ezra
there were three revelations, of God in nature, of God in
the conscience, of God in the Law.
There was another idea which helped to save the Law
from becoming a merely mechanical system, and this idea
was already to the fore in Pharisaic Judaism. Pi'of. Schiirer
says nothing of the spiritualizing effect of the idea of the
Imitatio Dei, which pervades the Rabbinical theology.
God is holy, be thou holy ; God is merciful, be thou
merciful. I^ has, perhaps truly, been said, that only
a Christian can understand a Christian's passion for Christ.
I think that only a Jew knows the Jew's passion for God,
636 THE JEWISH QUAETEKLY REVIEW
the depth of his love, the joy of his service. To God the
Phai'isee ascribed all the virtues ; stem justice, the tenderest
mercy ; God was the object of reverence, the object of love ;
king, saviour, father ; the monarch on high, the familiar
friend on earth. Man's ideal was to attain to something of
the Godly nature, and the Law was the means to that end.
The Pharisee's love for it led him to childish absurdities,
to the most trivial excesses. But so conceived, on the one
hand as the expression of the divine will, on the other as
the expression of man's moral nature, the Law brought the
human soul into relation with God, and it could never
become the mere code of external observances which it
seems to Schiirer. " An unchaste thought is a sin ;" "the
thought of sin is even worse than sin itself." "The AU-
Merciful desires man's heart " ran another familiar phrase.
The inwardness of the religious ideal is brought out in the
comments of the Sifre on the text, " And thou shalt love
the Lord thy God with all thy heart. With all thy heart,
with thy good and evil inclinations, let not thy heart be
divided but whole towards God. . . . With all thy soul.
Love him even to the surrender of thy soul. . . . With all
thy might. Whatever measure God metes out to thee, be
it the measure of happiness, be it the measure of sorrow,
love him with all thy might." But perhaps this religious
inwardness comes out best in such a passage as the follow-
ing Pesikta : " Good and upright is the Lord, therefore will
he instruct sinners in the way. They asked wisdom what
is the punishment of the sinner ? Wisdom answered, Evil
shall pursue him. They asked prophecy and were told,
The soul that sinneth shall die. They asked the Law.
The Law said. Let him bring a trespass offering and be
absolved. They asked God himself. God answered. What
is the punishment of the sinner ? Let him repent of his sin
and receive my pardon."
All this did not save average Judaism from the pitfall of
mechanical obedience, but it was a constant corrective to
the danger and was by no means without effect. The
PROF. SCHiJRER ON LIFE UNDER JEWISH LAW 637
Archbishop of Canterbury, in his Charge, argues that the
Pharisee did good but was not good, that he always applied
a rule, and thus experienced none of that moral struggle
which accompanies the application of the conscience to
questions of morality. But this is no argument against
Pharisaism, it simply is the redudio ad absurdum of the
theory of the nature of Rabbinism which the Archbishop
shares with Schiirer. The Pharisee had his moral conflicts,
like every other human being ; duties sometimes pulled
him two ways, and for all such cases he had no guide
but his own sense of right or wrong, his own moral nature
built up by obedience to the Law. Detailed as the Jewish
Law was, it did not, it could not, prescribe in advance for
a tithe of the moral decisions that he must daily make.
" But," Prof. Schiirer would reply, " I am not so sure of
that. Even the prayers were minutely controlled, and if
the prayers why not the conscience?" Certainly there
were many prescriptions as to the hour at which the
Shema might be said, and the liturgical ordinances were
sufficiently comprehensive. But again this is not the whole
truth. There was some fluidity in the contents of the
liturgy. In the Talmud there are numerous private prayers
which were composed and used by individual Eabbis.
Just as at an earlier date new Psalms easily found their
way into the Canon, so, right up to the age of printing,
new hymns found their way into the Synagogue. The
Midraah on Psalm 4 says, "Pray in the synagogue, or in
the field, or in thy house, or on thy bed, or if thou canst
not pray on thy bed. let thy heart meditate a prayer and
be thou silent. Be silent from the sin thou wast about,
and if thou dost this, what says the text in the next vei-se :
Offer sacrifices of righteousness. I shall esteem it as though
thou hadst built an altar and oflfered thereon a multitude
of sacrifices." In a score of places the Pharisaic Rabbis
insist that pi-ayer must be heart, not lip worship. All this
did not save many Jews from praying mechanically, from
using words without thought. Worse still was this when
638 THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW
Hebrew, though not familiarly known, remained the
language of the liturgy. But the Synagogue has hardly
done worse in this respect than the Roman Catholic
Church. The fault must not be entirely assigned to the
Law. It is a fault incident to all liturgies. You bid
man pray when his heart dictates, but you fix an hour for
public worship. You put the words into the mouth of
him who prays, yet you ask him to pray as though the
words were his own. You wish him to use his heart, yet
you are bound to give him a prayer-book. Even in
churches where there is no fixed liturgy, I am told that
after a few weeks' experience of the pastor, a watchful
member can perfectly well anticipate the exact formulae
which the pastor's extemporized outpourings will use.
Happily for Church and Synagogue alike, we can always
fall back on the Psalter which use cannot stale nor blunt.
One would almost suppose from Sehiirer that the Pharisees
had forgotten the Psalms.
Externalism, according to Sehiirer, attached even to the
motives and the results of obedience to the Law. The
Pharisee obeyed because he expected rewards, but he felt
obedience to be a grievous burden. And the expecta-
tion was of the most arithmetical and mechanical
character. Forcing against him a metaphor which is
echoed also in the Gospels, the critic tells the Pharisee
that he was a chafferer who basely demanded God's
tat for his own tit. Like Robinson Crusoe he cast up
accounts of profit and loss ; so many good works, so much
rewards. It is not easy to reconcile this picture with the
theory usually raised on the authority of James ii. 10, that
the Pharisees considered a single failure in obedience
sufficient to undo all their piety, sufficient to rob all their
piled-up works of their saving value. The Pharisees indeed
held that righteousness would be rewarded, they held act
and consequence to be causally connected. They could not
conceive God as just and yet indifferent to the justice of
man's conduct. Moreover they believed in the Covenant,
PROP. SCHtJRER ON LIFE UNDER JEWISH LAW 639
and steadfastly trusted in God's fidelity to it. But their
theory of Eetribution did not begin and end with the
principle of measure for measure. God's fidelity to the
Covenant was an act of divine grace, calling for Israel's
responsive obedience but not signed or sealed by Israel's
merits. They held that God rewarded, but that man must
not serve him because of the reward. The saying of
Antigonos which Schiirer thinks abnormal underlies the
whole Rabbinic theology. " He who fulfils a command-
ment and expects a reward is a sinner." " None shall
do the commandments to win reward, but all that ye do
must be done from love." "Blessed is the man who
delighteth in his commandments. R. Joshua ben Levi says
the meaning is that man only desires to do the command-
ments but does not want the rewards connected with them."
Add to this the remarkable Rabbinical doctrine of the
Chastisements of Love, and the evidence is complete that
though the Pharisees believed that in a just world God
must proportion happiness to merit, must indeed pay
measure for measure, yet they were not slaves who served
God for reward. This conclusion is fully confirmed by the
Jewish liturgy. If the Covenant is appealed to it is not on
the ground of present righteousness, but on the ground of
the idealized righteousness of the fathers. Man is always
described in the Jewish liturgy as utterly empty of works,
as altogether destitute of righteousness, and as dependent
for salvation solely and only on the infinite mercies of God.
I will spend fewer words still over Schiirer's other count.
He thinks that the Law was a burdensome yoke. The
controversy is again between logic and fact. Logic is with
Schiirer, fact is with the Law. A pnori, obedience to the
Rabbinic Law should have been unspeakably wearisome,
actually it was an ineffable joy. Against Schiirer's logic
there is the evidence of twenty-five centuries of Jewish
literature, liturgy, and life. The most wondrous feature
of life under the Law — its irrepressible joyousness — is
obliterated by Schiirer by a stroke of the pen.
640 THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW
In my criticism of Prof. Schiirer I have more or less
followed Mr. Montefiore's and Prof. Schechter's lines. The
gravamen of my charge is that Schiirer's third edition is in
this section identical with the second, that the criticism
levelled against it has been entirely unnoticed. It is true
that any revision would have been very inconvenient.
These chapters of Schiirer have been so extensively used
and relied on, that were Schiirer to admit himself wrong
in any point, he would upset the structures of many
a disciple and copyist.
Is this to go on? Is the Law to be searched for no
other purpose than to find justifications for Paul? Are
the Rabbinical sayings to be examined simply as foils to
the Gospel ? Or is the Law to be studied as a whole, with
no other aim than to get at the truth, to underatand its
excellences on its own lines as well as its notorious faults
when absolute tests are applied ? The only book in which
I have read a real attempt to get at the truth about the
effects of the Law on Jewish life and character is Anatole
Leroy Beaulieu's Ibrael among the Nations. He castigates
the Jews, but he discriminates. Jews do not expect
a wholly favourable verdict, they do not expect that the
Law will be pronounced an altogether good thing. They
know themselves that it is not an altogether good thing,
they do not believe at all in religious finality. But Jews
have the right to demand that there shall be what
Prof. Cheyne calls a fresh investigation of essential
Judaism. This investigation must be made by Christians
if it is to win due authority ; most Jews indeed who are
thoroughly conversant with the Talmud know nothing of
current theology. But the investigation must be made by
men who will study faithfully the original sources, who
will immerse themselves in the Rabbinic world and know
its highways and byways as they know their own city,
who will at every turn test their theories by comparison
with actual results in the Jewish life of the past and of
to-day. These investigators, if they refuse the evidence
PROF. SCHUKER ON LIFE UNDER JEWISH LAW 64 1
of Jewish lovers of the Law, must also refuse the evidence
of those who hate the Law, whether these adversaries be
canonical Apostles or German Professors. Why is it that
a man like Mr. Montefiore has been moved to such unwonted
heat when dealing with Schiirer's charges against the Law ?
It was because the Law is criticized with a harshness,
a one-sidedness, an ignorance, an injustice seldom paralleled
in the history of theology. What would you think were
a Jew to tell you that the war of ritual now raging in the
English Church is a war of external ceremonies, and that
this is the only subject that really interests Anglican
Christians'? Yet this is how the Pharisees are treated.
That my complaint is just you may see from this. I and
many Jews with me have no resentment whatever
against the general spirit of the criticism to which the
Law was subjected by Jesus, against his healthy on-
slaught against externalism. W^hen Jesus overturned
the money-changers and ejected the sellers of doves from
the Temple he did a service to Judaism for which
Judaism may one day be adequately grateful. But
were the money-changers and the dove-sellers the only
people who visited the Temple? And was every one who
bought or sold a dove a mere formalist ? Last Easter I was
in Jerusalem, and along the fa9ade of the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre I saw the stalls of the vendors of sacred
relics, of painted beads and inscribed ribbons, of coloured
candles, gilded crucifixes, and bottles of Jordan water.
There these Christians babbled and swayed and bargained,
a crowd of buyers and sellers in front of the Church sacred
to the memory of Jesus. Would, I thought, that Jesus
were come again to overthrow these false servants of his,
even as he overthrew his false brothers in Israel long ago.
But I will also tell you what I did not think. I did not
think that the buying and selling of sacred relics was the
sole motive which had brought thousands of pilgrims to
Jerusalem, I did not say, Here is the whole of the Gospel,
this is its inevitable end, its sure outcome. I knew that
642 THE JEWISH QUABTEELY BEVIEW
there is more in Christianity than this, that there are other
Christians than these. Nay, as I turned away I thought
that perhaps if I had the insight to track a dealer in relics
to his inmost soul, I might after all find there a heart warm
with the love of Christ.
I Abba HAMS.
