under penalty of death, and imposing the same penalty on the Jewish party to a marriage between Jew and Christian. His successors made still more oppressive laws. Great bishops like Ambrose of Milan and Cyril of Alexandria goaded the rulers or inflamed the mob against the Jews, whose case became continually harder both in the East and in the West. In the Persian Empire they fared better on the whole; but the more zealous Zoroastrians among the Sassanian kings persecuted Jews as well as Christians. Under these adverse conditions it is not strange that learning and culture declined. Yet the Midrashim, or homiletic catenas, and the corresponding matter in the Talmuds are evidence that the moral and religious teaching of earlier times was kept alive. The Palestinian schools died out about 425 A. D., those in Babylonia were in full decadence in the sixth century.

CHAPTER IV

JUDAISM

MEDIEVAL AND MODERN

The Moslem Renaissance-The Karaite Schism-Jewish Theology and Ethics-Saadia-Bahya ibn Pakuda-Ibn Gabirol-Judah ha-Levi -Aristotelianism: Maimonides-Mysticism: the Kabbala, Hasidism-Modern Revival of Learning-Moses Mendelssohn-Reform Movements-Zionism.

THE Moslem conquests in the seventh century embraced the countries in which by far the greater part of the Jews were settled, and delivered them from the persecuting zeal of Christians and Zoroastrians. In the Oriental renaissance under the caliphate the stirrings of the new intellectual life were quickly felt by the Jews. One of its first manifestations was a revolt against the authority of tradition, to which the completed codification of the Talmud had given the character of finality, and the tyranny of its official interpreters, whose opinions and decisions were already beginning to constitute another body of actual law. The leader of this movement was Anan ben David, a member of the family of the exilarchs,1 himself learned in the Talmud and the micrologic casuistry of the schools, whose intellectual sterility and religious aridity had in his day reached its nadir. It is said that the dangerous habit of having opinions of his own cost him the succession to the exilarchate, to which he had pretensions, and that this personal grievance threw him into open antagonism to the traditionists who had compassed his defeat. Whatever his

1 The exilarch (Resh Galutha), a hereditary prince of Davidic lineage, was the civil head of Babylonian Jewry, as the Gaon, appointed by him, was its religious and judicial head.

motives may have been, his declaration of independence drew to his side many to whom emancipation from the dominion of the rabbinical authorities was welcome. They formed a sect with an organisation of their own, and made Anan their exilarch.

Over against the authority of the Talmudic tradition Anan asserted the authority of Scripture and the right and duty of private interpretation. "Diligently search the written law," was his watchword. He did not reject traditions as such, but when he found them at variance with Scripture he set them aside, in spite of great names and immemorial prescription, and put the biblical rule, according to his interpretation, in their place. To his successors he seemed to have been unduly conservative, or to have unconsciously brought over too much of the old leaven, and they made more thorough work in purging out the remnants of rabbinism. Compends of the laws and observances made by Anan, though differing in many particulars from those of the great body of the Jews, were superseded by later ones of more radical character.

The sect, which had at first been called after its founder, Ananites, is better known by the name Karaites, which we might translate "Bible Jews." In their rejection of tradition as an authority concurrent with Scripture and their assertion of the right of individual interpretation and judgment, the Karaite movement has a partial resemblance to the Protestant Reformation. "To investigate is a duty; to err in investigation is no sin"; a man should bind himself to no authorities, but examine and investigate for himself; a son need not agree with his father nor a pupil with his teacher if he has reasons for his dissent; if he is mistaken, he has at least the reward of opening men's eyes and enlightening them.

The appeal to Scripture led the Karaites to a kind of study of the Bible that had long been neglected, the en

1 From kara, "read." We call the sacred books "writings"; Jews and Moslems call them "readings" (Mikra, Koran).

deavour to find out what it really meant, and their opponents were constrained to meet them on the same ground. They had the methods of Moslem interpreters of the Koran as an example. It was the beginning of a new biblical exegesis which later had a notable development in both camps. The literal interpretation of the Pentateuch led the Karaites, as it had led the Samaritans and certain older Jewish sects, to greater strictness in various matters than was the rule among the Rabbanites. Thus, levitical laws, such as defilement by a dead body, were revived, which the Rabbanites held to be no longer in force.

Persecution in Babylonia drove many Karaites to Palestine and Egypt; Jerusalem became their intellectual centre until the Crusades, afterwards Constantinople. Before the end of the ninth century the schism had grown to such dimensions, and its leaders had become so aggressive, that it was a serious menace to orthodox Judaism, and provoked violent polemics; and although this crisis passed, Karaism maintained itself for centuries, and produced a considerable and by no means negligible literature, especially in the interpretation of the Bible. Since the sixteenth century it has greatly declined, and now numbers only a few thousand adherents, chiefly in Turkey and Russia.

The theological controversies among the Moslems raised many questions which were as pertinent in Judaism as in Islam, and they soon became subjects of warm discussion among Jewish thinkers. This came in the days when the Mutazilites were at the height of their influence,1 and both their rationalistic method and a good deal of their doctrine were appropriated by the Jews. The problem of the divine attributes-how the existence of attributes can consist with the unity of the godhead-first raised by them, continued for centuries to be one of the burning questions of Jewish philosophy. The problem of the freedom of the human will was also part of this inheritance, though, as Judaism had no dogma of predestination, it did not present 1 See below, pp. 417 ff.

to Jewish thinkers the same theological complication as to Moslems.

The necessity of an exposition and justification of Jewish belief and teaching led Saadia (d. 942) to write his "Beliefs and Dogmas." The author was born in Egypt in 892, and was thoroughly versed not only in Jewish but in Arab learning. In 928 he was called to be the head (Gaon) of the academy at Sura, in Babylonia, which had fallen into sad decadence. His uncompromising integrity soon brought him into conflict with the exilarch, and he was for several years kept out of his office. During this time he wrote at Bagdad the book of which mention has just been made. Saadia made an epoch in almost every branch of Jewish learning. His translation of the Pentateuch and other parts of the Bible into Arabic, which was then the vernacular of much the greater part of the Jews, is comparable in importance to the Septuagint in the Hellenistic age; and besides this translation, which is in fact and intention an interpretation, he wrote commentaries in a new style on several of the books. By his lexicon and grammar, modest as these first steps were, he has a right to be regarded as the initiator of Hebrew philology. In the controversy with the Karaites he was the most redoubtable champion of orthodox Judaism. The "Beliefs and Dogmas" (more exactly, "rationally established tenets") is the beginning of the philosophical treatment of Jewish theology.

The influence of the Moslem liberal theologians is evident throughout. After an introduction, in which certain preliminary questions are discussed, Saadia proceeds to develop the cosmological argument for the existence of God, and from this point of view discusses the nature of God, his unity, attributes (life, power, wisdom), the commandments of God (rational and positive), the revelation of God through prophets and the nature of prophecy, the effects on the soul of obedience and disobedience, freedom and ability, good and ill desert, the nature and activities of the soul, soul and body, the state of the soul after death, the resurrection, the