Page:Marriagewithdece00bern.djvu/19

15 have been considered, by the compilers of them, to exhaust the subject: for indeed Chapter IV., § 8, though incidentally supporting me, is almost beyond the question at issue; and nothing upon the subject contradicting the five can be genuine. Chapter IV. commences an entirely different subject.

It was not until the second century after Christ, that the Oral traditions, in the state to which they had then grown, were collected into six books called the Mishna, or Repetition of the Oral Law: and it was not, I think, till the sixth century, that the celebrated Commentaries were written upon them by Maimonides, a very learned Jew. The Commentaries were called Gemara, meaning complement, the Mishna and Gemara together making up the Talmud; of which there are two, the Jerusalem, and the Babylonian; and after a time vowel points were invented and added, and accents also, to prevent the loss of the pronunciation of the Hebrew Language.

As for the two sections foisted upon the British public and society in a pamphlet by Dr. McCaul, D.D., a paid writer, I believe so far, for the Marriage Law Reform Society; what will not men write for money? He begins with the cool statement, that "Chapter iv. 13 has the following passage which is decisive upon the point: —

"If his wife die, he is allowed to marry her sister; " and he winds up with the following assertion:—"This is a general and straight-forward declaration of the law"—a statement the very reverse of the truth!!!

This marvellous passage, utterly at variance with all the sections quoted from those six chapters, which decide the question if words can, is said to be found where such a passage might be expected to be found, just at the end of a long chapter of twelve sections on a different subject: but it will, I trust, be satisfactory to learn, that the Reverend Rabbins De Sola and Raphall have not given it a place in this their translation of the Mishna; and that it is a spurious interpolation subsequent to the year 1509, in which R. Ob. Bartenora's celebrated Commentary was written, and which does not mention it; and prior to the year 1578. Moses Iserles, in his remarkable edition of the Shulchan Aruch, 1580, calls them "Emendations "!!!

Of the Shulchan Aruch Wolf, in his Bibliotheca Hebroea, says "R. Joseph Caro, the son of Ephraim the Spaniard, born A.M. 5300, A.D. 1540. He wrote the Shulchan Aruch, mensa instructa, or Table