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 III

(b) RABBINISM

Historical summary of events leading up to the compilation and consolidation of the first part of the Talmud—the Mishnah.

After 70, when Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed, an extraordinary group of Rabbis or teachers of "the Law" arose—men of rare gifts, far-seeing and possessing unusual powers of communicating their enthusiasm to other men. These teachers recognized the utter hopelessness of any further war with Rome; they abandoned all expectation of seeing the Temple rebuilt; they saw that the future of Israel lay not in any restoration of its nationality as a people—that was now hopeless. But Israel alone among the people of the world possessed a Divine Law, was the inheritor of a glorious promise, a promise which they maintained belonged alone to them; no earthly misfortune could rob the Jew of this: they were the people specially beloved of God, and only by neglecting the observance of the Divine Law could they forfeit the sure and blessed inheritance reserved for them. That same Law must be their sole guide in all the various details of life—in the smallest matters as in the more important. In the rigid keeping of it they would in the end receive their great reward, the reward reserved for them, and for them alone, as the peculiar people of God the Supreme, the Almighty.

For some five centuries, since the days of Ezra and the return of the remnant of the people from the Captivity, "the Mosaic Law," as contained in the Pentateuch, essentially in the same form as we now have it, had been regarded by the Jew with an almost limitless reverence. The acknowledgment of its awful and binding precepts was the condition without which no one was a member of the Chosen People, or could have a share in the glorious promises reserved for them.