Page:The old paths, or The Talmud tested by Scripture.djvu/258



"How is an excommunicate person to conduct himself, and how are others to conduct themselves towards him? It is unlawful for an excommunicate person, as for a mourner, to trim his heard or hair, or to wash all the days of his excommunication; neither is he to be associated in pronouncing the benedictions; neither is he to be reckoned as one of ten, wherever ten persons are required; neither may any one sit within four ells of him. He may however teach others and be taught. He may hire and be hired. But if he die in his excommunication, the tribunal send and lay a stone upon his coffin to signify that they stone him because he is separated from the congregation. And it is unnecessary to say that he is not to be mourned for, and that his funeral is not to be attended Whosoever remains thirty days in his excommunication without seeking to be absolved, is to be excommunicated a second time. If he abide thirty days more without seeking absolution, he is then to be anathematized." (Hilchoth Talmud Torah, ibid.) This, then, is the punishment which a learned man has it in his power to inflict at will. He may deprive him of the comforts of cleanliness and perhaps injure his health. He may hold him up to the public scorn by separating him by four ells from all decent people. He may heap obloquy upon his death and deprive him of a respectful burial, or if the man survive under the public contempt, and refuse to give the rabbi satisfaction, he will be anathematized, and his prospects for this world, at least, irretrievably ruined. The law respecting the anathematized person is this:—

"He is not to teach others nor to be taught, but may learn by himself that he may not forget the learning. He is not to be hired, nor to hire. Men may have no dealings with him, nor any business except a little that he may get a livelihood." Now then suppose that an unlearned man does or says something, which a rabbi interprets as contempt, he is first excommunicated. If, in the consciousness of innocence, he refuses to ask for the rabbi's forgiveness, he is at last anathematized, and all his business stopped, and all this is done to him because he is an unlearned man. He is himself to be dishonoured, his business ruined, and he himself to die of a broken heart, not because he