MR. DEUTSCH AND THE TALMUD.* THE subject of this memoir

was by birth a German Jew. He received the rudiments of his education from an uncle, "a Rabbi, who had made the Talmud his special study," and who naturally sought to inspire his young nephew with his own admiration and reverence for that heterogeneous mass of Jewish literature. Having subsequently graduated at the University of Berlin, Mr. Deutsch, then in his twenty-sixth year, obtained in 1855 the appointment of Assistant in the Library of the British Museum,—an appoint- ment which he retained till his death, from a lingering attack of an internal cancer, on the 12th of May, 1873.

With a warm and affectionate nature, he seems to have com- bined, as is not unusual, a morbidly sensitive disposition, and this defect in his character appears to have been fostered by well- meaning, but injudicious friends, among whom we are fain to reckon the editor of this volume. We quote the following passage as a specimen of what we mean :—

" Very proud by nature, his circumstances in England mado him suffer very painfully. Ho felt his attainments to be far beyond his position, and the galling official restrictions, petty rules, and annoying humiliations to which he was subjected kept him during his last few years in a state of constant irritation, and unquestionably hastened his death. A little moro bodily ease, and the comforts due to men in tho prime of life, no longer schoolboys ; a little more freedom from care, and worthy consideration by the high powers of tho country he had adopted bestowed in time, would, without any doubt, have saved to us that mine of exceptional knowledge, that rare combination of gifts, whose premature loss we now too late deplore."

On the very next page we are told that Mr. Deutech died of an incurable disease, the nature of which nobody suspected till the post-mortem examination revealed it. How, then, can the editor assert that "a little more worthy consideration by the high powers of the country he had adopted, bestowed in time, would, without doubt, have saved" Mr. Deutsch's life ? Compare with this com- plaining criticism the manly tone which Mr. John Stuart Mill adopts when describing the drudgery of his official life at the India House. No doubt he, too, "felt his attainments to be far beyond his position," but be turned even the dull routine of his office to good purpose, and made it subservient to his labours as an abstract thinker. Did the editor ever hear of Spinoza declining wealth and honour, and earning a scanty livelihood by polishing lenses, in order that he might keep his mind undisturbed for the study of philosophy ? For ourselves, though knowing little per- sonally of the late Mr. Deutsch, we have too much respect for his memory to believe that he would have been otherwise than pained by the tone taken by his indiscreet admirers. We cannot believe that he would have sanctioned the lofty claims made on his behalf. But probably owing to his constitutional delicacy, his character was not cast in a very masculine mould, and in the scraps of corre- spondence which are given in this volume, we perhaps see traces of the effect produced on his mind by the clouds of perpetual incense in which a small circle of attached friends enveloped him. For instance, we find him writing in a querulous tone of "the futility of my own self-sacrifice," and wishing to "betake him- self," like a disappointed Elijah, "to some quiet corner, to wait in patience and meekness for what the voice would say ":—

" And if it found me an unworthy vessel, I should at least have peace

and peace ace without But I have certain words in my

possession which have been given me that they might be said to others, few or many. There is within me the whole terrible germ of throes and woes which made Rebecca, I believe, cry out against her double blessing. I know also that I shall not find peace or root until I

have said my whole say I may prove and bring out a few

• Literary Remains of the late Emanuel Deutsch. With a Brief Memoir. London : Murray. details, I may teach a few—and these generally don't need to be taught this—that man is not generally bad from beginning, and certainly not because he does not happen to dress and eat quite in the approved fashion For a long time I have been frozen in every way. There is more struggle, more despair, more yearning, and more of helpless, hopeless, blind, and dumb crying-out than even you have ever

conceived As I am pondering over the fates of that creed of which I have traced the germs, Islam, and tried to see, to show the man who begot it visibly, as I work on with my metaphysical Talmud- developments, and see how wasted all that grace and keenness and catholicity of the minority has been on the majority, and what things of it all have become the heirlooms of humanity,' and what others have been chilled into everlasting monuments of ice, seen and marvelled at by a few when the sun rises or sets, but otherwise useless, &c."

From this passage, and from other hints scattered up and down the volume, we gather that it was Mr. Deutsch's intention, had his life been prolonged, to write a magnum opus on Islam and the Talmud, with the object of proving that Jews, Mohammedans, and Christians are much the same, after all, in spite of their differences in the manner of eating and dressing ; with this qualification, however, that the elevated morality of the Gospel is borrowed from the Talmud, and the theology of the Koran superior to that of the New Testament.

The essay on Islam is the most interesting in the volume. It is written with much literary skill and with considerable eloquence, and is on the whole, as far as we can judge, true to the main facts in the life of Mohammed. We do not, indeed, agree with Mr. Deutsch's estimate of the creed of Islam ; for, not to specify other objections, there is one fundamental article of that creed which falls immea- surably below the idolatrous religions which Mohammed considered it his mission to destroy. Underlying all the forma of Pagan beliefs was one precious truth, which St. Paul quoted so dexterously before the Areopagus of Athens, and which Mohammed fiercely de- nounced, namely, the fatherhood of God. That God should stand in the relation of father to any being whatever was to Mohammed "a blasphemy" of the worst description. His highest conception of God was that of a righteous Oriental despot who loved justice, and dealt mercifully with the slaves whom he created to serve Him, but whom He never suffered to address him in anything approach- ing to filial relationship. "No one in heaven or on earth," says Mohammed, "shall approach the Merciful except as His slave." This single tenet suffices, of itself, to dispose of Islam as a creed that could ever, in the-long run, regenerate humanity. A religion which renounces the fatherhood of God renounces at the same time all hope of spiritual development.

It is, however, with Mr. Deutsch's representation of •the Talmud that we wish particularly to deal in this article, both because it was his essay on the Talmud that first introduced him to public notice, and also because his papers on that subject afford a better test of his scholarship than any others in his "Remains." Stated briefly, then, Mr. Deutsch's view of the Talmud is as follows. In its pages" we find the first cry of separation between Church and State ; the first antagonism or contest of ceremonialism and free investigation." It is an utter mistake to suppose that the Pharisees were a set of bigoted formalists, " hated by Christ and the Apostles. They were not a sect, any more than the Roman Catholics form a sect in Rome." On the contrary, "the Pharisees, as such, were at that time—Josephus notwithstanding— simply the people, in contradistinction to the leaven of Herod.'" They attached no importance to " sacrifices and tithes," abhorred priestcraft and salvation by creeds. They were, in fact, advanced Liberals and sturdy Protestants before their time. In Mr. Deutsch's glowing language, they were "the most patriotic, the most noble-minded, the most advanced leaders of the Party of Progress." For the mere letter of the law they had no regard, but they were ever bent on developing its spirit. "In view of the cloud that they saw gathering round the Commonwealth," they "had but one cry,—Education ; catholic (i.e., unsectarian), com- pulsory, and gratuitous,"—the programme of the Education League, in fact. "The watchwords, resounding from one end of the Talmud to the other, are the words, 'Learn—teach; teach— learn.'" Under the impulse of this Pharisee Liberalism, schools and colleges were established "not only in Judaea, but throughout the whole Roman Empire," and the quality of the education given in those institutions was worthy of the enlightened zeal which founded them. It included law in all its branches, ethics, history, grammar, languages, including Coptic, Aramaic, Persian, Median, Latin, Greek ; medicine, embracing "the hygienic laws," and "anatomi- cal knowledge bound up with religion ;" mathematics and. astro- nomy; "natural history, chiefly botany and zoology." Nor did the multiplicity of subjects at all interfere with the efficiency of the instruction. "Good fundamental grounding" was rigidly secured, and so we read without surprise of "men to whom the ways of the stars in the skies were as familiar az the streets of their

r native city, and others who could compute the number of drops in the ocean, who foretold the appearance of comets, &c."

This enlightened system of education naturally inoculated the ethics and theology of the nation, and we find in the Talmud ac- cordingly the most elevated morality and the most merciful theology, combined with the most " humane, almost refined, penal legislation," which the world has ever seen. The Sermon on the Mount is only a plagiarism from the Talmud ; the dogmatism of the Athanasian Creed is altogether foreign to its spirit ; and so numerous were the precautions with which the Talmud sought to temper justice with mercy, that capital punishment was practically abolished among the Hebrews long before the Romans took away from the Sanhedrim the power of life and death.

This is the picture of the Talmud which Mr. Deutsch presented to the British public, and naturally enough, it made a considerable, if an evanescent sensation, for it was certainly opposed to all that had hitherto been written on that strange collection of theology, ethics, philosophy, and old wives' fables, which goes under the name of the "Talmud." But is the picture wholly accurate? Unfortunately the author does not help us to answer the question. There is too great a want of references all through his essays. If he had had to edit them himself, this would probably have been rectified. But as it is, the reader who wishes to verify Mr. Deutsch's often startling assertions is obliged to find his authori- ties as best he can through the length and breadth of some dozen folio volumes. We do not profess to have made anything like an exhaustive examination of Mr. Deutsch's Talmudic Essays point by point, but we have discovered so considerable a number of in- accuracies as suffice to convince us that his representation of the case must be regarded as one-sided only. To justify our state- ment we will compare, in some crucial instances, Mr. Deutsch's representation of Talmudic teaching with veritable quotations from the Talmud.

We have already presented our readers with Mr. Deutsch's description of the Pharisees of the Talmud, as distinct from the Pharisees of the Gospels, of Josephus, and as far as we know, of the principal writers who have written on the subject. Now we do not quarrel with Mr. Deutsch in the slightest degree for taking an original view of any historical fact whatsoever. But, on the other band, a man who runs counter to the received version of an-his- torical fact, is bound to justify his singularity by producing the evidence on which it is based. Mr. Deutsch offers no evidence. He calmly tells us that we have misunderstood our Lord's de- nunciation of the Pharisees, and he gives us an interpretation of his own, "Josephus notwithstanding," which contradicts flatly the portrait of the _Pharisees which is drawn in the Gospel narrative. There they are described emphatically as a confederation of "hypocrites," wedded to a system of the most odious ceremoni- alism, while neglecting "the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith ;" self-righteous pretenders, whose religion was all on the surface, while " within they were full of hypocrisy and iniquity ;" canting zealots, "compassing sea and land to make one proselyte," who became forthwith "twofold more the child of hell than themselves ;" "blind guides," who "took away the key of knowledge ;" men who "devoured widows' houses, and for a pretence made long prayers ;" who "thanked God that they were not as other men," and in matters of duty were accustomed to "strain out a gnat and swallow a camel." And so far are they from being identified with "the people," as contradistinguished from a "sect," that they are re- presented as abstaining from personal outrages on Christ and his disciples "because they feared the people." On one memorable occasion, when "the Pharisees heard that the people murmured" their belief in Christ, they "sent officers to take him." And when the officers came back without Him, and gave as their reason, "Never man spake like this man," then answered the Pharisees, "Are ye also deceived ? Have any of the Rulers or the Pharisees believed on him ? But this people, who knoweth not.the law, are cursed."

We do not, we repeat, question the right of Mr. Deutsch to argue that this view of the Pharisees is quite erroneous, though it is corroborated in the main by Josephus. But we do seriously dis- pute his right to dispense with argument altogether, while telling us cavalierly that we have " misunderstood " exceedingly plain language, "Josephus notwithstanding." In fact, to speak frankly, a critical examination of his essays has completely shaken our confidence in the "unfailing accuracy" which his editor ascribes to him. Let us take a few examples.

Mr. Deutsch assures us that "there is no everlasting damnation,

according to the Talmud No human being is excluded from.the-world to come. Everyman, of whatever creed or nation,

provided he be of the righteous, shall be admitted into it." "The Jews alone among the Shemite,s protested against everlasting damnation."

These are very definite assertions, and they are not written at

random, for they are taken from two different essays. Now let us compare them with the ipsissima verba of the Talmud. Mr.

Deutsch is right so far as this: the Talmud does unquestionably admit that " the righteous among the nations of the world have a part in the world to come." But who are "the righteous "? The Talmud tells us in the following passage who they are not :—

" All Israel has a share in the world to come, and the righteous of the nations of the world have also a share in the world to come. But these we they who have no part in the world to come, but are cut of and perish, and are condemned on account of their wickedness and sin for ever, even for ever and ever ; the heretics and the Epicureans, and the deniers of the Law. And there are three classes of the deniers of the Law, namely, he who says that the Law is not from God, yea, even one verse or one word ; or who says that Moses gave it on his own authority. That man is a denier of the Law. And so is he who denies its inter- pretations [that is, the Oral Law], and rejects the Haggadah, as „Zadok and Baithos ; and he who says that God has substituted one precept instead of another, and that the Law has become obsolete, although it was given by God,—such as Christians and Mohammedans. Each of these three classes is a denier of the Law."

Mr. Deutsch, therefore, in his enthusiasm for the Talmud, was guilty—we suppose quite unintentionally—of a suppressio yeti. The Talmud certainly concedes the possibility of salvation to " the righteous, of whatever nation," but when Mr. Deutsch adds, "of whatever creed," he makes an assertion which is not accurate, seeing that the Talmud shuts the door of salvation against Christians, Mohammedans, and all who reject the autho-

rity of the Oral Law, that is, of the Talmud.

Mr. Deutsch is also correct in saying that the Talmud seta a high value on "learning." In fact, he understates his case on this point. The Talmud declares it "lawful to slit the nostrils of an unlearned man," and even to "rend him like a fish." "The learned" are regarded, in fact, as a sacred caste, who cannot mingle with "the unlearned" without defilement and loss of pri- vilege; for the latter " are an abomination, and their wives are

vermin ; and it is of their daughters that it is written, Cursed is be that lieth with any beast.'" Certainly we have here a singular illustration of what Mr. Deutsch calls "the fundamental law of

all human and social economy in the Talmud," namely, "the utter and absolute equality of man." And the incongruity becomes more glaring still, when we explain that by "the learned" the Talmud does not mean persons versed in the various branches of secular knowledge, as Mr. Deutach would have us believe, but strictly and exclusively proficients in the Law,—not the Law of Moses, be it observed, but the Oral Law, or Talmud. From this select circle, again, are excluded Mohammedans and Christians, and in fact, all Gentiles. Indeed, the Talmud decrees that "a Gentile who employs himself in the Law is guilty of death. He is not to employ himself except in the Seven Commandments, which belong to the Gentiles." It is to this passage, we suppose, that Mr. Deutsch referred, when he attributed to the Talmud the saying that "there was no occasion for conversion to Judaism as long as a man fulfilled the seven fundamental laws." These seven commandments prohibit idolatry, blasphemy, shedding of blood, incest, robbery, injustice, and eating of blood ; and the Gentile who observed them was reckoned among "the faithful of the world." But so far was he from being "regarded as a believer to all intents and purposes," as Mr. Deutsch assures us, that even if he became a Jewish proselyte, a "learned" Israelite might kill him without incurring the guilt of murder, because the crime

e murder could only be incurred by killing a "neighbour," and a " neighbour " is defined by the Talmud to mean an Israelite

exclusively. Moreover, Jewish midwives are forbidden by the Talmud to render any aid to a Gentile mother in the pangs of labour ; lost property need not be restored to a Gentile ; good advice must be refused to him, and food handled by him must be regarded as carrion. Other precepts of the same amiable character have received an immortality of infamy in the following lines of Juvenal :—

" Romanas antem soliti contemner° loges Judaicum ediscunt et servant ac inetuunt jus, Tradidit arcane quodcunque volumine Moses. Non monstrare vias, eadem nisi Sacra colenti Qua.situm ad fontem solos deducere verpos."

So much for the universal brotherhood of man, as taught in the Talmud. It wasa myth of Mr. Deutsch's creation, and so was his assertion that "there is no everlasting damnation, according to the Talmud ; there is only a temporary punishment, even for the worst sinners." We have already seen that Christians and Mo- hammedans are expressly consigned to everlasting perdition. Nor is this dreadful doom limited to these two considerable sections of mankind. Mr. Deutsch defends the Pharisees as Talmudists par excellence. Now this is what Josephus says about the belief of the Pharisees respecting a future state:—

" They say that every soul is imperishable, but that the soul of a good man passes into another body (/...ers)3a' ar ;rive, 4r:we), while the souls of bad men are damned to everlasting punishment."

With this we may compare the following passage from the • Talmud :—

" Israelites who sin with their body, and also Gentiles, descend into hell, and are judged there for twelve months. At the end of twelve months their bodies are consumed and their souls burnt, and the wind scatters them under the soles of the feet of the righteous, as it is said, 'Ye shall tread down the wicked, for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet.' But heretics and informers, and Epicureans, who have denied the Law or the Resurrection of the dead, or who have separated from the customs of the congregation, or who have caused mon to fear them in the land of the living, or who have sinned and caused many to sin, like Jeroboam the son of Nebat, all such go down to hell, and are damned for ever."

The Talmud, then, teaches two things with respect to a future life ; first, that Israelites and Gentile proselytes who give way to sins of sensuality shall be tormented in hell for a whole twelve- month, after which they shall be reduced to ashes and made into a pavement for the righteous to walk over; secondly, that heretics, renegades, and Sadducees shall be condemned to endless punish. went. This, we submit, is very different from Mr. Deutsch's repre- sentation of the facts ; and he is equally misleading in several other assertions, as, for instance, that " the Talmud distinctly and strongly sets its face against proselytism." It would be easy to prove this an error, if space permitted it. But we have already

said enough, we believe, to make good our case against Mr. Deutsch as an accurate exponent of the Talmud. We do not charge him with wilful misrepresentation, but we do say that his; natural and excusable admiration for the Talmud, as the great, storehouse of the literature of his race, was carried to such a

pitch of exaggeration as to disqualify him as a critic. Learned. Hebrews of our day, like Professor. Hurwitz, for example, freely' admit that "the Talmud contains many things which every Jew,

must sincerely wish had never appeared there, or which should, at least, have long been expunged from its pages."

At the end of his article in the Quarterly, Mr. Deutsch gives us nearly four pages of proverbial philosophy, extracted from the Talmud, and insinuates that "some of the most sublime dicta of the Gospels" are mere plagiarisms from this older wisdom. "It is utterly impossible," he says, "to read a page of the Talmud and of the New Testament without coming upon innumerable instances of this kind." It would be hard to make a more misleading statement than this is. It is, indeed, scarcely possible to read a page of the New Testament without coming across some precept or sentiment of lofty and pure morality. And the precious ore is not buried in a heap of rubbish, or bound up with precepts and maxims which violate the first principles of morality. But in the Talmud these gems of moral wisdom, like Virgil's shipwrecked mariners in the midst of the seething waves, apparent rani nantes in gurgite vasto,—they are lost in a wide expanse of uncouth fable and bad morality. But, after all, the question is not whether the Talmud contains more or leas of true morality. It is by no means incumbent on a Christian apologist to maintain that the fundamental truths of

.morality were revealed to mankind for the first time by Christ.

Dr. Newman, on the contrary—and we do not suppose that any Christian apologist would differ from him here—maintains,—

" That there is something true and divinely-revealed in every religion all over the earth, overloaded, as it may be, and at times even stifled, by impieties which the corrupt will and understanding of man have in- corporated with it. Such are the doctrines of the power and presence of an invisible God, of His moral law and governance, of the obligation of duty and the certainty of a just judgment, and of reward and punish- ment as eventually dispensed to individuals; so that Revelation, properly speaking, is an universal, not a local gift."

And then he goes on to say that "this vague and uncertain.. family of religious truths, originally from God, but sojourning without the sanction of miracle or a definite home, as pilgrims up

and down the world, and discernible and separable from the cor- rupt legends with which they are mixed by the spiritual mind, alone, may be called the Dispensation of Paganism."

The moral sentiments which Mr. Deutsch has quoted from the Talmud can be matched by quotations quite as beautiful from Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, and are far surpassed in spiritual depth and moral grandeur by numerous passages in the Psalms and Prophets, and even in the Apocryphal books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus. But what then ? "Going over the theory of virtue in one's thoughts," as Bishop Butler has observed, with his usual profound insight, "talking well, and drawing fine pictures

of it,—this is so far from necessarily or certainly conducing to form a habit of it in him who thus employs himself, that it may harden the mind in a contrary course, and render it gradually more insensible, i.e., form a habit of insensibility to all moral considerations." What fallen humanity needed was not so much a theory of life—that it had, in a thousand beautifal and attractive forms—but life itself. It needed a new centre of attrac- tion for its wandering, purposeless affections, some one who should conquer death, roll back the stone from the door of the sepulchre in which the hopes of countless generations lay entombed, and "open the kingdom of Heaven to all believers." And it is because Cheat has done all this, that His religion is separated by an im- passable gulf from all that went before it. He came, not merely as a teacher, but pre-eminently as "the Resurrection and the Life." He came, not amply to develop humanity, but to create it anew, to plant a fresh organic force at its centre, so that the stream of its tendencies might thenceforward be heavenward, instead of earth- ward. The Incarnation was, in fact, as great a revolution in the moral world as the Copernican system was in the physical. It was revealed to men in the one case, as in the other, that this earth was not the centre of the heavenly system. And just as a true science of astronomy enabled men to "launch out into the deep" and discover new worlds, so the science of life which was re- vealed in the Person and teaching of the Son of God has disclosed to human nature a new world of powers and beatitudes far beyond the dreams of pagan moralist or Hebrew Talmudist. The great intellect of Napoleon saw at a glance the essential difference which separates Christ from all other leaders of men. They live their brief day, and then pass away into the common repertory of historical facts. As living, energising persons, they have ceased to influence mankind. But Christ's real power, His in- fluence over the hearts and wills of men, may be said to have begun on the Cross. Millions would die for Him to-day, with a more exalting faith in His personal presence and victorious power than ever inspired the legions which Napoleon led to battle. If Jesus of Nazareth had never risen from the grave, the Evangelic memoirs which record the chief events in His life, and give a few selections from His teaching, would probably have exercised no more influence on mankind at large, perhaps less, than the Memorabilia of Xenophon or the Dialogues of Plato. Socrates owes everything to his biographers ; the Gospels owe all their power to the Life which they describe. Christ was a living power before they were written, and He would not cease to be so if they perished. This is the problem which those who assail the Gospels have to solve. No one with whom it is worth while to argue would now think of disputing the existence of Christ as an historical personage ; and Christianity, viewing it in all its bear- ings, is certainly the greatest fact in the authentic history of man. As such, it demands an explanation, and those who reject that which is given in the Gospels are bound to substitute a better.