upon the pages of the Talmud alone. By a singular accident, the faculty of medicine formed the sole exception to this wholesale prohibition.

And this

Yet notwithstanding all this, notwithstanding the fearful passage through fifteen hundred years of misery, strong elements of life were yet latent in the bosom of Judaism. The first of these was their inflexible fidelity to the religious idea, and its elaboration in Talmudism, which fidelity neither the horror of death, nor the martyrdom of contempt and scorn, nor the snare of the tempter was of power to shake. The Jews everywhere saw close at hand the boundary line over which, if they passed, sorrow and suffering were left behindtheir passage to Christianity or to Mahomedanism; but over that boundary they passed not. fidelity was not the appanage of the chosen few, of the best spirits among them, but of the mass; of the last, as of the first members of their race. Besides this, they found within their own communities, cities of refuge to which to flee, which offered them protection from the infliction of outward injustice and maltreatment. Congregational life never ceased from the midst of them. Wherever ten Jews were assembled in one locality, they formed themselves into a congregation, as though they had been dwelling upon the free soil of Palestine;-a congregation whose fundamental principles were everywhere personal equality, free choice of their officials, in which dwelt not a trace of the custom of life-tenure or hereditary succession; a distinct, yet powerful echo of the voice of Mosaism. Within such congregations, the synagogue and its service were the first objects of care; then charitable institutions for the relief of the sick, the indigent, the old and the im

prisoned; for poor brides, for the dying, and for the inmatters. terment of the dead. The next meteors of solicitude were the schools, some destined for the instruction of youth, others of adults, in which the subjects taught were naturally restricted to the domain of Talmudic and Rabbinical learning. In this congregational life, the Jews found not only inexhaustible sources of indemnification for external evils and some means to avert them, but also partial compensation for their exclusion from all participation in general and political existence. A second shelter the Jew found in the sanctuary of domestic or family life. Repulsed from without, man seeks consolation in the arms of those dear ones belonging to him. The threshold of his house is the boundary-stone beyond which scorn and contumely cannot pass. Within, he finds the love, esteem, and reverence denied him without. Among the Jews unbounded was the intensity of family ties and affections. The bond between parent and child, and the conjugal relation, were alike sacred and exalted, prompting to efforts and sacrifices the most sublime. The exclusion from society, and the binding Talmudic statute, necessarily co-operated to keep the Jews removed and free from the great vices of the age. On the one hand temperance and chastity disinclining them, to excess ; on the other, an entire indisposition to deeds of murder, rapine, violence, brutality, and combativeness, were deepseated qualities in the Jewish heart. If in respect of property they evinced less conscientiousness, so that they were too often prone to artifice, deceit, and over-reaching; to the circumstances of their enforced condition may this be with justice imputed, while they ever abhorred to raise their hands against the lives of their fellow-beings,

and never abandoned themselves to profligacy, and sensuality.

All this in combination, my hearers, rendered possible and effected the preservation of the Jewish race during the seventeen centuries of direst persecution, through which, after the destruction of Jerusalem, they struggled as for existence, till a new time dawned upon them, at the commencement of the last century. The position of isolation, exclusion, and repudiation, in which ever dwelt this race, rendered its amalgamation with other peoples impossible,-the Religious Idea, of which the Jewish mind held tenacious possession, whose truth had permeated the very being of this race from its first to its last member, and endowed it with resistless force and was its isolating peculiarity,-the distinctive character imprinted by Talmudism on daily existence, the acuteness of intellect developed and kept alive in the whole mass by Talmudic studies,congregational life,—the depth and strength of family ties and affections, the freedom from the coarsest vices and from moral depravity,-all these were, I repeat, the elements which, in combination, invested the Jewish body-politic with a resisting power, that enabled them to repel and defy the forces external to themselves, aiming at their annihilation. Thus the Jews furnish historical proof, that not only the individual man, but whole races of men, so soon as they have truth dwelling in them, cannot be subdued by any power, whether of Church or State-by any oppression, however stringent and enduring. Jewdom existed not only during the whole of the middle ages,-Jewdom not only outlived the dominion of the Roman,-Jewdom not only witnessed the fall of all peoples of antiquity, the migrations of

countless races, and the irruptions of new ones,—it survived not only the rise of Christianity and Moslemism, but it still lives on to behold the dawn of a new era, the development of new social and religious mutations. It has done yet more. With this new era it was itself born to new life; an era when Judaism and Jewdom have stepped forth from their isolation and exclusion into the general world of man.

Thus the great import of these fifteen hundred centuries is this. The Christian Church sought to annihilate the Jews, and with them the antagonism to itself, of which they are the depositaries. Being unable in consequence of the dispersion, to accomplish its aim, it condemned the Jews to unmerited exclusion, of which the Roman emperors and the feudal system were the successive instruments. But the Jews overcame all obstacles to their continued existence, adhered within Talmudism to the religious idea, and arose at the dawn of a new era, towards the close of the last century, to re-enter in every relation of life the general world of man.

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LECTURE X.

THE CONTENTS OF THE TALMUD.

No written utterance exists, that has been the object of more wholesale contumely or that perhaps less merits such blame, than the Talmud; nor is there any work that has been denounced with more unmitigated hatred, from the ignorance, prejudice, or servility of its denouncers. Thus much we premise, ere we proceed to pass an impartial opinion on the Talmud. In duly weighing its merits and defects, it is far from our desire or intention to present an apology for, or a panegyric on, the Talmud ; but we deem it right at once to advance the above propositions, and then conscientiously and unreservedly seek to pronounce on the Talmud a just judgment.

The opponents of Judaism well knew what they were doing. They had an almost instinctive perception, that in the Talmud lay the best chance, the most powerful means of self-preservation for Judaism in the middle-ages. To condemn the one was to annihilate the other. To pronounce on the one sentence of disgrace, was to bring the other into disrepute. Even at the present day, we see that the opponents of the measures granting civil equality to the Jews, betake themselves to the Talmud, (of which they probably are wholly ignorant,) as though