THE TALMUD. 



[Read before the Albany Institute, Dec. 20, 1887.] 



By Rabbi Max Schlesinger. 



Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: — At the suggestion of 

 our honored president I have undertaken to speak to you to-night on the 

 Talmud. This is not an idle statement. It is my plea of "not 

 guilty" to any indictment which you may have to bring against 

 me for my ruthless attempt on your long-suffering patience and for- 

 bearance. If in your judgment I should be guilty of the high crime 

 and misdemeanor of boring you, please do not forget that I have an 

 accomplice, and that the responsibility is not altogether mine. I shield 

 myself behind the authority of our president, who thought that the 

 Talmud would be just the thing to interest you. On the strength of 

 this authority I was so bold as to lay here before you a copy of the 

 Talmud. This array of big folios will probably give you the best 

 idea of what the Talmud is. To all appearance the Talmud is simply 

 a very voluminous literary work. Yet it is altogether different from 

 any other literary work of either modern or ancient times. As we 

 shall presently see, it is not so much a literary work as a literary ac- 

 cretion, that grew up slowly and imperceptibly in the course of sev- 

 eral centuries. Following the natural law of such accretions it formed 

 first a nucleus around which layer upon layer agglomerated in the 

 course of time. The literature of the' Talmud covers the era from 

 about the year 200 before to about 600 after Christ, an era which, as 

 you know, gave birth to the two great daughter religions of Judaism, 

 viz. : Christianity and Mohammedanism. If for no other reason the Tal- 

 mud will always remain of great interest on this account: that we can 

 trace within its wild recesses and dense literary forests, the fountain- 

 springs out of which these two mighty religious streams came forth. 



What was the immediate cause of such a literary accretion? Since the 

 time of Ezra, about 500 years before Christ, when the exiles returned 

 from Babylonia and the second Jewish commonwealth wa3 formed, 

 the Mosaic law was accepted as the common law of the Jewish nation. 



