THE MISHNA.*

ALTHOUGH the Children of Israel profess to receive the Old Testament Scriptures as divine, yet they almost totally neglect the study of them, and as a consequence are involved in gross darkness. But while they have cast Moses and the Prophets into the shade, they have introduced an enormous rival to divine revelation, under the pretence that it is a comment upon, or exposition of, the Law of Moses. This they call the Mishna, or oral law. The Mishna is divided into six orders: the first order treats of the vegetable world; the second of feasts; the third of women; the fourth of damages; the fifth of holy things; and the sixth of purifications. The Mishna was published to the world in 1698, in six folio volumes, by Surenhusius of Amsterdam. The principal part of these six volumes is occupied by the com ments of translators and rabbies. We will give an account of the Mishna by Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon. This Moses Ben Maimon was one of their ablest doctors. He was physician to the Sultan of Egypt, lived in the twelfth century, and was enthusiastically engrossed in the philo. sophy of Aristotle. From the initials of his name the Jews call him Rambam: he is the writer of their creed and liturgy and they have a saying, that from Moses to Moses there is no one like Moses. Of the Mishna he gives the following account: All the precepts of the law were given by God to Moses, our master, together with an interpretation of what the

From Leila Ada.

authentic text signified. Moses, going into his tent, first related to Aaron the text and the interpretation; he rising and going to the right hand of Moses. Eleazar and Ithamar, the sons of Aaron, came and heard the same that had been before dictated to their father; so that he heard it twice. Then came the seventy elders, and at last the whole people heard the

same.

They all committed to memory the text and the interpretation, which Aaron had heard many times, and hence arose the written law, and the oral law-613 precepts together with their interpretations: the precepts inscribed in the books the interpretations handed down by word of mouth. Moses dying left these interpretations to Joshua, and he again to the elders, and they to the prophets, who handed them down from one to another without any dissent, till the time of the men of the great synagogue, who were Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Daniel, Hannaniah, Mishael, Azariah, Ezra the scribe, Nehemiah, Mordecai, and Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, with others to the number of 120.

But the last of the men of that sacred company was the first of the wise men mentioned in the Mishna, Simeon the Just, at that time high priest. After whom it came in process of time to our Rabbi the Holy, who was the phoenix of his age and the unique glory of that time, a man in whom God had accumulated such virtues that he merited to be called by his contemporaries, our Rabbi, the holy, whose name was Judah, so that it was said, "From the days of Moses to the Rabbi, we have never seen law and liberty to

gether, and from the time that he died, humility and the fear of sin ceased;" and so rich was he that it used to be said, "the groom of the stables of Rabbi was richer than Sapor, king of the Persians." He, tracing his doctorial genealogy up to Moses, composed the Mishna, partly from the traditions from the lips of Moses, partly from consequences elicited by argument in which there is unanimous consent, partly from conclusions in which there is a difference arising from two modes of interpretation (for they have thirteen modes interpreting); so that sometimes our rabbi says, “ such a one affirms this, such another says that."

Such various modes of interpretations have given rise to numberless dissensions among the Jews. From Simeon the Just to the year 150 of the Christian era, Judah mentions ninety-one wise men, as handing down to him their decisions. The Mishna is said to be an oral law, received from the lips of God, and intended as an exponent of his written law.

But we should transgress the purity which religion demands, were we to quote some of its puerile and absurd follies. How utterly ridiculous then, to suppose that that God was its author. If those that penned it set about their work with an intention to shock common sense, and load the Jewish religion with contempt, they could scarcely have acquitted themselves better. let no one suppose that our strictures are unkind; any one at all acquainted with the Mishna will at once perceive them to be within the bounds of that charity and pity which we owe to those who are blinded by error. Indeed, it were but two easy to quote passages which would justify our

And

severest censures. But, withal, the Mishna is surrounded with a degree of obscurity and hardness, owing to its orientalisms, and a considerable pervasion of a sort of Hebrew-Grecism in its

structure.

This obscurity has given rise to another commentary, called the Gemara, or completion. One Gemara, written in Palestine, forms with the Mishna, the Jerusalem Talmud; and another, written at Babylon, composes the Babylonish Talmud. Thus the Mishna, which the Jews declare to be God's own interpretation of this law, requires interpretation from man, and the whole together forms a mighty work of twelve folio volumes. These are the volumes which contain the whole of the Jewish divinity; for, dishonouring to God, they have almost completely withdrawn the Jews from the study of Moses and Prophets; if ever these are read, it is always lightly and imperfectly, and still secondary to the ponderous Talmud-that containing the quintessence of religion.

ISRAEL AND THE GENTILES.

CONVERSIONS IN SPAIN IN THE MIDDLE AGES.* THE details we have hitherto given concerning the social position of the Jews in the Peninsula, and their advancement in science, may have afforded some pleasure to the Christian who loves Israel for their fathers' sakes, yet there is a mixture of bitterness in the thought, that these gifts,

* Da Costa's "Israel and the Gentiles."

these talents and these privileges were enjoyed not only apart from any faith in their true Messiah, but even in opposition to that faith. Their history in Spain happily offers some far brighter pages. It is worthy of note, that, while no country in the world used such violent and tyrannical measures to bring the Jews over to Christianity, neither did any other produce so many bright examples of sincere and undoubted conversion; no country has yet witnessed so numerous a body of devoted Christian Israelites! Whatever may have been the cause of this effect, and whether perhaps in part owing to the greater equality of rank, and more frequent intercourse between the members of the church and those of the synagogue in Spain, it is certain that in no other country, either during the middle ages or even in our own time, have the words of the apostle (Rom. xi. 5) been so fully realized; in the midst of Israel's rejection and hardness of heart there was always a remnant according to

the election of grace.'

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Among the sons of Israel who have confessed the Christian faith in Spain, and fought the good fight, either in the ranks of the church or on the field of theology, one of the earliest examples is Julian, Bishop of Toledo, who flourished in the latter part of the seventh century, while the country was still under the dominion of the Goths, before the Saracen invasion. Great praise is awarded to him by the historians of that period, especially for his writings and labours as a Bishop. He took part in the great theological disputes of his time concerning the twofold will of Christ, a question on which this Bishop, or rather the Council of Toledo, at which he presided, expressed