Medieval Hebrew Featuring The Midrash

THE Hebrew writings after the fifth century of our present era include no such transcendently important religious works as the Bible and the Talmud. Yet the Hebraic race had lost neither their wonderful genius for religious thought, nor their strong instinct for formalism, for the embodiment of religion in a mass of minute rules. Hebrew tradition was still to give to the world two remarkable works bearing upon religion. Neither of these is a single book; each, like the Bible itself, is a collection of many works, brief books carrying the complete thought of many generations. One of these collections is commonly called the "Midrash," and the other the "Kabbalah." To appreciate these two earnest and strange and mystic labors of medieval thinkers, we must realize that from the time of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans (A.D. 70) there was no longer a Hebrew nation living in its own land. There was only a mournful race, wide-scattered over all the world. At first the chief remaining center of Hebrew thought and teaching was in Babylon, the foster-home from which sprang the main bulk of the Talmud. But after, the fifth century A.D. the lands of Babylonia were plunged also into destruction; and more than ever the Jews became hapless wanderers. They were welcomed, indeed, in some lands, because their habits of peace and industry and obedience made them profitable servitors; but more often they were met with savage persecution. Hence to the medieval Jew the usual conditions of life were strangely reversed. The people among whom he dwelt were not his "neighbors," but were strangers and enemies; while his true "neighbors," those who would feel with him and help and value him, dwelt in all the widest distances of the world.

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