Jewish law

“ They were scrupulously exact in their interpretation and observance of the Jewish law as the rule to regulate the life of the Jewish community in every department, and were the representatives of that legal tendency which gave character to the development of Judaism proper during the period which elapsed between the date of the Captivity and the advent of Christianity. ”

“ They find, that it is ridiculous and false to say, a law is accomplished, when it is proposed and permitted to violate it, and add or retrench the most essential points. Since the time of Jesus, why has the Jewish law been completely abrogated by Paul and his adherents, who, as we have seen, ceceded from the Christian partizans of Judaism? ”

“ In this law the territorial ruler for the first time proclaimed his right to legislate for the Jews, heretofore considered the exclusive privilege of the Emperor of Germany, as overlord of all the Jews. This law deals largely with the regulation of money-lending. It permits a very high rate of interest, and allows the Jews to be tried in accordance with their own laws. It prohibits all violence toward the persons and properties of the Jews, their synagogues and cemeteries, and forbids the forcible baptism of Jewish children. ”

“ If the individual is a powerful person who can withstand the Jewish court, than he may be taken to the secular courts of the ruling government, to recover what may be recovered according to Jewish Law. ”

“ He was essentially the rationalist of his age who discouraged with his hard common sense the dreamers who were awaiting the speedy and miraculous coming of the Messiah. In Jewish Law his ability chiefly was directed toward the interpretation of civil jurisprudence, for which he was especially fitted. As judge of the Court of Nehardea, he made a brilliant record. His most famous decision and that which most affected the Jews, was expressed in the phrase, dina d'malchuthah dina,—"The law of the [234] land is the law for us." ”

“ The written law in Austria, unlike that of Russia and Roumania, knows no difference between Jew and Christian. But the public authorities boldly treat the law as a dead letter, and custom recreates the Jewish ban, which the law had abolished. The sentiment of society which is inimical to the Jew makes it exceedingly difficult for him to make a living, and in the near future this will become wholly impossible. ”

“ The Jewish question, therefore, does not turn on whether the Jews shall be accorded everywhere equal rights with the rest of mankind, but whether they shall be placed above the law, whether they shall be allowed to occupy everywhere a privileged position.862 Nothing less will satisfy them, and any attempt to oppose this claim will always be met by them with the cry of "persecution." ”

“ Without denying that the Law had become the rallying-point of distinctive Judaism and was destined to obtain a paramount place in Jewish life and thought, we have to insist that it held no monopoly of influence in the period before 150 B.C., when the Wise were still distinctively the Wise. Jewish legalism may already have become an important fact in the national consciousness, but plenty of room remained for Jewish humanism. ”

“ In the eye of the law they were heretics, to be compelled or converted into Christianity, but to stand distinctly outside of it meanwhile. War was the all but universal profession. Jews might not hold military rank. They might not even be civil guardians of the peace, since ‘no Jew in any cause could be witness against a Christian.’ They might neither aspire to be owners of land, nor leaders of men. ”

“ The Man of the Nineteenth Century.—In English courts of law, the issue of a case depends less on its advocates than on its merits, and, in the long run, the like is true of the cases that come before the wider courts of public opinion. The emancipation of the Jews in England was greatly helped by the character of the Jews in England, and, despite the many restrictions which were still in force, the nineteenth century produced some noteworthy figures among them. ”

“ ONE of the methods by which the Jewish people managed to survive endless misery and persecution during eighteen centuries of dispersion and protect themselves from the continuous bombardment of their social and moral citadels was by taking refuge in the study of the law. The study and observance of the law, both civil and religious, saved the Jews from degeneration and vulgarization, and preserved for them the humanizing memories of the thoughts and deeds of their forebears. ”

“ The equal rights of the Jew before the law cannot be withdrawn where they have once been conceded; for the first attempt at withdrawal would immediately drive all Jews, rich and poor alike, into the ranks of revolutionary parties. ”

“ Amid all the wretched physical squalor of the street he would have found little mental and less spiritual destitution. If the law of the land bid Jews shrink before men, the law of the Book bid them rejoice before God. ”

“ But the Jew also can only conduct himself towards the State in a Jewish fashion, that is as a stranger, by opposing his chimerical nationality to the real nationality, his illusory law to the real law, by imagining that his separation from humanity is justified, by abstaining on principle from all participation in the historical movement, by waiting on a future which has nothing in common with the general future of mankind, by regarding himself as a member of the Jewish people and the Jewish people as the chosen people. ”

“ In all towns and villages men and women were sought out and slain—whosoever was found guilty of practising Jewish observances, or possessed a copy of the Jewish Law, or refused to offer worship at a heathen shrine. The position of the loyal Jews soon became desperate. ”

“ The Jew, for instance, must cease to be a Jew if he will not allow himself to be hindered by his law from fulfilling his duties towards the State and his fellow-citizens, going, for example, to the Chamber of Deputies on the Sabbath and taking part in the public sittings. ”

“ Their evasion of the fifth commandment, their exposition of the law of oaths, are specimens of the bad taste in morals which then prevailed. Whereas, in a numerous collection of our Saviour's apophthegms, many of them referring to sundry precepts of the Jewish law, there is not to be found one example of sophistry, or of false subtlety, or of anything approaching thereunto.
VII. The national temper of the Jews was intolerant, narrow-minded, and excluding. ”

“ But it is always easier to frame a law than to ensure its observance, and this was especially the case in Germany, which consisted of a great number of federal States, in which there was a great difference of opinion on many subjects, and especially as regarded the status of the Jews. The principle of Jewish equality, social and political, with the Christian inhabitants of every country, did make its way, but very slowly, and several generations passed before it came to be fully acknowledged. ”

“ No one can deny the gravity of the situation of the Jews. Wherever they live in perceptible numbers, they are more or less persecuted. Their equality before the law, granted by statute, has become practically a dead letter. They are debarred from filling even moderately high positions, either in the army, or in any public or private capacity. And attempts are made to thrust them out of business also: "Don't buy from Jews!" ”

“ So the Sanhedrin (a Greek word) , a body of seventy members, was both a House of Legislature and an ecclesiastical council. It numbered 70 like the Council of Elders appointed by Moses (Exodus xxiv, 1) .
Thus it happened when all political power was taken, from the Jews, the presentation of religion through the forms of law very naturally survived.
There is yet another reason for Judaism being interpreted as Law, which touches the genius of Judaism. Judaism has always been less a faith to be confessed than a life to be lived. ”

“ Where a court decides that a dispute cannot be resolved by existing statute, by judicial precedent, or by strict legal analogy, it shall render its decision in accordance with the principles of freedom, justice, equity, and peace derived from Jewish civil law. ”

“ Be it known by this our Royal Edict—may God exalt and bless its purport and elevate the same to the high heavens, as he does the sun and moon!—that it is our command, that all Jews residing within our dominions, be the condition in which the Almighty God has placed them whatever it may, shall be treated by our Governors, Administrators, and all other subjects, in manner conformable with the evenly balanced scales of Justice, and that in the administration of the Courts of Law they (the Jews) shall occupy a position of perfect equality with all other people ”

“ Christians—misguided Christians, one must say—who see God’s alleged will of universal Jewish dominion fulfilled by means of the Jews’ defiance and despite of the Law given to Moses, ought to re-examine their ground for so strange and immoral a conclusion. The break-up of this civilization, this age of civilization, will occur because of the collapse of this system by which the Jew has obtained his hold on the nations. The system that gives him his hold is doomed, is passing, and the fallacy of Jewish tribal destiny to rule the world will pass with it. ”

“ Legal protection for the Jews increased gradually; even the "Act for the More Effectual Suppressing of Blasphemy and Profaneness" (1698) recognized the practice of Judaism as legal, but there were probably only a few hundred Jews in the entire country. The British Jewish community grew gradually, and efforts to emancipate the Jews were included in various "Reform Acts" in the first half of the 19th century, although many failed to become law. ”

“ But many of the Rabbis themselves refused to take advantage of the leniency they were willing to grant to others, and determined to obey every injunction of Judaism. In particular they determined to teach the Law to their disciples, on which the continuance of the Jewish tradition depended—though they knew that death would be the penalty of discovery. Roman spies were everywhere ready to pounce upon any who committed the "crime" of fulfilling the precepts of Judaism in obedience to the dictates of conscience. ”

“ The servants of the household are less noticed in the proverbs than one would expect. Usually they were slaves, and the status to our mind suggests hardships and injustice. But the remarkable provisions laid down in the Hebrew Law regarding Hebrew slaves greatly alleviated their lot, preventing or mitigating cruelties which frequently befell the slaves of the Gentile nations. Few topics, in fact, more arrestingly demonstrate the superiority of the moral feeling of the Jews as compared with the Greeks or Romans than the treatment accorded to their respective slaves. ”

“ The land which the Society of Jews will have secured by international law must, of course, be privately acquired. ”

“ At all events, if any of our co-religionists take this law as a pretext for imposing upon their non-Jewish fellow-men, and injuring and ruining them by exorbitant usury, they pervert alike the letter and the spirit of the Divine command; they do not act in a Jewish spirit, and instead of being members of a holy nation or the people of the Lord, they are guilty of ‏חלול השם‎, the profanation of the name of God, and do not deserve to be honoured by the name of Jews. ”

“ We may then also hope to see the other fact universally recognized that wherever the Jewish race, with its wonderful vitality and its remarkable productiveness of talent and energy, enjoys the equal protection of just laws and a due appreciation of its self-respect, it will, far from remaining a race of aliens, furnish its full contingent of law-abiding, peaceable, industrious, public-spirited and patriotic citizenship, vying with the best. ”

“ Through the political assimilation of the Jews with the populations among whom they dwell, and more particularly through their emancipation in the various countries of Western Europe and America, they have acquired the same rights in foreign countries under International Law and treaties as their Christian fellow-citizens. Unfortunately this has not been universally recognised, and it has frequently happened that, when they travelled into countries where Jewish disabilities still lingered, they were held liable as Jews to ill-treatment from which their Christian fellow-countrymen were free. ”

“ With Theodosius II, emperor of the eastern division of the Roman Empire, who came to this Byzantine throne in 408, began the systematic restraint of Judaism—the harsh discrimination against Jews before the law. They were prohibited from building new synagogues, from exercising jurisdiction between Christian and Jew, and from owning Christian slaves. The bishops and clergy began fomenting attacks in different localities, forcing baptism on some by threat. ”

“ And in him began the Jewish dispensation, which like a child who has not yet attained to perfect knowledge, was taught to read in the old law, which enjoined that good should be done towards relations, and towards the good, and evil to evil doers and enemies. ”

“ The Jewish community constituted not only a national and cultural, but also a civil, entity. It formed a Jewish city within a Christian city, with its separate forms of life, its own religious, administrative, judicial, and charitable institutions. The Government of a country with sharply divided estates could not but legalize the autonomy of the Jewish Kahal, after having legalized the Magdeburg Law of the Christian urban estates, in which the Germans constituted the predominating element. ”