6
CHRISTIANITY IN TALMUD
teaching of Moses should be applied to every con-
ceivable event, act and duty of daily life. Histori-
cally, the founder of Jewish Legalism was Ezra, to
whose mind was ever present the supreme necessity of
guarding the national religion from those corruptions
and laxities which had brought about the exile, and
who saw no better protection against the recurrence of
such a danger than an authoritative code, which should
state-either in speech or writing--the divine com-
mands which the Jewish people were to obey. If by
the 1¹
Men of the Great Synagogue " we are to under-
stand Ezra and those who worked on his lines, with
him and after him, then
we can understand the saying
ascribed to that ancient assembly, " Make a hedge for
the Torah " (Aboth, i.
1). The Torah is the divine
teaching given to Moses and handed down by him ;
and the hedge is the Legalism, the outward form of
law and precept,
in which henceforth it was to be pre-
served. The Talmud indicates its view of the work
of Ezra, and also of the connexion between his work
and that of the Rabbis by saying (b. Succ.
27a) : " In
the beginning, when the Torah was forgotten, Ezra
went up from Babylon and founded it ; again it
was forgotten and Hillel the Babylonian 1 went up
and founded it ; again it was forgotten and Rabbi
Hija and his sons went up and founded it." In other
'
Hillel was no doubt the founder of Rabbinism in the stricter sense, for he
introduced the exegetical rules on which the Rabbinical casuistry is founded.
But Ezra is the true founder of that Legalism, of which Talmudic Rabbinism
is the logical result. To compare Hillel with Jesus on the ground of their
gentleness is to ignore the fact that Hillel did more than anyone else had
done to organise that Tradition of the Elders which Jesus denounced. In
their conception of the
form
of religion, Jesus and Hillel stood at opposite
poles of thought.
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