I THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

THE JEWISH ETHIC

The concept of a ‘race apart’ … 23

Hebrew Scripture and the ‘race apart … 25

Apologies for ‘racial apartness` … 26

THE CULT OF THE LAW  … 30

Return from Exile  … 30

Rebuilding the Temple … 31

Rebuilding the Law … 32

‘Legalism` of the Pharisees … 33

The Pharisee-Sadducee conflict … 33

NOTES AND REFERENCES  … 36

PART 1: THE ETHIC OF JESUS

I

THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

THE JEWISH ETHIC

The ethic of Jesus is best understood against the background of the ethic of the Jews. Jesus was a Jew among Jews, born in their midst, brought up under the influence of their spirit and consciousness. He conceived of his mission on earth as starting with the Jewish community. The Qur’an affirms this: ‘And when ‘Isa, son of Mary, said, ‘0 people of Israel, I am God’s prophet sent to you, confirming the Torah...’’ (61:6; see also 43:57-65). It is because the Jews recognized in Jesus a radical threat to their whole ethos that they resisted him and resolved to put an end to his life and his activity. In order to understand the ethic against which Jesus’ mission was directed, to uncover its inner ideas as these formed, we must go back to the period of the Exile and before.

The concept of a ‘race apart’

Ancient history contains many accounts of states and empires that rise to power, hold the scene for a time, then decay and are forgotten. Typically, they arise in some remote region about which the then contemporary world knows little; they conquer relatively quickly and ‘inherit’ the land and population and power over both. In the passing of empires, one to another, these three elements are always in play.

First, there is the territory which persists through all change. Towns may be destroyed, villages and countryside ravaged. Even the geography and climate may be altered through grandiose irrigation schemes, the diversion of rivers, and over-taxing the earth. Nevertheless, the land as such, as the ground on which the changes take place, remains; the territory of a dying empire does not die with that empire.

Second, there is power, political relationship. Unlike land, power is intangible, but real enough in the relation between rulers and the ruled, and in human associations such as government, bureaucracy, armed forces, political parties, etc. ln ancient times, political relationship did

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not, for the most part, consist of an idea or body of ideas—as, in the medieval period, in the dār al-Islām or Christian Commonwealth ideas or as, in modern times, democracy, socialism, nationalism, etc. Rather, political relationship was concretely embodied in the person of a ruler who, through an entourage, willed, and a population of the ruled who obeyed or refused to obey. When the ruler was killed or otherwise removed, the ‘state’ or ‘government’ was annihilated. The political relationship itself remained, now embodied in the person of the new ruler.

Third, there is the people, the mass of the population, those who survived through the conquest which changed their ruler, and those who came with the conquerors. Typically, the people adapted to the new order, accepted their ‘translation’ into the life of the new empire. This ‘translation’ may not have been willing nor quick, but mostly it happened; the process consisted of intermarriage, of adding on (or adapting) new cults, a new religion, of accepting new words, eventually a new language. There may be many reasons why this happened. The absence of what we now call ‘political ideology’, and some affinity between conquerors and conquered in language, cult, life-view, are no doubt among the more important reasons. For our present argument what matters most is that such fusions could and did happen—with just the one striking exception of the Hebrews and their descendants, the Jews.

All other ancient peoples, it seems, accepted the flow of history, were carried along with its changes, whether as conquerors or as conquered. Only the Jews, despite every misfortune suffered by their original state. Judah, and their ethnic community, Israel, over the two millennia before the birth of Jesus, sought to preserve themselves as a people, distinct and intact. Other ancient peoples valued human life above the value of any identity derived from being a linguistic or ethnic community or from being subjects of a particular ruler. When that ruler perished, their pursuit of human life enabled them to accept another, to melt into a new identity, political or ethnic. Thus the population of the Fertile Crescent, with the exception of the Jews, became Akkadians, Amorites, Egyptians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians, Hellenes, and Islamic, as the empires known by these names came or went. The Jews alone regarded their ethnic identity and their political identity as indissoluble values. For the Jews, so it appears, human life lacked worth without attachment to ethnic and political identity. On the other hand, they preferred ethnic survival to extinction in the cause of political identity. At no time in the period of history which concerns us were the Jews as a people idealistic enough to lay down their lives for the sake of the political idea—as did, in later times, Christians, Muslims, Capitalists, Communists. The two values of ethnic and political identity, thus held ‘apart’, unmoved by the processes of human history flowing around them, eventually merged.

The sociologists’ technical term for this equivalence between ethnic and political identity is racism. The idea that ‘race’ is purely a

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physical or biological reality is a common misconception. It always contains the intangible (nonetheless real) element of political relationship and political identity and purpose.¹ The people are ‘chosen’ for that identity and must be preserved for that purpose. Thus it is that the Hebrews were the first racists in human history and remain so to this day. Their history as a people is the story of this ‘racism’ and cannot be understood as a whole except in its terms.

Hebrew Scripture and the ‘race apart’

Many people, from a variety of motives and viewpoints, have argued that, as a whole, Hebrew and Jewish Scripture is the story of this racism. The Jews whom, above all, it concerns, generally accept the thesis that their Scripture is only theirs; that it was written in their language, by their ancestors, for their benefit; that the only standpoint from which it can properly be understood is that of Jewish history, especially as the greater part of its narratives and poems are about that history. Their aversion to proselytism, the teaching of Jewish religion to non-Jews, and the closed rabbinic tradition within which, for many ages, their Scripture has been interpreted, are external expressions of this racist view of their Scripture and of themselves. It would be sad indeed if the history, whether political or cultural, of a people, could be properly read and understood only by themselves. And this would be the case if the early history of a people were such that no facts could prove or disprove it, as in the case of a myth. Even then, the myth itself, its genesis, development and decay, can enlighten us, if not about the early history of which the myth tells, at least about the later consciousness which did the mythologizing.

Fortunately, this is not the case with the story of the Hebrews. Archaeology has established beyond doubt that the greater part of the Hebrew account is historically sound—at least after the Exodus. It is now possible to read this history confidently with a few variations in dates relating to the early periods. Were the records of that history meant to chronicle the pursuit of the racist idea and to inculcate it in the hearts and minds of the Jews? These are questions which can now be reliably decided by reference to empirical data—thanks, largely, to the work of archaeologists and the consequent reconstruction of ancient history. Among that body of data, the texts of Hebrew Scripture are the foremost, most eloquent, and adequate evidence.

The texts relating to Hebrew history before the Exodus may be looked upon in two different ways. They may be regarded as history, as true a record of what actually happened as could be produced in those days. Or they may be regarded as poetic productions (legends) which reflect the mind and spirit of their author(s). Either way, there can be little doubt that either the pre-Exodus Patriarchal Hebrews or those of later times who created Genesis, were racists. From the first human family in the Garden of Eden, among whose children God discriminated irrationally (Genesis 4:1-6ff), to the Exodus from Egypt,

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God has shown, according to these Scriptures, a bias in favor of one man, one family, or one party. There are time when this bias is earned by virtue (Noah, for example); but in most cases it is irrational and groundless. Whether understood as the judgement of God upon the Hebrews or of the Hebrews upon themselves, the significance of the bias is the same: the Hebrew is better than the non-Hebrew simply because he is Hebrew and because he is not non-Hebrew. The Hebrew esteems himself, or God esteems him, as standing above the rest of humanity, for whom he has coined the only word of its kind in any language, goyim, or non-Jews.² By virtue of being born a Hebrew, the Hebrew stood in a certain relation of favor with God. Perhaps this relation was first thought of as something intangible. But in time the intangible relation came to be associated with physical existence as a Hebrew, with blood and bone. The ‘covenant in the flesh’ (Genesis 17; 13-14) was understood literally.

A small minority of Jews, in ancient or modern times, have persistently refused to identify with the majority of Jews who understand Hebrew Scripture in racist terms. Their view is certainly respectable and, when supported by a number of Scriptural passages which definitely point in that direction, is morally worthy and, therefore, the most likely to be of divine origin. The intellectual and moral courage of Jews who take this stand deserves our greatest admiration. Fundamentally, they seem to share our view that the existing Hebrew Scripture is a heavily edited and altered version of that Divine Torah which God entrusted to Moses, and which the Jews thus abandoned for the sake of tribalist self-preservation and self-assertion.

Apologies for racial apartness

Christian interpreters represent by far the most important challenge to the thesis that Hebrew Scripture is the record of Jewish racism, and have produced the most forceful, if often forceful, apologetics in their support of it as the true ‘word of God’.

For twenty centuries, Christians have struggled to explain the texts they adopted as Scripture. The first Christians were Jews and for them, the only Scripture that could exist was the Hebrew Scripture—namely, the Torah, the Prophetic literature and the Writings. Alexandrian Jews³ were familiar with the techniques of allegorical interpretation used by the Hellenes to re-present the old myths and legends of Greek poetry. They used the same techniques to re-present and harmonize their Scripture with the Greek philosophy and culture under whose influence they lived. The first Christians, mostly convened Jews, therefore also used allegorical interpretation to reconcile the Hebrew Scripture with the spirit and teachings of the new faith. Jewish Christians had dropped out of the history of Christianity by the end of the first century. Jewish influence lingered on for several centuries after that. When that too had faded, the Hebrew Scripture (now called the ‘Old Testament’) was primarily valued as a source of background

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material for the career of Jesus. With the Reformation, the Old Testament came back as ‘Scripture’ and interest in its original Hebrew form was cultivated. Thereafter, the Protestants took Hebrew Scripture to be the revealed word of God, on a par with the New Testament for holiness and authority. However, the conception of the church as ‘Guardian’ and sole interpreter of the Scripture persisted through many centuries. It was not until the sixteenth century that the Bible, as we know it today, became the property of anyone who cared to purchase a copy.⁴

The popularization of the Bible also popularized a belief in the Old Testament as, wholly and literally, a revelation from God. However, as scholasticism and dogmatism were pushed back by a new freedom of inquiry in morals and religion, as well as in science, this literal acceptance of the Hebrew Scripture collapsed. Scholarship dealt blow after blow to the old certainty until only the most naïve fundamentalist believed that every word in the Old Testament had been revealed by God. The relevance of the Scripture had to be rescued somehow.

About a hundred years ago, German Old Testament scholars came up with the concept of Heilsgeschichte or ‘salvation-history’. They presented the Old Testament as a series of revelations in different historical situations, divinely managed over a period of two millennia, to point to, and culminate in, Jesus. This offered a justification for the moral ugliness of Hebrew racism by giving it a historical destiny—namely, that it was as it was just so that it could be redeemed through the ‘Incarnation’. According to this view, every event to idea in the Old Testament was inspired, initiated and brought about by God so that the process of ‘salvation-history’ could lead to the ‘Incarnation’ which, all along, had been God’s intention for mankind.

But something evil does not become good because it is attributed to a different author, and certainly not because it is attributed to God. Indeed, to attribute an evil to God is self-contradictory. No-one of sound conscience can possibly deny that Hebrew racism is an evil. And yet, ‘salvation-history’ is engaged in precisely that denial. It maintains that Jews were and remained the ‘chosen people of God’ despite their moral unworthiness—and simply because they were Jews. The implications of this for the nature of God are grave indeed.

‘Salvation-history’ does not begin until the election of Abraham. Human history before Abraham is not explained except as unsuccessful, haphazard measures on the part of God to deal with the problem of evil. The creation of woman, the banishment from paradise and man’s subjection to toil and suffering, and, finally, the annihilation of the Deluge—all these divine measures were tried and failed before God ‘hit upon’ an effective method of improving His own creature. At a certain point, God became, as it were, exasperated; He despaired of the Jews as His emissaries to mankind, and so Himself resolved to enter history and save man by suffering on man’s behalf. The whole implication of this is that God works in fits and starts, changing His strategy according to circumstance, in compromise of His onmipo-

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tence, wisdom, and goodness. It contradicts the creation of man in ‘the image of God’, with the faculty and will to know and to act, rather than a puppet on the canvas of history.

The Christian attempt to ethicize Hebrew racial ‘apartness’, to make it good has never worked. The problem of making the document of that ‘apartness’, the Old Testament, meaningful and palatable continues to tax the great minds of Christendom to this day. The truth is that ‘apartness’ is in fact racism and unethicizable: the sooner Christians abandon the attempt to make it so, the sooner and easier they will move in the footsteps of Jesus.

The Christian scholars of ‘salvation-history’, as noted above, needed to find a point at which God decided to assume man’s guilt and alone for him. They chose the governorship of Nehemiah and Ezra in the fifth-century BC as the period when, decisively and finally, the Jews turned away from what God had willed and ordained for them. Christian allegorical interpretation (from the time of the Apostolic Fathers on) had read the ‘will to Israel’ (as expressed in the writings attributed to the later Jewish prophets) as a will to establish a spiritual kingdom. But under Ezra and Nehemiah a material kingdom was set up, systematically identifying the chosen people with real political power and separating them from those who did not share in the ‘covenant in the flesh’. The chosen people were required to govern every detail of their lives according to a revised and extended Law (which, again, was for them alone). In doing so, the Jews abandoned—as Christian scholars saw it-the ‘ethical’ vision of an Amos or Micah.

But this whole argument is wrong. The books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel were not written for the benefit of the Christians. They were not written so that, several centuries later, the Christians should come along and, through very strained allegorical interpretation, force them out of their Jewish context and into meanings which they plainly do not intend. When the Jews, in the period after the Exile, read these texts in the racist way, they were following a tradition that went back a millennium and a half. There was no abrupt turning away from what had been, as Christian scholars want to believe, but a clear, steady continuation of the ancient emphases on the chosen people, separated from all others (the goyim), not by their virtue or worth, but by their flesh and blood. Christian scholarship has not established by any means that the visions of the later prophets are other than racist visions, They all speak of an incorruptible remnant of Jews who justify continued divine favoritism; they all speak of a return to Jerusalem in Judah and of a re-establishment there of a Jewish kingdom in the flesh; they all yearn for an Israel that will dominate its neighbours, humiliate the goyim and so avenge the long-suffering of its ancestors.⁵

The traditional Christian view cannot accept (and therefore cannot explain) Jewish racism before the period of Ezra and Nehemiah without rejecting the whole scheme of ‘salvation-history’. No wonder therefore that only a liberal Jew, Sigmund Freud, and a disciple of his,

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M. Kamil Hussayn, a Muslim, should have attempted to explain it (Freud, 1939; Hussayn, n.d.).

For both Freud and Hussayn, Jewish racism dates from the Exodus from Egypt. This was the event which forged the Hebrews into a race and endowed them with a racist consciousness that has remained in evidence throughout their history. However, this liberal Jewish and liberal Muslim opinion is no less wrong than that of the Martin Buber asks (1946, p.32): ‘How could the Hebrew refugees From Egypt who crossed the Red Sea stand in front of Sinai as they stood, unless they already had the consciousness of being an ‘Israel’?’ His point (see also Buber, 1952, pp, ix-xiii) is that unless the Hebrews were already conscious of themselves as the people of God, ‘chosen’ above other nations, they could not have entered into covenant with God at Sinai. We may add, further, that the Hebrews could not have maintained their separateness in Egypt, and resisted assimilation, nor had so clear a consciousness of one day returning to Canaan, unless they did already know themselves as ‘Israel’. Finally, there is the clear evidence, before even the migration to Egypt, from Jacob’s treatment of the Shechemites’ (see below, p.65). This people had dared, through circumcision, to identify themselves with ‘Israel’.

For a gay to so identify himself was, in Hebrew eyes, a capital offence, and death was the result of the Shechemites’ presumption.

Even in the Hebrew Scripture, the call to Abraham (with which the idea of the Hebrews as the chosen people begins) is presented as arbitrary. God is presented as making the choice for no reason except that the Hebrew is the Hebrew. Even if we agree that God could initiate the possibility of man’s salvation not from the outset of his creation but at some point in time much later, why should this point be the election of Abraham and the Hebrews? Jews and Christians alike accept that there is no real answer to this question. ‘It simply is so because the Jew is a Jew’, they might say, while adding, perhaps: ‘It is not for man to inquire into God`s mind.’

This Christian commitment to upholding and justifying the history of Hebrew racism, a commitment which Christianity inherited from the first Christians who were converts from Judaism, has stood all these centuries as a barrier against a full and free appreciation of the mission of Jesus. That mission was, potentially, a great and radical critique of Hebrew racism and of the particular form that racism took in Jesus’ time: legalism. To understand the ethical and political situation at the time of Jesus we need to look more closely at the period of Jewish history immediately following the Exile in Babylon. That period (as noted above) is regarded by advocates of salvation-history as momentous—the point at which the Jews turn away from God and His prophets, away from relationship with God. What they turned towards we shall now see.

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THE CULT OF THE LAW

Return from Exile

The cult of the Law arose out of the political circumstances surrounding the Exile to Babylon. During the Exile, the Jews nursed the hope for a return to Judah and for a re-establishment of their sovereign state. Deutero-lsaiah painted this ideal of the return in most vivid colors (e.g. Isaiah 35:1-10; 40:1-31; 41:1-29; 42:1-25). He dared to hail the pagan Cyrus as God’s ‘anointed’ (45:1) and ‘elect’ (42:1) for giving the Jews the famous edict of restoration in 538 BC. Cyrus permitted the Jews to return for purely political reasons. They were enemies of his Chaldean enemies so, by undoing the exile the Chaldeans had imposed upon them, Cyrus hoped to make the Jews his allies, Secondly, as enemies of Egypt, the Jews could make an excellent buffer between the Egyptians and his own domains. Clearly Cyrus was a wise politician: the Assyrians and Chaldeans before him had ruled by mere force; he intended, instead, to set up an empire of relatively autonomous provinces whose people could, therefore, be expected to be both more loyal and more forthcoming with taxes. The advantages of having a strong Judah so appealed to Cyrus that as well as releasing the captives, he authorized them to rebuild their temple (Ezra 1:2-4, 7-11) and contributed to the cost of doing so from his own treasury (Ezra 1:8; l:4-6).

Not all the exiled Jews rushed forward to help rebuild the kingdom of Judah.⁶ Just as, in modern times, many Jews have helped the Zionist movement to achieve a second ‘aliyah or return with money but not gone there in person, so the Jews of Babylon helped to finance the scheme but few volunteered to go; as witness Ezra, ch.2 and Nehemiah, ch.7. Just as their ancestors in Egypt had ‘increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceedingly mighty’ (Exodus 1:7)—an accurate enough description of Jewry in the modern world –the exiles in Babylon were sufficiently prosperous and happy not to want to return to Judah. Josephus described them as unwilling to leave their possessions.⁷ Thus only those Jews went for whom the return itself was more important than the happiness and security available in Babylon.

We should note in passing that, before the Chaldeans, the Assyrians had deported many Jews in 720 BC. These did not preserve their identity and melted into the humanity that composed the Assyrian Empire. Evidently there was a great difference in the ideologies of these two groups. The Assyrian exiles were of the Northern Kingdom, tolerant and universalistically-inclined like their ancestors, the Shechemites of Genesis. The later Chaldean exiles were from Judah and fanatically racist. The former spread throughout the Empire. The latter concentrated themselves in very few places (see Ezra 2:59, 8:15,

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17, 21) notably in Tal Aviv, ‘the hill of the ears of grain,’ by the river Chebar in lower Babylonia. The Babylonian Jews were more racist than the other Jews of the empire, and only the most fanatic of them made the decision to ‘return’. ln fact, they had been Judah`s aristocracy, those most likely to be nation-conscious—otherwise the Chaldeans would not have thought them worth deporting. Prosperity in Exile sifted out the more doubtful (i.e. the more tolerant) of them, those not willing to ‘return’. Thus it was the ultra-separatists who took up Cyrus’ offer to return to Judah and re-build the temple. And Cyrus must have been well satisfied with a zealotry that would serve his purpose against Egypt.

Naturally, when this small group of fanatics returned to Jerusalem, they were ill-pleased at their brethren who, disillusioned by defeat and compelled by misery, had become less racist and tolerated some mixture with the surrounding people. Their cousins to the north, in Samaria, were even more advanced on the road of tolerance and universalism. Therefore, the returnees regarded them with special hatred and contempt. The first friction came when those who returned sought to rebuild the temple under Sheshbazzar.

Rebuilding the Temple

The other Jews of Judah and Palestine, even though their Judahic racism was much enfeebled, if not altogether lost, had continued to worship Jahweh.⁸ They had by no means given up the desire to rebuild Jerusalem, especially its temple. When the returning Jews from Babylon came to start work on that task, the Jews of Palestine naturally rushed forward to help. They were harshly rebuffed. They were told that they had not kept either their race or their worship or their customs pure; they had, instead, assimilated their race, worship and customs to the goyim. The Jews of Palestine were told, in short, that they were an abomination in the eyes of Jahweh. (For the content and tone of the rejection, see Isaiah 57:3-13, Ezekiel 33:34-9; 2 Kings 17:29-34, etc.).

The citizens of Samaria as well as the other Jews in Palestine were inevitably alienated.⁹ The racists, with the support of the imperial government, retained control of the re-building project, refusing any Jew who did not share in their ultra-conservatism from a share in the work. The Samaritans tried to reverse the order of the Persian government, and succeeded in bringing the work on the temple to a halt. When the returned exiles got the halting order revoked, the Samaritans embarked on a series of delaying tactics.¹⁰ Finally, losing their enthusiasm, the Palestinian Jews gradually drifted further towards assimilation. Though backed by the Persian government, the ‘ultras’ thus stood alone; and this affected their own morale most adversely. Their minds were tuned to the glowing dreams of 2 Isaiah (40-55). But the reality of their situation was quite otherwise. They were threatened by every kind of misery—by treachery (Zechariah 8:10), by weakness

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(Nehemiah 7:4), by poverty (Haggai 1:9-11; 2:15-17). Rather than lsaiah’s master race dominating ‘the lsles’ and giving its law to the goyim, Jahweh’s kingdom was the smallest, the most arid, dilapidated and insignificant corner in a world-empire. Their morale was at a low ebb: a general mood of despondency prevails in Haggai, Malachi, Zechariah, and Trito-Isaiah (Isaiah 56-66). At these fateful moments in Jewish history, Nehemiah and Ezra joined energies to save the race (and the racism) of Judah.

Rebuilding the Law

Nehemiah, a Jewish eunuch cup-bearer of Darius the Great, took advantage of his nearness to the person of ‘the Great King’ to solicit his permission to go to Jerusalem and help rebuild it. Darius appointed him governor in 445 BC (Nehemiah 5:14), a post he held for twelve years.¹² He was authorized to rebuild the city’s fortifications and walls (2:1-8). This is a project the Samaritans had succeeded in stopping through a special order of the king whose suspicion they aroused by allegations of insurrections (Ezra 4:17-22). Nehemiah succeeded in rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, apportioning the work among the various families of repatriated exiles (Nehemiah 3:1-32), and in restoring a fair measure of security.

Now secure behind walls fortified against attack from outside, Nehemiah turned his attention to an ‘enemy within’, namely those Jews, inhabitants of the city, who had intermarried with Samaritans. He asked them to divorce their wives. He was rebuffed; the high priests of Jerusalem were themselves allied in marriage to Sanballat, the governor of Samaria (Nehemiah 13:28). Nehemiah left for the court of Darius, aware that to complete his work he needed new powers from the king and new men to help implement it. He stayed only a few days (13:6), making whatever arrangements he needed and returned to Jerusalem, accompanied, or followed, by Ezra.¹²

Ezra was an arch-fanatic in matters of race and religion, and very knowledgeable in the Law. He came to Jerusalem armed with an edict from the king empowering him to enforce the Jewish Law in the king`s name and under his authority on all Jews in the large satrapy (administrative province) of Abar-Nahara (beyond the River, i.e. geographic Syria; Ezra 7:l2ff., esp. 25-8). In addition to all the free ‘grants-in-aid’ which the central government of the empire as well as its provincial treasuries had granted and promised to grant in the future for the benefit of the temple of Jerusalem, Ezra was empowered to conduct throughout Babylon a ‘United Jewish Appeal’ and to launch an ‘Israel Government Bonds’ sale. (The reader who feels l have used these terms for the sake of a strained, artificial relevance to modern events should consult Ezra 7:12-28 and then decide.) Under the threat of having all their property confiscated and being condemned to become outlaws (10:8), the returned exiles and those Palestinian Jews who sympathized with them were coerced into divorcing

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(their goyim wives (10:44), and pledging to mold every detail of their lives in strict compliance with the letter of the Law as Ezra was to give it to them (9:83, 10:29).

Undoubtedly, Ezra’s Law was not a new legislation created out of nothing. It was a crystallization of materials—literary texts as well as moral imperatives—with which the Jews had long been familiar.¹³ The codification must have been regarded at the time as specially worthy and significant. It unified the whole ethos of the Jews, focusing their consciousness on a single object; itself. In the codified Law, the Jews began to see their identity, their duty, and their destiny. It was meant to satisfy their common religious, political, and social aspirations; to focus their outlook, their loyalty, and their devotion. Ezra solicited and obtained—with no small threat and coercion—every Jew’s promise never to betray that codification. He thus furnished Jewry with a new covenant, on a par with Jahweh’s old covenant with the Patriarchs. For this service, Ezra won the title of founder of Judaism and the gratitude and loyalty of Jews to the present day. In fact, he saved Jewry from dissolving into the body of humanity, that is, from becoming human in common with the rest of us.¹⁴

By making the whole religion equivalent to a literal observance of the Law, Ezra preserved Jewish racial identity. Being direct, precise, comprehensive and, above all, concrete, the Law furnishes the observant with a directive which links the immediate, concrete circumstances of their life to their religion. It thus forges between fellow-Jews an indissoluble bond of community. Jewish Law had the definite purpose of making Jews do particular things in a particular way. The result was a very practical, actual, external—and indeed continual—re-iteration and affirmation of Jewish corporate identity. It produced a Jewish performance of being Jewish. But while it affirmed Jewishness it did not therefore either affirm or enable relationships with God except in this—that the Jews, only and forever the Jews, were His chosen people.

‘Legalism’ of the Pharisees

The Pharisee—Sadducee conflict

The Jews, new under Roman occupation, were leading a troubled, precarious existence, made worse by a serious internal division between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. ‘For two full centuries’ writes W.F. Albright, (1957, p.353), ‘from circa 130 BC to AD 10, Jewish religious life was characterized by this party conflict in which the Pharisees gained ground steadily at the expense of their more aristocratic brethren.’ The Pharisees were ultra-conservative nationalists, or better, racist separatists who lived on, and for, one hope only; the reestablishment of the political kingdom of Judah and the material gran-

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deur of Solomon’s Jerusalem. They thought of the Law as a body of statutes meant to be enacted with absolute, literal obedience. They hoped thereby to live as they imagined the Jews had lived in the time of their great kings. They regarded that idealized past as ‘the good’, since when the Jews had decayed to their present state which they regarded as ‘the evil’. Certainly they saw themselves as the only cure for that evil. Their name indicates ‘separation’—not only from the rest of mankind, but also from their fellow Jews. They were the staunchest followers of the arch-separatist, Ezra., who had developed formal, religious Judaism.¹⁵

This Judaism consisted in the idea of the Torah as the full revelation of God and the duty of memorizing and obeying its teachings and commandments (G,F. Moore, 1927-30, vol.1, pp.14ff), Numerically, the Pharisees may not have been many; but, for preserving the Torah and making its commandments effective in daily life, they were revered by the common people.¹⁶ Their determination to recreate and perpetuate Hebrew ancient history went hand in hand with their application of the older parts of Hebrew Scripture associated with that history. ‘The religion of the Pharisees was an attempt to realize in practice the teaching of the prophets as part of the all-inclusive Torah’ (R. Travers Herford, 1924, p.91). To do this they relied heavily on the oral traditions of the rabbis’ interpretations of the Torah, to which they also adhered with literal fidelity.

Strict deduction from the texts of the Torah was the chief means by which ancient law could, according to the Pharisees, be adapted to new situations and circumstances.¹⁷ lf a proposed new law could not be strictly deduced in this way, it had to be abandoned. The process of deduction moved from the general to the particular: a general ancient law could be applied in a new particular circumstance. Alternatively, if the ancient law concerned a matter of detail, a general principle could be deduced from it and then applied to a new particular circumstance. In either case, the letter of the law as it had been written or memorized ruled the process. The Pharisees also recognized customs and practices, handed down not in written legal texts but by oral transmission, as a legitimate part of the ‘Law of the fathers’.¹⁸ (The oral law, later written down in expanded form, constitutes the Mishnah.)

The Sadducees too found the provisions of the Torah increasingly irrelevant, in an ever-changing world, to many areas of human relationship and activity, public and private. They too were keenly aware that the Jews were not their own political masters and so were obliged to deal with needs and circumstances not covered by the Torah. They sought new legislation through the promulgation, as needs arose, of priestly decrees, Like the deductions of the Pharisees, this method was also a traditional one. The Torah itself provided the authority for such legislation. According to Deuteronomy 17:9-11, a priest has the authority to give his own judgement—presumably in cases where the Torah is silent and where its provision is inadequate and in need of a

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further judgement. The punishment for non-compliance with such a priestly judgement was death (17:12).

The Pharisee-Sadducee conflict appears to have been a competition for power. The latter were in control of the temple and remained so until its destruction in the year 70. For a long time before that, they had led Jewish life; the authority which they claimed from the Torah was vested in them as priests. The Pharisees, without official function in the temple, were lay men, despite their detailed knowledge of the Torah and their memorization of masses of deduced provisions and arguments. Their power to influence and mold Jewish life was more direct. However, this struggle for power with the people does not, by itself; adequately explain why the Pharisees resented the Sadducees’ quite legitimate right to promulgate decrees.

A better explanation is to be found in their respective attitude to the Law and, behind the Law, to ‘the chosen people’ whose Law it was. Especially after Ezra, the Law had been valued as the thing which identified the Jews as such, held them together and., through observance, perpetuated their separate identity. The Pharisees, literalists about their identity as ‘the chosen people`, were also literalists in all matters of legal observance, As Hasmoneans, the Sadducees had learnt too well from the Maccabean tragedy that politically and racially separatist attitudes could again bring disaster at the hands of their enemies. What the Pharisees resented, therefore, was not that the Sadducees issued decrees—they had a right in law and tradition to do that—but that they were lukewarm in their loyalty to the Jews as a distinct racial-political community. The Pharisees continually harassed the Sadducees. They publicly branded their liberalism as licence, and their progressivism as treason to the Hebrew Scripture and to the covenant of Ezra. Already a powerful force, the Pharisees’ influence on Jewish life after the destruction of the temple in the year 70 was to become overwhelming.

Between the two ideological forces represented by Pharisees and Sadducees, the mass of the Jewish people were no doubt despondent, but still looked forward to a Messiah, or deliverer, who would set things right and re-establish their lost glory, Meanwhile, in the ordinary business of life, they compromised their Law as the circumstances of their political subjugation demanded. The pettiness of their disputes with one another is amply illustrated in the anecdotes of Jesus’ life recorded in the Gospels: whether or not one may work on the Sabbath, even though such work may be ethically or physically necessary; whether or not one may eat of certain dishes; whether or not one may eat without washing hands etc. Obviously, these and similar questions did not raise insoluble problems. The answers to them are elementary. Rather, the Pharisees lacked the breadth of spirit with which to see the Law as a body of precepts designed to bring about relationship with God. Their moral sense could no longer grasp any purpose, any value, beyond that of the compliance itself.

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Compliance with the Law, whether it could be achieved or not, became with them an obsession. It governed their whole outlook; its malignant force paralyzed their moral faculties. Jesus, whom they thought to incriminate by forcing him to choose between the two horns of their compliance-dilemmas, rebutted them with his classical ‘both-and’ and ‘neither-nor’ answers. ‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites’ was a constant reproach (Matthew 23:1-39). ‘Ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess’ (23:25); ‘ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgement, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone’ (23:23); ‘ye are like unto whited sepulchres’ (23:27). What the Pharisees really cared for was their being Jewish which was identified as being God’s chosen people; the means to that end, they believed, was strict compliance with the Jewish Law: ‘The Pharisees were vigorous legalists and their great aim was to perpetuate the Jewish Torah in the purest possible form, in order to maintain Israel’s privileged place as the chosen people of God’ (Albright, 1957, p.391). Not surprisingly, their ethic was external obedience, lacking in attention to nuances, to meanings, to final ends.

Six centuries later, the Prophet Muhammad’s experience with the Jews was not unlike that of Jesus. The Qur’an says of them: ‘the likeness of those who are entrusted with the Torah... is as the likeness of the donkey carrying a load of books’ (62:5); ‘those who have received the Scripture turn away from it when its substance is made the judge of their differences’ (3:23); ‘those unto whom the Scripture hath been given would rather take misguidance than guidance’ (4:44); ‘… such as say with their mouths ‘We believe', but their hearts believe not... listeners to falsehood… pulling words out of their context and meaning... greedy for illicit gain... O People of the Scripture! Stress not in your religion anything but the truth and meaning [therein]’ (5:41-2, 77). In every verse what is being criticized is outwardness without a corresponding inwardness.

Notes and references

Notes

¹           Despite all misconceptions to the contrary, articulate Nazism has always maintained that Aryan ‘blood’ is not what the biochemist studies in the laboratory, but is a symbol ‘in the flesh’ of an ideology that is inexplicable in physical terms. Ernst Krieck (1933-4), foremost exponent of Nazi philosophy of education, called blood `the shadowy stream of life’ endowed with ‘symbolic significance’, ‘leading into the realms of metaphysics’ the ‘source of the spirit of the race’, ‘the representation of the current of life from which man ascends to light, spirit and knowledge’.

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²           It may be argued that the Hellenes also considered themselves ‘apart’ from all others whom they called ‘barbarians’. The fact that they did so is not contested. But it was not the same kind of usage. Originally, the term ‘barbarians’ designated speakers of another tongue and, without doubt, the Greeks, down to Plato and Aristotle, distinguished racially between Greeks and non-Greeks. However, Hellenic culture did develop, by the middle of the fourth century BC, a universalism which rejected the earlier Greek racism. In that Hellenic culture, crystallized in Isocrates’ Panegyricus and Xenophon’s Anabasis, the Hellene designated as any man of inferior moral and aesthetic judgement. It was unthinkable of him to join ethical goodness and/or aesthetic refinement to ‘barbarism’. The Hebrew goy (pl. goyim) is quite differently used. A goy may be ethically good and aesthetically refined. The acquisition of these virtues dos not make him any less goy. A man is goy purely because he is not a Jew, a son of the covenant, a member of the Jewish race. Whereas no Jew could under any circumstances be a goy though he may act like one, the Greek and the non-Greek are both ‘barbarian’ as long as they do not act like ‘Greeks’, and stop being so when they do. It was under this Greek influence that Philo (1855 edn, On the Life of Moses, Bk 2, 5) and Josephus (1930 edn, The Jewish War, Pref., s.1), applied the designation ‘upper barbarians’ to the Jews who lived beyond the Euphrates. For an eloquent and enlightening presentation of the role Isocrates’ and Xenophon’s thoughts played in Hellenism, see Werner Jaeger, 1944, vol.3, pp.7Cff., 156ff. The following statement is especially clear (pp.80-1); ‘At first sight it looks like a gigantic paradox for Isocrates to begin his proclamation of the supra-national civilizing mission of Greece by an extravagant utterance of national pride; but the apparent contradiction disappears when we connect the supra-national ideal of Greece—its universally valuable paideia—with the realistic political plan of conquering Asia. In fact, that ideal contains a higher justification for the new national imperialism, in that it identifies what is specifically Greek with what is universally human... The Greeks, through the logos, over which they naturally have command, have revealed to other nations a principle which they too must recognize and adopt because its value is independent of race—the ideal of paideia, of culture... Without the idea which he here expresses for the first time, the idea that Greek paideia was something universally valuable, there would have been no Macedonian Greek world-empire, and the universal culture which we call Hellenistic would never have existed.’

³           Philo was a supreme master of the art and applied it ingeniously to Hebrew Scripture in order to reconcile it with the Neo-Platonic philosophy of the times.

⁴           Before that date, Christendom went through four centuries of strife and indecision regarding the publication of its Scripture. As late as the end of the eleventh century, Pope Gregory VII said ‘God has ordained that in some places Holy Scripture should remain unknown, because, if all could easily understand it, it might through being despised or misinterpreted, lead the people into error’. In 1199, Innocent III complimented the Bishop of Metz because he had disciplined people in his diocese for

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reading the Scripture in French in their own houses. The first direct prohibition against the publication of the Bible was issued by the Council of Toulouse in 1229 (obviously, prior to this, there was no possession of Scripture by the laity to warrant the need for a prohibitive order). lts fourteenth canon reads; ‘We also forbid the laity to possess any of the books of the Old or New Testament, except perhaps someone out of devotion wishes to have the Psalter or Breviary for the Divine offices... but we strictly forbid them having any of these books translated into the vulgar tongue’. Similarly the Synod of Oxford in 1408 enacted: ‘that no man hereafter by his own authority translate any text of scripture into English or any other tongue, and that, no man read any such book, pamphlet or treatise’. For over a millennium, the Church’s attitude was one of jealous custody: wittily ridiculed in this famous comment on a line from the service—Deposit potentes de sede, et exultaoit humiles (He hath put down the mighty from their seats and hath exalted them of low degree)—‘Tis well that such seditious words are sung / Only by priests and in the Latin tongue. The Church had no special loyalty to Latin. It prohibited translation only to preserve its monopoly of the texts and, therefore, of the doctrines and history of the faith. Even then, the Bible was not available to anyone who read Latin, but was kept strictly under lock and key, and could be read only by those members of the clergy sufficiently indoctrinated to understand it in the authorized manner. The fact that Latin went out of circulation made it easier for the Church to guard the people against acquaintance with ‘the Word of God’. Tyndale‘s English Bible had to be published outside of England, was confiscated like any other contraband item and publicly burnt wherever it was found, and its author was banished when he first mentioned the idea of a translation. (All quotations in this note from an address on the history of the Bible by Dean S.B, Frost, McGill University Faculty of Divinity, Montreal, to the Canadian Biblical Society, 1961.)

⁵           Thus, for example, lsaiah’s good wishes on the occasion of Joachim’s having a baby: ‘For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful, the mighty God [a mistranslation of what in Hebrew means ‘a God-like heir], the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace,’ etc., etc. (Isaiah 9:6). Handel popularized these words by setting them to beautiful music in his famous Messiah. The Authorized Standard Version (ASV) calls them ‘Christ's birth and Kingdom’. But this is a piece of writing which, coming from the Exile period, cannot be an expression of Messianic hope which is a later development. Nor is it even an expression of Jewish hope for a king since, at the time, the Jews had one, Joiachim. Rather, it is an expression of lsaiah‘s hope that the future, ushered in by Joiachim‘s new born son, may be a good one. It has, therefore, nothing to do with Christianity. Likewise, lsaiah's wishful description of the future awaiting Israel after its chastisement by Assyria (Isaiah 11:1-16), the Christians prefer to identify as ‘Christ’s peaceable kingdom’ (see ASV), unmindful of its dependence upon that ‘remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt... and from Hamath and from

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the islands of the sea’ (verse 11), and of its resentful dream of vengeance on Israel's neighbours: ‘But they [i.e., the remnant] shall fly upon the shoulders of the Philistines toward the nest; they shall spoil them of the east together; they shall lay their hand upon Edom and Moab; and the children of Ammon shall obey them. And the Lord shall utterly destroy the tongue of the Egyptian sea; and with his mighty wind shall he shake his hand over the river [the Euphrates]’ (Isaiah 11:14-5). Likewise, Deutero-lsaiah’s description of Cyrus, the Persian King, as ‘elected’ by God to bring about the downfall of Babylon, the Jews’ enemy, and restore them from the exile to which they were subjected (Isaiah 42-5), the Christians read literally as a description of ‘the office of Christ graced with meekness and constancy’ (see ASV). (Contrast, e.g., how Verdi understood his Nabucco: ‘the hero of a dramatic fanciful representation of ltaly’s will to freedom from Austrian imperialism’.) Those statements in Isaiah which ring with Hebrew feelings of superiority complex and racism—e.g.  ‘But thou Israel, art my servant, Jacob whom l have chosen, the seed of Abraham my friend. Thou whom l have taken from the ends of the earth… l have chosen thee, and not cast thee away’ (41:8-9)—are called God`s ‘mercies to the church’ (ASV). Those which ring with a Hebrew will to revenge—e.g. ‘Behold, all they that were incensed against thee shall be ashamed and confounded; they shall be as nothing;... and the whirlwind shall scatter them... l gave Egypt for thy ransom. Ethiopia and Seba for thee… For your sake l have sent to Babylon, and have brought down all their nobles, and the Chaldeans, whose cry is in the ships’ (41:11-12; 15-16; 4323, 14)—are called ‘God’s comforting of the church’ (ASV). lsaiah‘s expression of Jewish resentment—e.g. `The labor of Egypt, and merchandise of Ethiopia and of the Sabeans, men of stature, shall come over unto thee, and they shall be thine: they shall come after thee; in chains they shall come over, and they shall fall down unto thee, they shall make supplication unto thee…   Come down, and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon, sit on the ground... thou shalt no more be called tender and delicate. Take the milestones, and grind meal; uncover thy locks, make bare the leg...thy shame shall be seen: I will take vengeance, and l will not meet thee as a man… [The non-Jews] shall bring thy sons in their arms, and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders... they shall bow down to thee with their face toward the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet’ (45:14; 47:1-3, 11; 49:22-23)—is called ‘the ample restoration of the church’ and ‘God’s perpetual love to his church’ (ASV). Jewish delight and joy at the miseries and sufferings of the Gentiles (e.g. Isaiah 52) is called ‘the exaltation of Christ’s Kingdom’ (ASV).

⁶           According to 2 Kings 24: 14, the number of Jews deported to Babylon was 10,000 while 24:16 says it was 8,000. In the year 587 another 3,023 were deported; in 586, 832 (Jeremiah 52:28-9) and in 581 (52:30), 745.

⁷           (1930 edn, Antiquities, 11, 1, 3. To a remark by Herodotus (Ancient

History, 1, 251) that Jewish agriculture in alluvial Babylon was very rich, E.W.K. Mould (l950, pp.119-20) adds: ‘Active and extensive commerce was carried on in Babylon. This was something new [sic] and appealing to the Jews for it offered them big opportunity. So they gradually quit

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farming for trade, and thereby some became rich. Thus the Exile effected a thorough-going transformation in the Jews. It made them into the world’s traders…’

⁸           Jeremiah witnesses to that: ‘There came certain from Shechem, from shaven, and their clothes rent, and having cut themselves with offerings and incense in their hand, to bring them to the house of the Lord’ (Jeremiah 41:5), For evidence of the Palestinian Jews’ mourning the defeat and death of 587-86 BC, and their yearning for a restoration, see Isaiah 63:7-19; 64; 12; Psalms 74, 79; the whole of Lamentations belongs in such a context as Jerusalem under the Chaldeans.

⁹           Originally of mixed race, the Samaritans had been convened to Judaism by priests from the district of Samaria returned from exile by permission of Sargon II (722-705 BC) for that purpose (2 Kings 17:25-28). In religious terms they were Jews, down to every detail, until Ezra’s regime. Then, they refused to give up their non-Samaritan wives. Nehemiah (13, 28-31) tells of a Samaritan priest who, refusing to give up the foreign born woman, is ousted from the priesthood he has supposedly ‘defiled’ by Ezra who thus ‘cleansed... the Levites… from all strangers’. The Samaritans set up for themselves a temple in Mount Gerizim but kept the Scripture (Pentateuch), the Law, the liturgy, and their manner of life absolutely unchanged. (See J.A. Montgomery, 1907, pp.322-46. See also the encyclopedia articles `Samaritans’ by Warren J. Moulton in Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (1908-21); and E. Kautsch, in Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge.)

¹⁰          They convinced, for instance, the Satrap of Syria to stop the restoration work in Jerusalem, which he did (Ezra 4:1-6). This order was not reversed until after the accession of Darius (519 BC) ‘in the sixth year of the reign of Darius the King’ (Ezra 552; Zechariah 4:6-10). Also, they aroused the Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites and all alienated Palestinian Jews to sporadic attacks against Jerusalem so that Nehemiah had to divide the workers into two shifts, one to guard while the other worked (Nehemiah 4:7-23).

¹¹          Nehemiah 2:1, 13:6. These dates (445-33) have been continued by the discoveries of the remains of another colony of tolerant universalist Jews who, running from the Chaldeans, had settled in Elephantine, an island in Upper Egypt near Aswan.

¹²          According to Ezra 717, Ezra arrived at Jerusalem in ‘the seventh year of the King’ and, according to Ezra 7:1, ‘in the reign of Artaxerxes, King of Persia’. This makes his arrival thirteen years earlier than Nehemiah which is unsound. If, on the other hand, the seventh year was in the reign of Artaxerxes II (i.e. 398) it would be too late, because Nehemiah had by then disappeared from the scene. The evidence that these two actually cooperated in the work of restoration, Nehemiah taking care of public matters and security, and Ezra extorting from the Jews oaths to abide by the Law and to divorce their wives and so forth, is too strong to put aside. Against the letter of the Old Testament it seems necessary to uphold this view with which not a few Christian scholars agree. (See e.g. Bright, l959, pp.363ff.)

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¹³          Ezra’s codification is the ‘Five Books of Moses’ or The Pentateuch K.H. Graf, the father of all Biblical criticism, published in 1866 his classic Die Geschichtlichen Bücher des Alten Testaments, a thesis which has won the acclaim of Biblical scholars ever since. Even Julius Wellhausen had little to add to Graf on this subject. He analyzed the Law into strata and then compared them, arguing that the ritual and ceremonial laws represent a development, in general as well as in many particulars later than Deuteronomy, introduced by Hilkiah in the reign of Josiah. Apparently many authors had contributed, adding to or changing them, until Ezra compiled, redacted some, rearranged, and perhaps outrightly legislated other parts of the Law that we now have, in the year 444 BC. Nehemiah 8-10 tells us in more than one place that the Jews of Jerusalem had neither copy nor knowledge of Ezra’s book. For a good introduction to scholarly analysis of this problem, see G.F. Moore, 1927-30, vol. 1, pp.3-36.

¹⁴          G.F.  Moore summarizes the arguments of Abraham Kuenen (a contemporary of Graf—see previous note) in his De Godsdienst van Israël, 1870, vol.2, pp.146-56 (Moore, 1927-30, vol.1, p.13): ‘The introduction of Ezra's law-book changed the whole character of the religion. It was, in the words of Kuenen, the origin of Judaism; [i.e., the religion of the Jews after the fall of Judah in 586 BC in contradistinction from that of earlier times, usually referred to as ‘religion of Israel’ or ‘Hebrew religion’]… There [i.e. before Ezra] the spirit ruled, here [after him] the letter; there the free word, here the scripture. The outstanding figure of the preceding centuries was the prophet; after Ezra his place was taken by the scribe. Thee reform was anti-prophetic and anti-universalistic; inevitably the law extinguished the remnants of prophecy, and it fastened exclusiveness on the religion for all time to come.’

¹⁵          ‘Ezra was regarded as the real founder of Judaism, after Moss; and his work is summed up in saying that he raised the Torah to the supreme place in Jewish life and thought which it has held ever since’ (R. Travers Herford article ‘Pharisees’ in The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, 1924).

¹⁶          Louis Finkelstein, 1939, p.16. Josephus (1930 edn, Antiquities, 18, 1, 4) described the Pharisees as the real leaders of the people: indeed of the Sadducee priesthood as well, ‘Practically nothing,’ he wrote, ‘was done by them [the Sadduccees]; for whenever they attain office they follow—although unwillingly and of compulsion—what the Pharisees say, because otherwise they would not be endured by the people’.

¹⁷          ‘Acknowledging the ‘law of the fathers' to be the sole authority, these lay teachers (the Pharisees) now had to find all the decisions and rules necessary for the practical life of their time contained or implied in the Law. They also had to devise methods for connecting with the Law all those new decisions and customs which were now universally observed by the people, thus making them appear as part of the laws of the fathers’ (Lauterbach, Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s. 6, pp.57ff, quoted by G.H. Box in his article ‘Pharisees’, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics).

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¹⁸            For more detail on how the Law was revised and extended, see. W.F. Albright, 1957, pp.354ff.; also, A. Kaminka, in the Encyclopedia Judaica, vol.4, p.623.

References

Albright, W.F. (1957) From the Stone Age to Christianity, Doubleday, New York.

Bright., John (1959) A History of Israel, Westminister Press, Philadelphia.

Buber, Martin (1946) Moses, East and West Library, Oxford.

Buber, Martin (1952) Israel and Palestine: the History of an Idea, East and West Library, Oxford.

Finkelstein, Louis (1939) The Pharisees. The Sociological Background of their Faith, Jewish Publications Society.

Freud, Sigmund (1939) Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones, A.A. Knopf New York.

Herford, R Travers (1924) The Pharisees, Macmillan, London.

Hussayn, M. Kamil (n.d.) Mutanaww’iat, Cairo (The relevant chapter is translated by Kenneth Cragg (1959) in The Muslim World, 49 (1), pp.30-40.)

Jaeger, Werner (1944) Paideia. The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. Gilbert Highet, Oxford University Press, New York.

Josephus (l930 edn) Works, trans. H. Thackeray, Heinemann, London

Krieck, Ernst (1933-4) ‘Völkische Erziehung aus Blut und Boden’, Internationale Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 3, pp.305-9. (English trans., pp.310ff.)

Moore, G.F. (1927-30) Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, Harvard University Press.

Montgomery, J.A. (1907) The Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect: Their History, Theology and Literature, PhiIadelphia.

Mould, E.W.K. (1950) Bible History Digest, Exposition Press, New York.

Philo (1855 edn) Works, ed. C.D. Yonge, Henry Bohn, London.

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