- mised land of their fathers was desolated. Thousands of
the people were slain or reduced to slavery. Of the Jews who dwelt as strangers in Egypt, Syria, and Italy—the very name was hated and despised. Only one thing remained to the sad remnant of the Chosen People: the sacred Law of Moses, the Torah—the writings of their old prophets—their treasured Psalms—the undying records of their past glorious history.
And these precious writings, and the wonderful body of rule and tradition, oral and written, which had gathered round them, the Halachah and Haggadah of the Scribes, collected during the previous four or five centuries,—these were saved from the awful wreck, and a group of devoted Jews gathered them together, and with them at once proceeded to train up a new and a yet greater and more influential people than had ever before worshipped the Eternal of Hosts, even in the golden days of their mighty kings David and Solomon; but the foundation-stories of the grandeur of the new Israel were not to be built with human materials. No army, no strong fortress, no stately city, not even a visible temple made with hands after the fashion of the glorious lost House of God, were for the future to rank among the proud and cherished possessions of the Jew. Only the Divine Law given him direct from God the One Supreme, the Everlasting, for the future was to represent to the Jew home and hearth, family and nation, City and Temple.
If the Jews—the scattered harassed remnant who survived the bloody Roman war of Titus—would with heart and soul keep the precepts of the Divine Law, what mattered insult and cruelty, human scorn and malice, suffering and misery for a little season; for eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, the beatitude which awaited the Jew who loved the Torah. This was the teaching of that group of fervid and devoted men who, so to speak, arose out of the ashes of the ruins of Jerusalem and the Temple. And the sad remnant of the people hearkened to this teaching, and with heart and soul revered the Law, the Torah of their God.
All this is no mere rhetoric, strange though it reads: it is plain unvarnished history.
Undismayed by the crushing ruin of A.D. 70, the
