The Legends of the Jews
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| The Legends of the Jews - by Louis Ginzberg |
The term Rabbinic was applied to the Jewish Literature of post-Biblical times by those who conceived the Juda¬ ism of the later epoch to be something different from the Judaism of the Bible, something actually opposed to it. Such observers held that the Jewish nation ceased to exist at the moment when its political independence was destroyed.
For them, the Judaism of the later epoch has been a Judaism of the Synagogue, the spokesmen of which have been the scholars, and the Rabbis. And what this phase of Juda¬ ism brought forth has been considered by them to be the product of the schools rather than the product of practical, pulsating life. Poetic phantasmagoria, frequently the vaporings of morbid visionaries, is the material out of which these scholars construct the theologic system of the Rabbis, and fairy tales, the spontaneous creations of the people, which take the form of sacred legend in Jewish literature.
The school and the home are not mutually opposed to each other in the conception of the Jews. They study in their homes, and they live in their schools. Likewise, there is no distinct class of scholars among them, a class that withdraws itself from participation in the affairs of practical life. Even in the domain of the Halakah, the Rabbis were not so much occupied with theoretic principles of law as with the concrete phenomena of daily existence. These they sought to grasp and shape. And what is true of the Halakah is true with greater emphasis on the Haggadah, which is popular in the double sense of appealing to the people and being produced in the main by the people. To speak of the Haggadah of the Tannaim and Amoraim is as far from fact as to speak of the legends of Shakespeare and Scott. The ancient authors and their modem brethren of the guild alike elaborate legendary material which they found at hand.
The compilation consists of seven volumes (four volumes of narrative texts and two volumes of footnotes with a volume of the index) synthesized by Louis Ginzberg in a manuscript written in the German language. In 1913, it was translated by Henrietta Szold. It was published in Philadelphia by the Jewish Publication Society of America from 1909 to 1938.
The author: Rabbi Louis Ginzberg was a Talmudist and leading figure in the Conservative Movement of Judaism of the twentieth century. He was born in Kaunas, Vilna Governorate and he died in New York City.