Judaism discovered

Strange Qualifications for Biblical Expertise

Roman Catholic Books of Fort Collins, Colorado is the publishing arm of a Catholic organization that clings to the old Latin Tridentine Mass and the Pope of Rome (as opposed to the growing corps of Tridentine Catholics who regard the Pope as a public heretic and believe the "See of Peter" is vacant, i.e. sede vacantist). In the spring of 2000, a four-page catalog of selections from the Roman Catholic Books company appeared as an insert in the flagship papist newspaper, The Wanderer. One of the items advertised in the catalog was a reprint of The Nazarene, a book by Israel "Eugenio" Zolli, the former chief rabbi of Rome, who converted to Catholicism. The story of Rabbi Zolli has been blacked out by the establishment who seek to tar Pius XII with a Nazi stigma. As Chief Rabbi of Rome during WWII, Zolli was able to judge

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Pius XII's actions under the Nazi occupation first hand. So impressed was this rabbi with the pope's rescue effort on behalf of Italy's Judaic population, that Rabbi Zolli converted to Catholicism in 1945 and changed his name from Israel to Eugenio in honor of the pope (Pius XII was born Eugenio, his surname was Pacelli). Zolli died in 1956.

In recommending the volume by Zolli, Roman Catholic Books stated: "The years Zolli devoted to learning ancient languages and studying the Torah, Talmud, Midrash and other sacred Jewish texts gave him an advantage over Christian scholars. They came to Hebraic literature as outsiders; but Zolli had lived and breathed the words of the prophets and rabbis all his life. For this reason, Zolli's book stands head and shoulders above the innumerable Biblical commentaries."

In this promotional statement for Zolli and his book we observe the calamitous notion that there is some Biblical expertise and heritage worthy of our approbation in Judaism, in deference to its scholars who have "an advantage over Christian scholars" in the field of Bible study. The predominance of the faulty idea that Judaism is the root of Christianity, is responsible for much of the paralysis and impotence in the Church today. Prof. Shahak and Prof. Norton Mezvinsky of Connecticut State University write: "The Bible anyway is not the book that primarily determines the practices and doctrines of Orthodox Jews. The most fundamentalist Orthodox Jews are largely ignorant of major parts of the Bible and know some parts only through commentaries that distort meaning...Judaism, as it came to be known, did not exist during the biblical period."¹⁷⁷ The group "Roman Catholic Books" does not seem to grasp the fact that no other religion prepares one for the study, and more importantly the true understanding of the Bible, than Christianity. It is one thing to suggest that a lifelong facility with Hebrew is a significant aid to Bible exegesis. One may obtain such facility through diligent language study from an early age, so the advantage is not one of religion but of precocity and pedagogy. It is quite another matter however, to claim that immersion in the Talmud and Midrash gives a Talmud-follower a theological advantage over Christian scholars who base their study of God's Word solely on the Old and New Testament and the Early Church. To make such a claim is to actually say that being familiar

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with a huge compendium of the lies and fantasies of men is an advantage over a researcher who has hewed to God's Word, and to the scholarship of those Christian exegetes who expound the Bible in faithful submission to its divine authority. Superstition, goddess-worship, reincarnation and idolatry incontrovertibly comprise the under-publicized, formative core of Judaism's oral traditions, and have exerted a profound influence on the rabbis since their sojourn in Babylon eighteen hundred years ago. Everything these soothsayers touch, from the Old Testament to the Christian ecclesia, they pervert. Yet "Christian" leaders and organizations continue to bow down before them in awe.

Like the Talmud, the Midrash upholds the rabbinic fallacy that the Bible is deficient and incomplete; that it requires the intervention of Midrashic traditions concocted between 400 and 1200 A.D. to be understood. Barry W. Holtz, Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and director of the seminary's Melton Research Center states: "The Bible is loath to tell us the motivations, feelings, or thoughts of characters. Rarely giving us descriptive details either of people or places, it is composed in a stark, uncompromising style. Hence, in the laconic style of the Bible, we find one significant cause of the necessity of Midrash. Midrash comes to fill the gaps, to tell us the details the Bible teasingly leaves out: what did Isaac think as his father took him to be sacrificed? The Bible doesn't tell us, but Midrash fills it in with rich and varied descriptions. Why did Cain kill Abel? Once again the Bible is silent, but Midrash is filled with explanation. How tall was Adam when he walked in the Garden? Look to the midrashic materials, not the Bible for such details... Where the Bible is mysterious and silent, Midrash comes to unravel the mystery... the Bible often states matters of law without clarification or detail... Observant Jews today keep separate dishes for milk and meat, but where is that outlined in the Bible? Nowhere, in fact. It was the Midrash of rabbinic Judaism, legal Midrash, that defined the laws." ¹⁷⁸

The Catholic publishing company that recommends Zolli's book because the author steeped himself for decades in the impostures and charlantry of rabbinic tradition, can only be ignorant of the actual character and content of the Talmud and the Midrash. Presbyterian theologian Douglas Jones associates ancient Israel with Judaism, further compounding the oxymoronic

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myth of a Judeo-Christian tradition. For modern Protestantism to announce that Abraham is the father of Judaism and Christianity is to proclaim him the father of the Pharisees, and their tradition of the elders, contradicting the very heart of what Jesus proclaimed to the Pharisees in the book of John, chapter 8.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Christendom existed for 1494 years before this term Judaism was even coined in English, yet modernist Christians assign this name to the ancient Israelite religion of Yahweh. "Well, okay, so what?" might be the sloppy, slothful modern reply. "It's just a word." But as William N. Grimstad states in Talk About Hate, "We need to get to the bottom of the fact that ninety percent of what is haywire... has to do not with water pollution or air pollution but with word pollution." Indeed, the misuse of words in this digital media/infotainment age has repercussions far beyond the realm of the academic. Precision is of crucial importance and the failure to select the accurate word or term for a thing can mislead whole nations for generations. The substitution of Judaism for Israelite is perhaps one of the most spectacular examples of this detrimental process in action. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that Presbyterian leader Douglas Jones had written, "Today, we so often think of the Israelites and the Christians as two distinct religions, almost like Buddhism and Islam. But early Christianity never saw itself in that way. The earliest Christians saw themselves as faithful Israelites simply following Yahweh's teachings. In fact, the first main dispute in the Christian church was whether non-Israelites, the Gentiles, could even be a part of Christianity!"

Had Jones written the preceding there would be no argument, because the names Israelite and Yahweh are direct and historically accurate representations of the people, beliefs and deity of the Old Testament creed. In fact, these accurate descriptive terms were in general use by Christian writers, scholars and theologians for centuries before the dawn of the modern period and the commensurate enormous pressure on the Church to pay homage to counterfeit Israel-carnal Israel, to use Augustine's term~a religion of ever-increasing dead ritual and occult superstition from the first century A.D. onward.

According to one of the leading orthodox rabbis and Jewish scholars in America, Jacob Neusner: "This book introduces the structure and the functioning system of Rabbinic Judaism... the particular religious system set

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forth by sages, or 'rabbis' who flourished in the first six centuries C.E. This same Judaism is also called 'talmudic' because its main statement is set forth by the Talmud of Babylonia..." ¹⁷⁹ Rabbi Neusner refers to a "Rabbinic Judaism." He indicates that it arose in Babylon during the centuries after Christ was crucified. Rabbi Neusner further notes that "rabbinic literature took shape during the nascent and formative age of Christianity." He calls Christianity: "...a challenge that had to be met, for Christianity appealed to the same authoritative writings, the Hebrew scriptures of ancient Israel, that this Judaism formulated in its way." ¹⁸⁰Notice the delineation Neusner makes between the ancient Hebrew scriptures and the rabbinic literature. They are quite patently not the same! The former is the ancient root of Christianity. The latter, formulated after Christ's incarnation and crucifixion, is the modern root of Judaism.

A Closer Look at "Rabbinic Literature"

Let us take a closer look at this formative "rabbinic literature." It is formative because it, and not the Old Testament, is the foundation stone of Judaism. The tradition of the elders condemned by Christ in Mark 7 and Matthew 15 was an oral gnosis that preserved the thinking behind the idolatry and the apostasy of the Israelites who had worshipped the Golden calf and fed their children to Molech. It was an undercurrent of corruption ever-threatening to boil upward and become institutionalized into a formal and competing religion, by being committed to writing. The boiling point of corruption was reached after the Pharisaic Jewish leadership rejected the Messiah. Having rejected the Biblical Messiah, they were guilty of having perpetrated an enormous, indeed a cosmic crime against God's law, His prophecies and prophets. As a result of the corrupting effects of this epochal transgression, they began to commit their oral traditions to writing, beginning with the Mishnah. Rabbi Neusner admits that: "The Mishnah certainly is the first document of rabbinic Judaism. Formally, it stands at the center of the system, since the principal subsequent rabbinic documents, the Talmuds, lay themselves out as if they were exegeses of Mishnah..." ¹⁸¹

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Not the Book of Genesis, not the Pentateuch, but the Mishnah is the "first document" of Judaism, standing at the "center of the system." How can it be said that Judaism represents the teaching of Moses, when the Bible is not the center of the system? Is this what Moses taught? It may come as a shock to learn, as we demonstrated from the outset of this writing, that the rabbis are conscious of their monumental fraud and they privately admit among themselves that their system has no basis in Moses. In a cryptic passage from a book of the Kabbalah (Tikkunei Zohar 1:27b), buried within a double- entendre, is a reference to the Mishnah actually being "the burial place of Moses." The rabbinic authors of the Mishnah admit to each other that their teachings and laws have "scant scriptural basis":

It was already stated in an ancient Mishna that 'The laws concerning the Sabbath, Festal-offerings and acts of trespass are as mountains hanging by a hair, for they have scant Scriptural basis but many laws' (M. ffagiga i, 8).

"Scant Scriptural basis" for Judaism's laws

Equally revealing is the title of Susan Handelman's book about the Talmud: The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (State University of New York, 1982). "Don't bother me with the facts," seems to be the reaction of the priests, bishops, popes and Protestant ministers and preachers who continue to insist that Judaism is a Biblical religion. These mercenary clergy gain worldly power and prestige from being seen as pro-rabbinic. They dare not sacrifice their worldly perks for something as unimportant as the truth! How has our understanding of Judaism been so fundamentally distorted? How has so great a fraud been perpetrated as the claim that Judaism is based on the Bible, when Judaism actually began with the Talmud of Babylon? First we must consider the mercenary motivation (along with the love of power) of the ministers and priests of Churchianity: "...religion has always been a foundation for men to build a profitable trade upon; that is, men of selfish views have made it subservient to the purposes of worldly power, wealth and grandeur to themselves; and these I call the interested in religion...And though the professed design of the interested in religion is to secure to others the favor of

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God, and their happiness in another world: yet the real design, and what they steadily pursue, is their own power and wealth, and every other advantage which they can possibly gain, or secure to themselves in this." ¹⁸²

For an ambitious young clergyman with oratorical and business skills, at the price of falling prostrate before Satan, who from Nimrod's time has sought and gained world power, he becomes an American-Israeli advocate and activist from the pulpit, beginning a career that will sail on the winds of the spirit of the age, with all doors open to him. If he is a master of glib patter and waving the Bible in the air while the Las Vegas-style lounge act masquerading as sacred music backs up his patter, he may make it all the way to the top, as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Paula White and Tim LaHaye have done. A minister of the Gospel who tells the truth about Judaism in the church, however, is likely to be run out of it, or fated to pastoring a shrinking congregation under constant attack by the media and heresy-hunting "human rights watchdog" groups. For most young clergymen, in spite of whatever their convictions may be, the choice is a no-brainer: they'll shill for the rabbis and the Israeli generals every time, thereby obtaining an opportunity at raking in fame and fortune.

"No science can better convince us of the divinity of Christ than magic and Kabbalah." Another part of the answer may be found in the fact that Judaism began to infiltrate the Roman Catholic Church in earnest and contributed as well to the rise of certain major denominations of Protestantism, thanks to a myth which gained cachet during the Renaissance. The nature of this deliberately-planted disinformation was that the religion of Judaism was the Biblical religion par excellence and that for a Christian intellectual or spiritual seeker to truly know the Old Testament it was necessary to in some degree consult a rabbi. The occult infiltration of the Church was well under way by the fifteenth century when the hermetic, Neo-Platonic school of so-called "Christian Kabbalists" led by Pico della Mirandola, circulated the Kabbalistic theses in Rome, whose central theme was that "No science can better convince us of the divinity of Christ than magic and Kabbalah."

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Rabbi Ben Zion Bokser claims that "Pope Sixtus IV was so delighted with his (Pico's) work that he urged him to translate Cabbalistic texts into Latin for the use of divinity students" (The Maharal, 1994, p. 11). Pico was followed in 1517 by Johannes Reuchlin, whose De Arte Cabalistica put gematria (the rabbinic numerological system), to use in Bible study; by the Franciscan monk Francesco Giorgi's 1525 tribute to the Zohar, De Harmonia mundi and Cornelius Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia of 1531; all these culminated in the 1564 occult masterwork, Monas hieroglyphica by the reigning figure of Protestant occultism, the mathematician Dr. John "007" Dee, the founder of Freemasonry and the idea of British Empire. In modern times, the hysteria whipped up around the concepts of "antisemitism" and "The Holocaust," cause frightened and guilt-laden gentiles and Christians to halt almost all critical inquiry into the claim that the creed of the religion of Judaism is synonymous with the Old Testament. To view that claim with skepticism has become a thought-crime, an exercise in heinous "antisemitism" that will "if not checked," inevitably lead to another "Holocaust." By this impressively effective intimidation device, the hoax that Judaism was the Biblical religion, is validated and given near-universal cachet. But scared rabbits do not make for good scholars or good Christians, as William Scott Green of the University of Rochester, a contributor to Rabbi Neusner's Rabbinic Judaism book, makes plain:

"It is commonplace to classify Rabbinic Judaism as a... religion in which practice and belief derive from the study and interpretation of Scripture.. .The.. .model depicts Rabbinic Judaism as an., .exegetical development out of Scripture itself... The model makes reading and interpreting the Bible the quintessential rabbinic activities... Rabbinic Judaism emerges as Bible-centered—the Bible read, the Bible studied, the Bible interpreted, the Bible 'put into practice'... Indeed the picture of... rabbis as Bible readers expounding their religion out of Scripture has a powerful intuitive plausibility in a culture in which religion is conceived largely in Protestant terms...'

But, the "model... blocks our perception of the particularities of rabbinic culture... the rabbis' interest in Scripture was hardly comprehensive, and vast segments of it, including much of prophecy and the Deuteronomic history, escaped their interpretation... Scripture neither determined the agenda nor provided the ubiquitous focus of rabbinic literary activity and

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imagination... substantial portions of rabbinic teaching- for example, on matters as basic and important as Sabbath observance-have scant Scriptural support. (The) complex of rabbinically ordained practices.. including most of the rules for the treatment of Scripture itself—do not derive from Scripture at all. Rabbinism's initial concern was the elaboration and refinement of its own system. Attaching the system to Scripture was secondary. It therefore is misleading to depict Rabbinic Judaism primarily as the consequence of an exegetical process or the organic unfolding of Scripture. Rather, rabbinism began as the work of a small, ambitious, and homogenous group of pseudo-priests... By the third century, (A.D.) the rabbis expressed their self-conception in the ideology of 'oral Torah,' which held that a comprehensive body of teachings and practices (halakot) not included in Scripture had been given by God and through Moses only to the rabbinic establishment." ¹⁸³

Green gives the origin of Judaism as 70 A.D (although he substitutes for Judaism the word rabbinism): "...it helps to remember that rabbinism's initial catalyst was neither the canonization of the Hebrew Bible nor readerly research of Scripture but the demise of the Second Temple...¹⁸⁴

Judaism is the product of a "small, ambitious, and homogenous group of pseudo-priests..." The Talmud, beginning with the Mishnah, is the chief Scripture of the religion of Judaism. The great, Pharisaic "sages of blessed memory" decree this themselves in the Talmud. From the Talmud, Shabbat 15c and Baba Metzia 33A, comes the three propositions of the revered, Gentile-hating Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai, one of the most honored of all "sages." Yohai wrote:

A. "He who occupies himself with Scripture gains merit that is no merit.

B. "He who occupies himself with Mishnah gains merit for which people

receive a reward.

C. "He who occupies himself with Talmud—there is no source of merit

greater than this."

What part of the preceding unimpeachable statement from the supreme holy book of Judaism do gentiles and Christians not understand? Old

¹⁸³ Rabbinic Judaism by Jacob Neusner with a contribution by William Scott Green, pp. 31-34, (op. cit.).
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Testament study is denigrated in Judaism unless it is viewed through the distorting prism of Talmud. This is what Jesus Christ stated in Mark chapter 7 about the oral tradition of the elders that became the Talmud when it was written down, it makes the Bible of "none effect." Judaism is the religion of the tradition of the elders and the nullification of the Old Testament, exactly as Jesus Christ stated, yet his bold words of truth are so politically incorrect in our current Talmudic age that, "for fear of the Jews," every somersault must be turned by those who claim to be His followers today, in order to blot out Christ's own words of warning, and conform instead to the iron dogma that the adherents of Judaism are the "People of the Book." Indeed they are, but that book is not the Old Testament Scriptures, it is the Babylonian Talmud. Baruch Maoz is an Israeli citizen, a veteran of the Israeli military and a convert to Christianity. He gives the following testimony concerning claims of the existence of a "Biblically consistent Judaism": "There simply is no such thing. Judaism is not Jewish; it is in many instances a direct contradiction of Biblical teaching. The truth is that the rabbis hijacked Jewish national identity 2,000 years ago, when the Temple was destroyed...Rather than being reliable guides to an understanding of the Torah...they are blind leaders of the blind."

"Study of Bible is an accomplishment, yet not an accomplishment; but the study of Oral Law, there is no greater accomplishment then this."

BT Baba Metzia 33a

"At the end of the previous century, the Mirrer Yeshiva's Mashgiach Ruchani brought a student to the Rosh Yeshiva for disciplining. After hearing the charges, the Rosh Yeshiva slapped the hapless pupil in front of the student body. He (the student) had habitually assembled other students for the purpose of studying Bible between afternoon and evening prayers. Although extreme, this anecdote illustrates the paradoxical relationship that exists between the Bible and those who claim to be its true practitioners. Ask the average yeshiva student to .learn it...He'll hem and haw, and make a vague promise to make time someday. He definitely wouldn't learn it in yeshiva, where Talmud studies prevails. The Netziv once said that his

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students 'knew the Bible through the Talmud, and knew the Talmud through the Ketzot'¹⁸⁵

"...Pirkei Avot (5:24) explicitly states, 'a five year old should study Bible, a ten year old should study Mishnah, and a fifteen year old should study Gemara.' Variations on this statement appear throughout the Talmud and Midrashim. Maimonides in Hilchot Talmud Torah (1:11) rules: A person should divide his time in learning: a third for Bible, and third for the Oral Law (Mishnah), and a third for Gemara (Talmud). Y.D. 246:4 rules similarly. However, this doesn't validate Bible study in Judaism as an independent discipline. Tractate Sofrim (16:9) states: One who toils in Talmud will progress. But one should not pass over Scripture and Mishnah to concentrate on the Talmud; instead, he should study Scripture and Mishnah in order to understand Talmud. Maimonides halacha codifies this trend (1:12): "The above applies in the early stages of a person's study. However, when a person increases his knowledge and does not have the need to read the Written Law, or occupy himself with the Oral Law constantly, he should study the Written Law and the oral tradition at designated times. Thus, he will not forget any aspect of the laws of the Torah. However, he should focus his attention on the Gemara alone for his entire life, according to his desire and ability to concentrate." ¹⁸⁶

Notice the dissimulation mechanism. Why does Maimonides shift from allotting equal time between the sacred texts, to emphasizing Talmud (Gemara) almost exclusively? This allows for an ingenious loophole: the Bible is studied by reading —not the Bible— but the Talmud! The Lechem Mishnah states that this ruling explains the common practice of devoting the majority of one's energies to Gemara, despite the injunction to study all three areas equally. Similarly, R. Yosef Karo, in his glosses to the Mishneh Torah, suggests that time was the guiding factor — realistically, Talmud studies require more time. Rabbeinu Tarn (Tos. Kiddushin 30a) offers a different solution. The Gemara (BT San. 24a) describes the Babylonian Talmud as encompassing all areas of Torah. Therefore, Rabbeinu Tarn suggests that a person fulfill his requirement to study Torah through Gemara studies

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alone.. the Siftei Cohen responded (245:5): 'But I maintain that the practices of Israel (to teach children only Gemara) are like Torah; for have not the Tosafot written, as has the Semag. . . that we can find support for our custom in the statement that the Babylonian Talmud. . . is a mixture of Scripture, Mishnah, and Talmud, so he need not allocate a third of his time to Scripture if he studies the Talmud.

"The vast majority of halachic works emphasize the importance of Talmud study over Bible study. What created this imbalance? Talmudic sources openly accentuate the oral tradition's central importance in Judaism. The Covenant between G-d and B'nei Yisrael was not formed except over the Oral Law (BT Gittin 61a). To some, the Talmud represents the unique relationship that the Jew shares with his Maker. R. Yitzchak from Corville wrote: 'Don't think that the essential section of the Torah is the Written Law. Only over the Oral Law did G-d establish his covenant with us'...R. Shlomo ben Mordechai from Merezich, a 16th century student of R. Shlomo Luria, expressed most chauvinistically these sentiments: 'The true future salvation from Gog and Magog will only come about through the merit of Talmud study, for Talmud study leads to saintliness and purity. while Bible study does not even produce righteousness.. Even a little Talmud study creates more fear of Heaven than much Bible study.. I swear by my life, they (Bible scholars) do not even know how to put tefillin ¹⁸⁷ on correctly...'

"Hold back your children from higayon" "This emphasis on Talmud studies, both as a practical source of halacha and a symbolic source of Jewish uniqueness, nearly extinguished Bible studies from the yeshiva.. other sources were interpreted to explicitly warn against Bible study. Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrkanus warned his students, 'hold back your children from 'higayon' (B'rachot 28b). Rashi explains 'higayon' to mean 'excessive Bible study that attracts one too much.' This identification of 'higayon' with Bible study dates back to the Gaonim. Sefer Yuchsin wrote (quoting R. Zemach ben Platoi Gaon), 'Hold back your children from 'higayon' —from studying the Bible, for it leads to heresies.' The fear that Bible studies could lead to heresy already existed in Tannaitic times...

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"Rashi explained the danger differently; due to its attractiveness, Bible study distracts a person from serious Gemara study. The Mishnah states (Shabbat 115a) that 'We do not read from the Writings, since it leads to the nullification of the Beit Midrash.' Rashi, quoting his teacher R. Yitzchak haLevi, explains: '...since Bible study is more attractive to people, and Shabbat was utilized to give sermons (halachic guidance and explanations) to the people...it is better for them to hear (the sermons) then to read from the Writings.'

"What were the historical factors that caused the People of the Book to abandon it? In the Babylonian yeshivot, Bible study had a respected place, even though Talmud study was the central focus. Despite this, we occasionally find Amoraim who were unfamiliar with Biblical verses. The Machzor Vitri justifies this deficiency: 'Since poverty and want spread (to the scholars), forcing them to support themselves, they could not afford to devote a third of their time to Bible study. They had to rely on the statement that the study of Talmud encompasses all disciplines. However, regular Bible instruction continued into the ninth century, until the schism with the Karaites. For the first time, outside conflicts led to Bible study being diminished. The fear of potential heresies affected major curricular changes in the yeshivot. With the Karaites trumpeting their 'unadulterated' Bible, unencumbered by Rabbinic commentaries and traditions, the Gaonic yeshivot reduced their emphasis on Bible study. Bible teachers were warned not to teach the text's simple meaning.. Later sources even warn against Bible teachers as a 'source of apostasy.'.. Indirect evidence for this sorry state came from a polemic written by Pope Gregory IX. As an addendum to an order to confiscate and burn Talmudic manuscripts, he mentioned that the Jews in his realm avoid Bible study, for fear that 'it would attract them to that strange law (Christianity).'

"Apparently, when preservation of the Talmud and halachic system were at stake, the community's heads preferred practical Talmudic knowledge at the expense of Bible scholarship. This rationale was offered by the 17th century Italian, Rabbi Yehudah Ashael Matov: 'There is room to find justification for the Ashkenazic community and their leaders, why a people so wise and penetrating are pathetically ignorant of Bible, grammar. . . their limitations are their perfections, for they were able to engage in in-depth study (Gemara) in the time that they could have utilized for Bible.

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"...the Talmud-centric curriculum of Middle Age Ashkenaz did not reflect an ideal situation, but was the necessary reaction to the turbulent circumstances that surrounded them. The yeshivot's new focus on the community's intellectual elites did not go unchallenged. The German Pietists unleashed a series of criticisms on their society, including on the educational institutions in general, and the lack of Bible study in particular. Their critique dealt with three issues. Ignoring Bible was foolhardy, for Bible had a necessary utilitarian role in understanding the Oral Law. A vast storehouse of ethical and moral lessons lay unmined for the people, and finally, the concentration of educational resources on a select few ran the risk of alienating the larger population. The German Pietists were the first to write of the.. phenomenon of a rabbi who was 'an expert in the Talmud and an ignoramus in the Bible.' ...The expulsion in 1492 of Sefardic Jewry from Spain, and the eastward movement of Ashkenazic Jewry to Poland, Austria-Hungary, Bohemia, saw a new lessening of Bible study, this time in the face of 'pilpul.' Originated by R. Yehoshua Falk, students eagerly adopted this new methodology of making arbitrary distinctions and dialectic categories in Talmudic studies.. this 'pilpul' involved a system of linguistic inferences, and convoluted, flimsy reasoning. Although it centered in Poland, this phenomenon occurred in both Sefardic and Ashkenazic communities. Again, the shift to Talmud led to a weakening of Bible study in the yeshivot.. Bible study remained neglected among Ashkenazic Jewry. Rabbi Yosef Haan, of 17th century Frankfurt writes of rabbis 'who have never seen Scripture before in their lives.' For yeshiva students, only Talmud and halacha were the financial passport to making a living as a rabbi or judge. The possibility of being rejected for a good, financially comfortable match alone turned many students away from Bible studies. Rabbi Yosef Stathaugen (died 1715) wrote that students would not study Bible for fear that people would say, 'a student who studied in such a prestigious institution spends his time studying Bible?'...Among the reasons for neglecting.. were their perpetual battles with heretics...(l)ike the Karaites and the medieval Christians.. In response, the Rabbis banned Bible study. This cycle, where fear of heresy led to the Bible's neglect, repeated itself in the eighteenth century conflict with the Hasidim...Rabbi Yechezkel Landau (Chief Rabbi) of Prague.. His introduction to his novellae on Talmud, the Tz'lach, begins with a full fledged attack on unrestricted Bible study: 'It appears to me, since the heretics also study Bible

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for their own purposes, if your son studies Bible without supervision, he may have a teacher who is one of 'them,' and he will follow after their empty beliefs. This is true even more so in our time.. therefore, Rabbi Eliezer warned us (Brachot 28b) to stay away from the Bible, and seat our children at the knees of scholars, who will teach them Mishnah and Gemara.. If Bible studies appeared in 19th century Lithuanian yeshivot, it was only in the guise of the weekly pares with Rashi. Perhaps the only yeshiva that encouraged some form of Bible study was Volozhin, first under Rabbi Chayim of Volozhin, and then under the Netziv. Rabbi Chayim Ozer Grodzinski summarized the prevailing 'yeshivish' attitude about Bible study when he said, 'Only insignificant people study Bible — not yeshiva bachurs..."¹⁸⁸

The yeshiva model of Bible study consists in filtering texts entirely through the distorting prism of the traditions of the rabbis. This trend commenced as a response to defending against the challenges to Judaism from Christians and Karaites. If the Bible was to be studied at all by adherents of Judaism, it would be presented hopelessly buried beneath complex rabbinic commentaries and glosses. The principle of sola Scriptura is out of the question in Judaism: "Rabbi Yisrael Rosen proposes that we study Bible in yeshiva in the same manner we study Talmud. If studying Gemara entails Rashi, Rambam, and Tosafot, then studying Bible means doing so armed with midrashim and Chazal. R. Y. Cooperman argued that only after studying the midrashim in depth could one return to study the 'p'shaf (plain meaning) of the (Bible) verse. R. Rosen nominates Rabbi Yehoshua Bachrach as the pioneer in this methodology. His works effortlessly weave the midrashim tradition into the plain meaning of the text." ¹⁸⁹

No matter what the contingencies, the Word of God always takes a back seat to the word of men in Judaism. By definition a Judaic scholar of the highest level of religious erudition, gedol, is always a master of the Talmud. His scholarship is determined by the extent of his grasp of the Talmud and cognate rabbinic texts: "The 'yeshiva' approach had one solitary purpose. Yeshivot were geared towards developing, 'gedolei YisraeV (supreme rabbis of

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Israel). For this reason, other studies were forbidden. Without total concentration on Talmudic studies, students could not become 'gedolim" ¹⁹°