the student of comparative jurisprudence and of social economy. The Haggadah, on the other hand, attaining its fullest development in its treatment of the Biblical text, is therefore frequently included in the second paragraph of the Biblical articles. While in other directions its utterances bear more directly upon matters of theology, much remains both in legend and in proverbial wisdom which is discussed under the appropriate heads.
The rabbis of Talmudic times—the Tannaim and Amoraim—those innumerable transmitters of traditions and creators of new laws, receive ample treatment in the pages of the Encyclopedia. Not a few of them mark epochs in the development and growth of the halakic material, while others are interesting from their personal history or from the representative pictures of their times which their lives and teachings afford. Most of them being at the same time teachers and preachers, their biographies would be incomplete without specimens of their homiletic and ethical utterances. Those familiar with the labyrinthian structure of the Talmudim and Midrashism as far as arrangement of subjects and chronological order are concerned, and with the chaotic state of the text, particularly with regard to proper names, need not be told that the difficulties in identifying men and times are sometimes insurmountable, and much must be left to conjecture, in spite of the efforts made both in early ages and in recent days. The composition not only of well-known Haggadic and halakic collections, but also of the single treatises of the Mishnah, will be separately treated. The work of Zunz, Buber, and Epstein in the provinces of Haggadah, and that of Frankel, Brüll, and Weiss in Halakah, have rendered it possible to give a history of Talmudic literature.
What the Bible had been for the Talmud, the Talmud itself became for the later Rabbinical literature, which, based on the Talmud, applied itself to the further development of the Halakah and the Haggadah. Although this Rabbinical literature extends over a period of 1,400 years, and represents the only genuinely Jewish writings of that period, Rabbinical
Literature. it is the least understood, not to say the most misunderstood, department of Jewish literature. The present Encyclopedia affords for the first time a survey of the growth of the Halakah and the Haggadah in post-Talmudic times (500-1900). During that period, the civil and religious laws of the Jews, although based upon the Talmud, underwent many a change, while the Haggadah developed new motives and broadened its foundations, until it differed essentially in character from the Haggadah of the Talmudic times. Two new branches were developed: the dispersion of the Jews in this period throughout the civilized world produced the responsa literature; and the exclusion of the German-Polish Jews from all share in general produced casuistry. A subject that has received due consideration is the period of the Geonim (500-1000), which, though not spiritually productive, powerfully influenced rabbinical Judaism.
An attempt has been made to fill the hitherto existing gap in literary history in regard to the activity of the Arabic-Spanish school (1000-1500) in the labyrinth of the Talmud, and equal consideration has been bestowed upon the French, German, and Italian Talmudists of the same period, to whom is largely due our knowledge of the Talmud, and through whose initiative the Jewish spirit was diverted to new lines of activity and kept alive, when it was denied ever other mode of asserting itself. Adequate attention has been given to the Rabbinical literature of the past four centuries which have been chiefly characterized of the casuistic works of the German and Polish Talmudists, and the critical treatment of the Talmud in recent times finds full expression in these pages.
Jews have written in almost all languages that have a literature, and the Encyclopedia has taken account of this literary activity in its broadest range. The vast
