The Maccabaean

PALESTINE of to-day is no doubt well-known to every Zionist, for if he does not live in Palestine, Palestine lives in him. But we seem to be less familiar with the Palestine of the past, of the many hundreds of years that preceded the Zionist age. The present life in Palestine is so different from what it has been in the past that only a study of its history can reveal the miraculous progress that has been achieved. A contrasting picture of the Palestine of the past with that of the present will show us the new life that now animates our Holy Land, and give us an idea of the double resurrection of the Jewish people and Jewish land which Zionism has effected.

Assuming that the present conditions in the Holy Land are well known to Zionists, this paper will limit itself to the Palestine of the many generations ago, in its periods of decadence, when it was "without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep," when life was extinct in spite of its great men and literary productions, because it did not have any hopeful ideal such as Zionism to animate it. But we shall see that even in this stage, "the spirit of God was seen to be moving upon its face." There was a source of light in the midst of darkness. In its most agonizing days Palestine was a source of intellectual inspiration to all the Jews of the diaspora.

The intellectual history of Palestine, since its political disintegration, may be divided into seven periods, which we shall glance over rapidly.

The first period (165-499) is the most flourishing one; it is the time of the Mishnah and the Talmud. The Talmudic sayings that "the air of Palestine makes men wise and intelligent," and that "there is no learning which could equal that of Palestine," seem to be particularly true of this period, as can be seen by a comparison of the Palestinian writings with those produced at the same period by the Jewish scholars in other centers of learning. Such,

for instance, are the apocrypha of the second Temple, like Ben Sira compared to the Sibylline literature of the Jews of Egypt, the Agadic and Midrashic literature of the Palestinian Tanaim to the Alexandrian allegories, or the ethics and theology of the tractate "Aboth" to the ethics and theology treated in the Talmud of Babylon. Even during the time when Jewish learning was focussed in Babylon, it was held that the Palestinian teachings were based on a more logical foundation, while the teachings of the Babylonian schools, being sharper and more sophisticated, were considered as serving merely to season the strictly technical teachings of the Palestinian school. It is related of one of the greatest Jewish leaders of Babylon that when he came to Palestine he endeavored to forget all he had learned in his country so as to render his mind more plastic to the teachings of Palestine. That two Babylonians could not equal in intellect one Palestinian was a popular maxim in Babylon. If the Talmud of Jerusalem, however, won less fame than the Babylonian Talmud, it was not that it was of an inferior nature, but that it remained incomplete on account of the Roman persecutions which hampered literary activities in Palestine. But with the close of the Talmud and the Mishnah the flourishing period of Palestine is at an end, and since then its intellectual life was in a state of constant oscillation between life and death, in a strenuous struggle for self-preservation.

The second period, from 499 to 1260, is not a period of innovation or originality, as it was hampered in its work by the numerous persecutions which brought about the gradual desertion of the country. However, this period has given us the Hebrew punctuation and the Massora. This period closes with the year 1260, when the Tatars under Hulaku Kahn overran the whole land. The Jews had then to abandon it and remained away for seven years until the arrival of Nachmanides, with whom be-