The study of the Talmud in Poland, established by Shachna, Solomon Lurya, and Moses Isserles, reached a pitch attained at no previous time, nor in any other country. The demand for copies of the Talmud was so great that in less than twenty years three editions had to be printed, no doubt in thousands of copies. The study of the Talmud was a greater necessity in Poland than in the rest of Europe. The rabbis, as has been already said, had jurisdiction of their own, and decided according to Talmudical and Rabbinical laws. The great number of Jews in Poland, and their fondness for litigation, gave occasion to intricate law cases. The rabbi-judges were obliged to go back to the source of law, the Talmud, to seek points of support for such cases. The contending parties being themselves well informed and acute, the reasoning of the rabbis had to be flawless to escape criticism. Hence Rabbinical civil law in Poland met with extraordinary cultivation and extension, to adapt it to all cases and make it available for the learned litigants. Thus the ever-growing subtlety of the method of Talmud study depended on current conditions and wants, and on the circumstance that each Talmudist wished to surpass all others in ingenuity. It would be tedious to enumerate the Rabbinical authors of Poland in the first half of the seventeenth century. The cultivation of a single faculty, that of hair-splitting judgment, at the cost of the rest, narrowed the imagination, hence not a single literary product appeared in Poland deserving the name of poetry. All the productions of the Polish school bore the Talmudical stamp, as the school regarded everything from the Talmudical point of view. The disciples of this school looked down almost with contempt on Scripture and its simple grandeur, or rather it did not exist for them. How, indeed, could they have found time to occupy themselves with it? And what could they do with these children's stories, which did not admit the application of intellectual subtlety? They knew something of the Bible from the extracts read in the synagogues, and those occasionally quoted in the Talmud. The faculty for appreciating the sublimity of biblical doctrines and characters, as well as simplicity and elevation in general, was denied them. A love of twisting, distorting, ingenious quibbling, and a foregone antipathy to what did not lie within their field of vision, constituted the character of the Polish Jews. Pride in their knowledge of the Talmud and a spirit of dogmatism attached even to the best rabbis, and undermined their moral sense. The Polish Jews of course were extraordinarily pious, but even their piety rested on sophistry and boastfulness. Each wished to surpass the other in knowledge of what the Code prescribed for one case or another. Thus religion sank, not merely, as among Jews of other countries, to a mechanical, unintelligent ceremonial, but to a subtle art of interpretation. To know better was everything to them; but