The gospel of duty to one’s neighbour, which, long languishing as a creed, seems now reviving as a fashion, has always been, amongst that race which taught ‘love thy neighbour as thyself,’ not only of the very essence of religion, but an ordinary social form of it. It is ‘law’ in the ‘family chronicle’ of the race, as Heine calls the Bible; it is ‘law’ and legend both in those curious national archives known as Talmud. Foremost in the ranks of _livres incompris_ stand those portentous volumes, the one work of the world which has suffered about equally at the hands of the commentator and the executioner. Many years ago Emmanuel Deutsch gave to the uninitiated a glimpse into that wondrous agglomeration of fantastically followed facts, where long-winded legend, or close-argued ‘law,’ starts some phrase or word from Holy Writ as quarry, and pursues it by paths the most devious, the most digressive imaginable to man. The work of many generations and of many ‘masters’ in each generation, such a book is singularly susceptible to an open style of reading and a liberal aptitude of quotation, and it is no marvel that searchers in its pages, even reasonably honest ones, should be able to find detached individual utterances to fit into almost any one of their own preconceived dogmas concerning Talmud. On many subjects, qualifications, contradictions, differences abound, and instances of illegal law, of pseudo-science, of doubtful physics, may each, with a little trouble, be disinterred from the depths of these twelve huge volumes. But the ethics of the Talmud are, as a whole, of a high order, and on one point there is such remarkable and entire agreement, that it is here permissible to speak of what ‘the Talmud says,’ meaning thereby a general tone and consensus of opinion, and not the views of this or of that individual master. The subject on which this unusual harmony prevails is the, in these days, much discussed one of charity; and to discover something concerning so very ancient a mode of dealing with it may not prove uninteresting.