It has preserved and fostered for some fifteen hundred years in the “Dispersion” that spirit of deep religion and strict morality which has kept the Jewish people separate and intact; and be it remembered under the most unfavourable external conditions, for, with certain rare exceptions, since the days of the Emperor Constantine and the victory of Christianity the Jew has been generally hated, despised, persecuted, an exile and a wanderer over the face of the earth. In the Jewish race the study of the Talmud has awakened and stimulated intellectual activity in an extraordinary degree. Its study has given to the world of letters a vast number of scholars, men of the loftiest character, belonging to the first rank of philosophers and writers, whose works, limited though they mostly are by the Rabbinic area of thought and speculation, have been of high service to civilization. Among these great ones issuing from the Jews of no one land, and who form a numerous band, it is difficult in this brief study to particularize even the most distinguished, but the following names will at once occur to any competent scholar as prominent examples of famous men of the Rabbinic school, whose works have shed real light on the so-called dark mediæval period:-- Raschi A.D. _circa_ 1040-1105 Maimonides " " 1135-1204 D. Kimchi " " 1158-1235 The names, however, of distinguished scholars and writers of the Rabbinic school who have arisen during the last fifteen centuries in different lands might be multiplied almost indefinitely. And this people is with us still, more influential, probably more numerous, than at any period of its immemorial history. The numbers at the present day are variously computed as amounting to from seven to eleven millions. THE INFLUENCE OF THE TALMUD ON CHRISTIANITY But not only among the Jewish peoples of the “Dispersion” has this strange and wonderful book exercised a surpassing influence, but even among the Christian nations of the world has its spirit percolated, and in a remarkable way has influenced and coloured certain important phases of religious thought and belief. Among Christian peoples the Talmud is virtually unknown; to well-nigh every individual in the Christian nations it is but the shadow of a name, to the great majority scarcely even that; and yet the profound, the awful reverence for the Old Testament Scriptures which lives among all Christian folk, a reverence that often shades into a passionate love, though they guess it not, springs largely out of the teachings of that great Rabbinic book the _Talmud_, the very name of which so many have scarcely heard.