Jewish Life Digital Edition October 2013 | Page 10

INSIDE STORY

THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW YOU NEVER KNEW

TESTIMONY OF THE NATIONS
THE TORCH OF JEWISH LEARNING

For two thousand years, learning was the sole claim to distinction recognised by Israel. “The scholar,”
says the Talmud, “takes precedence over the king.” Israel remained faithful to this precept throughout
all her humiliations. Whenever, in Christian or Moslem lands, a hostile hand closed her schools, the
rabbis crossed the seas to reopen their academies in a distant country. Like the legendary Wandering
Jew, the flickering torch of Jewish scholarship thus passed from East to West, from North to South,
changing every two or three hundred years from one country to another. Whenever a royal edict
commanded them to leave, within three months, the country in which their fathers had been buried
and their sons had been born, the treasure which the Jews were most anxious to carry away with
them was their books.
“Among all the autos-de-fe which the daughter of Zion has had to witness, none has cost her such bitter
tears as those flames which, during the Middle Ages, greedily consumed the scrolls of the Talmud.”
Henri Jean Baptiste Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu (French historian) 1842-1912

BEREISHIS – IN THE BEGINNING
As we again renew the cycle of Torah, here are four
interesting interpretations on the word Bereishis:
“eish”. The Bris milah s