in which the law of the stranger was not
the law. The law of the land of their dispersion was not the law of
the owner of the soil but the law of the Jews. In this sense the
Ghettos of Italy and the Gassen of Germany were not so much Italian
and German soil as they were Jewish. As by the modern fiction of
extraterritoriality the home of an Ambassador is considered part of
his own national territory, so these exclusively Jewish settlements
were colonies of Judaea planted on foreign soil. They were separated
from the rest of the land by visible or invisible walls, and within
these walls, hardly touched by the influences that were at work
shaping the life around them, the ancient law of the Jews was
preserved and handed down from generation to generation. Hence during
the Middle Ages the student of the law became the most important
member of the community, and all the energy of the community that was
not required to outwit the constant menace of brutal force and
religious persecution was devoted to the cultivation of the law and of
the literature that it gave rise to.

It should be noted, however, that since the beginning of the Talmudic
period, the civil law developed in certain directions only, because
after all the Jewish people had no land of their own in the usual
sense and no central authority and were constantly moving from place
to place, always subject to persecution. Some branches of their law
were entirely neglected and others abnormally developed.

_The Schools of the Law_

In the Talmudic period, the judges, members of the Synhedrion, and
professors of the law schools, received a long professional training.
The course of study lasted seven years, at the end of which, having
passed their examination successfully, the graduates were eligible to
assignment as judges in the lower courts, from which they were
promoted to act as associate judges in the great Synhedrion and
eventually might hope to attain the dignity of full synhedrial
membership. These judicial dignitaries were obliged to be well versed
in the languages, law and customs of the contemporary peoples,
especially in the laws of the Greeks and Romans. Great academies of
the law flourished in Palestine and still greater ones in Babylonia,
the latter eventually supplanting the former. These academies called
for the enthusiastic encomium of one Talmudist who said, "God created
these academies in order that the promise might be fulfilled that the
word