legends
of mediaeval times; some, however, are characterised by a richness of
humour which one would hardly expect to meet with in such a work; while
not a few of the parables, fables, and tales are strikingly beautiful,
and will favourably compare with the same class of fictions composed by
the ancient sages of Hindustan.

It is a singular circumstance, and significant as well as singular, that
while the Hebrew Talmud was, as Dr. Barclay remarks, "periodically
banned and often publicly burned, from the age of the Emperor Justinian
till the time of Pope Clement VIII," several of the best stories in the
_Gesta Romanorum_, a collection of moral tales (or tales "moralised")
which were read in Christian churches throughout Europe during the
Middle Ages, are derived mediately or immediately from this great
storehouse of rabbinical learning.[55]

[55] In midsummer, 1244, twenty waggon loads of copies of the
Talmud were burnt in France. This was in consequence of,
and four years after, a public dispute between a certain
Donin (afterwards called Nicolaus), a converted Jew,
with Rabbi Yehiel, of Paris, on the contents of the
Talmud.--See _Journal of Philology_, vol. xvi, p.
133.--In the year 1569, the famous Jewish library in
Cremona was plundered, and 12,000 copies of the Talmud
and other Jewish works were committed to the
flames.--_The Talmud_, by Joseph Barclay, LL.D., London,
1875, p. 14.

The traducers of the Talmud, among other false assertions, have
represented the Rabbis as holding their own work as more important than
even the Old Testament itself, and as fostering among the Jewish people a
spirit of intolerance towards all persons outside the pale of the Hebrew
religion. In proof of the first assertion they cite the following passage
from the Talmud: "The Bible is like water, the Mishna, like wine, the
Gemara, spiced wine; the Law, like salt, the Mishna, pepper, the Gemara,
balmy spice." But surely only a very shallow mind could conceive from
these similitudes that the Rabbis rated the importance of the Bible as
less than that of the Talmud; yet an English Church clergyman, in an
article published in a popular periodical a few years since, reproduced
this passage in proof of rabbinical presumption--evidently in ignorance
of the peculiar style of Oriental metaphor. What is actually taught by
the Rabbis in the passage in question, rega