e Chosen People who must eventually rule the world forms
indeed the basis of Rabbinical Judaism.

It is customary in this country to say that we should respect the Jewish
religion, and this would certainly be our duty were the Jewish religion
founded, as is popularly supposed, solely on the Old Testament. For
although we do not consider ourselves bound to observe the ritual of the
Pentateuch, we find no fault with the Jews for carrying out what they
conceive to be their religious duties. Moreover, although the Old
Testament depicts the Jews as a favoured race--a conception which we
believe to have been superseded by the Christian dispensation, whereby
all men are declared equal in the sight of God--nevertheless it does
contain a very lofty law of righteousness applicable to all mankind. It
is because of their universality that the books of Job and Ecclesiastes,
as also many passages in the Psalms, in Isaiah, and the minor prophets,
have made an undying appeal to the human race. But the Jewish religion
now takes its stand on the Talmud rather than on the Bible. "The modern
Jew," one of its latest Jewish translators observes, "is the product of
the Talmud."[805] The Talmud itself accords to the Bible only a
secondary place. Thus the Talmudic treatise Soferim says: "The Bible is
like water, the Mischna is like wine, and the Gemara is like spiced
wine."

Now, the Talmud is not a law of righteousness for all mankind, but a
meticulous code applying to the Jew alone. No human being outside the
Jewish race could possibly go to the Talmud for help or comfort. One
might look through its pages in vain for any such splendid rule of life
as that given by the prophet Micah: "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is
good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to
love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" In the Talmud, on the
contrary, as Drach points out, "the precepts of justice, of equity, of
charity towards one's neighbour, are not only not applicable with regard
to the Christian, but constitute a crime in anyone who would act
differently.... The Talmud expressly forbids one to save a non-Jew from
death, ... to restore lost goods, etc., to him, to have pity on him."[806]

How far the Talmud has contributed to the anti-social tendencies of
modern Judaism is shown by the fact that the Karaites living in the
south of Russia, the only body of Jews which takes its stand on the
Bible, and not on the Talmud,--of