Emil Schürer
Published: 2015-06-16
Total Pages: 501
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Excerpt from A History of the Jewish People, Vol. 3: In the Time of Jesus Christ Unquestionable as it is on the one hand that zeal for the law of God and the hope of a better future constituted the two distinctive marks of the Judaism of the period now under consideration, still it must not be forgotten on the other that those interests sought to express themselves in a great variety of forms, and that, in the sphere of the spiritual life, there were yet other aims that claimed to rank along with them, though having no immediate connection with them. How far this was the case may be seen from a glance at the Jewish literature of our period. The aspect which that literature presents is of so diversified a character that it is difficult to combine all the different elements into one connected whole. And if this be true of the literature of Palestinian Judaism alone, it becomes much more so if we take into account the literature of Hellenistic Judaism as well. In that case there will be seen to stretch before us a field of so extensive and varied a character that it is scarcely any longer possible to make out the internal connection between all the various products of this literature. In this strangely varied mass two leading groups may in the first instance be distinguished, the Palestinian and the Hellenistic. We select those designations for want of better; and to correspond with them we also divide our subject into two leading sections. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.