Note 169 — BOOK V THE JEW AND THE TALMUD

Renan recognizes the service rendered by the Talmudical Rabbis to Christianity, but while acknowledging this, curiously limits it to the preservation of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament Scriptures, which he thinks would probably have been lost but for the labours of the Rabbis of the Talmud—he characterizes this as “un service du 1er ordre.” To him the Hebrew Old Testament is an incomparable monument of history, archæology, and philology. The deeper signification of these sacred records, which in the hearts of earnest Christians constitutes their exceeding preciousness, finds little place, alas, in the cheerless conception of the brilliant French scholar.