Original subtitles

In 70 AD,

after a siege marked by starvation and terror crucifixions,

the Roman army broke through the walls of Jerusalem.

Not only did they kill thousands of Jews,

they laid waste to the Temple...

the only place on earth, according to biblical law,

where Jews could worship God.

It was the death of the religion of priests and sacrifices

described by the Hebrew Bible.

But it would not be the death of Judaism.

In the years ahead, some of the greatest religious minds in history

would struggle to reinvent the religion of Moses and David.

But they would be forced to work

during a period of almost inconceivable bloodshed and turmoil.

They would watch their people be expelled from Jerusalem on pain of death

and see the name of their homeland changed from Judea to Palestine.

There would also be a monumental challenge from within...

a breakaway form of Judaism called Christianity.

But amidst these epic struggles, Judaism would be reborn

and the gifts of the Jews would be preserved for all humankind.

(DARK MUSIC)

When the Romans laid waste to the Temple

they destroyed far more than a building.

The Temple had been the economic, political and religious heart and soul

of Judea and of Judaism.

The despair that filled the land after its destruction

was captured by the poet Baruch.

"Blessed is he who was not born.

"Or he who, having been born, has died.

"But as for us who live, woe unto us...

"because we see the afflictions of Zion

"and what has befallen Jerusalem.

"Do thou, O sun, withhold the light of thy rays?

"And do thou, O moon, extinguish the multitude of thy light?

"For why should light rise again, where the light of Zion is darkened? "

MAN: Jews looking at the destroyed Temple

must have felt terribly, terribly depressed

that their entire ability to worship God, to connect with God,

had just been so severely compromised.

They'd been totally defeated by the Romans, many of them led off into captivity,

and this was really a period of tremendous mourning

and the need to begin somehow to deal with this terrible destruction.

The Romans now had Jerusalem and almost all the rest of Judea

under their iron fist.

All except for one tiny plot of desert south-east of Jerusalem

on the shore of the Dead Sea.

At Masada, a fortress built by King Herod atop a butte overlooking the sea,

one rebel group was still holding out against Rome.

They were the Sicarii,

who were named after the long, thin daggers they carried.

At the beginning of the rebellion

they had taken the fortress in a surprise attack.

Herod had designed Masada

so that a small force could hold it against an enormous army.

The historian Josephus described the trail

that was the only way to reach the top.

"This trail was called the 'Snake',

"as resembling that animal in its narrowness and its windings.

"There is also nothing but destruction, in case your feet slip,

"for on each side there is a deep chasm. "

Because the Snake was so narrow,

a handful of Sicarii

had for years been able to beat back every attack by Rome's legions.

But then the Romans began to build a ramp

that would enable them to reach the top of Masada.

For two years the Romans built their ramp.

And for two years the Sicarii waited.

On the day before the ramp was completed

the leader of the Sicarii, Eleazar ben Yair,

told his men they faced an awful choice.

If they surrendered the Romans would crucify them

as an example to the would-be rebels throughout their empire.

Or they could die fighting

and leave their wives and children to rape and slavery.

Then he proposed a third alternative.

Josephus learned what took place from two women

who managed to slip away from the fortress.

"To avoid the miseries that were to follow from their enemies,

"they resolved on the necessity of doing their own execution. "

"Miserable men, indeed,

"were they whose distress forced them to slay their own wives and children

"with their own hands.

"The husbands tenderly embraced their wives

"and took their children into their arms

"and gave the longest parting kisses to them

"with tears in their eyes.

"Yet at the same time,

"they did complete that which they had resolved on.

"Not able to bear the grief they were under for what they had done

"and esteeming it an injury to those they had killed

"to live even the shortest time after them,

"they then chose ten men by lot to slay all the rest.

"And they offered their necks

"to the stroke of those who executed that melancholy office.

"And when these ten men had without fear killed them all,

"they made the same rule for casting lots for themselves-

"that he whose lot it was should first kill the other nine

"and, after all, should kill himself.

"Now, for the Romans,

"they expected that they should be fought in the morning.

"But when they made their assault upon the fortress

"they saw no enemy,

"but a terrible solitude on every side. "

MAN: It is here that that tradition of self-imposed martyrdom

reaches its most poignant expression.

And that is the very eloquent if heartrending statement

that when I can no longer choose whether or not to die

I can still choose how to die.

And that's what inspired the martyrs at Masada to take their own lives

rather than to submit to slavery and death under Rome.

In just a few years

most of the groups that had dominated Judea and Judaism for centuries

had vanished.

The Sicarii and their fellow rebels were all dead.

The authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Essenes,

had also been butchered by the Romans.

And with no Temple, the priesthood had become meaningless.

Just one group remained...

The Pharisees.

According to the Jewish book of law and tradition, the Talmud,

one of the leaders of the Pharisees, Yohanan ben Zakkai,

had escaped the siege of Jerusalem by pretending to be dead.

Afterward, Yohanan journeyed to a town near the sea called Yavneh.

In a vineyard there he set up a primitive school

for studying the Hebrew Bible.

Eventually, Yohanan and the other teachers

would be given a new title...

Rabbi.

It was at this point that the Pharisees

effectively evolved into what we call the rabbis,

that is, this group of lay teachers

which essentially directs the religious activity

and the religious study of the Jewish people.

And this transition from priest to rabbi, one might say,

in terms of the leadership of Jewish life,

is one of those things that marks Judaism in the period after the Temple.

The Talmud says that Yohanan's greatest challenge

in keeping Judaism alive

was his fellow rabbis' despair over the loss of the Temple.

"Woe unto us" Rabbi Joshua cried out,

"that the place where the iniquities of Israel were atoned for

"is laid waste. "

"My son" Rabbi Yohanan said to him, "be not grieved.

"We have another atonement as effective as this. "

"And what is that? "

"It is acts of loving kindness.

"For, as it is written,

'I desire mercy, and not sacrifice. '

According to the story, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai says

that now that the Temple has been destroyed,

it's in acts of loving kindness,

in actions such as burying the dead,

caring for the homeless, feeding the hungry,

it is in those kinds of actions

that the very same goals that were achieved in the Temple-

of relating to God, of being in God's presence-

THAT'S the way one's in God's presence.

By seeing the presence of God in the needy person

and reaching out and helping them.

Yohanan had found his answer to the loss of the Temple

by studying the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.

He was following in an ancient tradition,

for ever since the long-ago days of exile in Babylon

men eager to learn about God

had been discussing the stories and laws of the Bible

in meeting places called synagogues.

With the Temple gone, the rabbis began to rebuild Judaism

around the study of the Bible in the synagogue.

Here they debated how biblical law could be applied

to living an ethical and compassionate life.

With the destruction of the Temple

the synagogue is thrust into this tremendous vacuum

and it has to pick up the slack

of lack of access to God through a temple process.

That's where the synagogue really takes off.

Through the medium of prayer,

the synagogue will be everything that the Temple had to be, but much more.

(Rabbi prays in Hebrew)

In the Temple, only the priests had been allowed to communicate with God,

through sacrifice.

Now, in the synagogue,

rabbis and common people alike talked to God through prayer,

a previously little-used practice

favoured by the writers of the Book of Psalms.

"Lord, I am calling. Hurry to me.

"Listen to me. I am invoking you.

"My prayers rise like incense,

"my hands like the evening offering.

"Lord, set a guard at my mouth, a watcher at the gate of my lips,

"to let me feel no impulse to do wrong.

"To snare the godlessness of evil-doers. "

GAFNI: What emerges is a spiritualised version of Judaism-

prayer instead of sacrifice, rabbis instead of priests,

synagogue instead of temple.

And the great question is, how much of this was consciously organised,

formulated, by Yohanan ben Zakkai and the people of his generation?

It could be that part of this is a retrojection of a later period

back onto Yohanan ben Zakkai.

But I am convinced that Yohanan was aware of the dilemma

of the post-Temple period

and very, very keenly tried to set up alternatives

without ever calling them alternatives.

In other words, you have to project a sense of continuity

while in practice and in fact

you are innovating and setting up alternative lifestyles.

(CROWD NOISES & MEDITATlVE MUSIC)

But there was one thing that seemed impossible to replace.

The great Temple festivals

that for centuries had kept people deeply connected to stories from the Bible.

One of the most important festivals had been Passover

which commemorated Moses leading the lsraelites out of slavery in Egypt.

Then the rabbis who followed in Yohanan's footsteps

created a new kind of Passover celebration

called a Seder.

It was celebrated not in the Temple with tens of thousands of others

but at home with family and friends.

MAN: When the Temple is gone, how do you observe Passover?.

It's there that the Seder was created... which means 'order'.

Out of the chaos of not having the animal and its blood to celebrate Passover

comes the order of the echo of that event.

Of telling the story.

And so the text that they developed,

which is still in use in every Jewish home on Passover Eve,

is called the Haggadah which means 'the telling'.

In order to tell the story of Passover

Jewish families used a lamb bone to represent the lamb

whose blood their ancestors had painted on their doorposts in Egypt

so that the Angel of Death would pass over.

And they used unleavened bread

to represent the matzo the lsraelites had eaten

as they fled toward the Promised Land.

At the table during the Seder

one of the adults read the story of the Jews' exodus from Egypt.

Then everyone present ate the different Passover foods,

each of which symbolised a part of the story.

NETTER: The great achievement of the sages of Yavneh

is that they understood

that if you no longer had the fires of the altar in Jerusalem

what you had was the story.

The Temple was no longer,

the physical sacrifice was no longer.

But the story is eternal. And that's what we kept.

Slowly, in a process that would take hundreds of years,

the rabbis were reinventing Judaism.

But even as they worked

the world around them was becoming threatening once again.

During the 60 years after the fall of the Temple

the Romans and their Jewish subjects lived in an uneasy truce.

Many Jews moved to the fertile area around the Sea of Galilee

to try and rebuild their lives.

But for some, the rebuilding only brought on painful memories

of the building they longed to reconstruct most-the Temple.

In 1 30 AD, anger at the Roman emperor Hadrian

for refusing to allow the rebuilding of the Temple

reached the boiling point.

Rumours of a new revolt began to spread.

GAFNI: Many Jews continued to consider Roman presence in the land of Israel

to be illegitimate.

This was the evil empire, it had no business here.

Clearly, however, there must have been immediate stimuli to this war.

We're not sure what they were.

According to Roman historian Cassius Dio

it was Hadrian's attempt at building a pagan city in Jerusalem

to be called Aelia Capitolina

that threw, as it were, the Jews over the edge

into the abyss of military uprising.

Another Roman source claims it was an attempt by Hadrian

to prohibit circumcision of Jewish children.

We cannot know.

But that would have been, at the very most, the final push

into what must have been a popular resentment of Rome

that needed some sort of stimulation.

The rebellion began among a band of outlaws

Iiving in the countryside.

Their leader was called Simon bar Kokhba.

The Romans had long considered Bar Kokhba merely a thief

but to many of his fellow Jews

he was another in a long line of freedom fighters

who had refused to accept Roman rule.

Bar Kokhba was a Jew, like the Zealots,

Iike the defenders of Masada,

who was willing to take up arms against Roman occupation,

and was willing to fight for Jewish sovereignty,

and, in fact, for a limited period of time achieved sovereignty.

We can hold in our hands the coinage

that Bar Kokhba issued in his own kingdom,

the last kingdom of Jewish sovereignty for another 2000 years.

Rather than confront the mighty Roman legions

from a great city like Jerusalem, as in the last uprising,

Bar Kokhba came up with a plan for a guerrilla war.

A Roman historian described Bar Kokhba's preparation for the revolt.

"They occupied caves in the countryside

"and strengthened them in order that they might have places of refuge

"whenever they should be hard pressed.

"And they pierced subterranean passages from above at intervals

"to let in air and light. "

As plans for a rebellion began to leak out,

rumours raced through the region

that Bar Kokhba was the messianic leader foretold in the Bible

who would lead the Jewish people to freedom.

"His name meant 'star'

"and he claimed to be a luminary who had come down from heaven

"and was magically enlightening those who were in misery. "

SCHIFFMAN: Simeon bar Koziba, as we now know his name to have really been,

is called Bar Kokhba - 'son of a star' -

because there was a prophecy in the Bible

that spoke of a star as a symbolic name for a messianic figure.

Now this fellow, Bar Kokhba, was a tremendous military leader

who between 1 32 to 1 35 AD almost kicked the Romans out of Judea

and, in fact, caused many Roman soldiers to be killed

in the prolonged battles of the revolt he had brought into being.

But the key point to realise is that the Bar Kokhba revolt

was a messianic revolt that people entered into

believing firmly that the Messiah would come if they were victorious.

Bar Kokhba's charismatic leadership

appealed to not just peasants and craftsmen

but also scholars and sages.

Their fervour was stoked by certain prophecies in the Bible

which they believed said this was the precise moment in history

God had chosen for the Temple to be rebuilt.

NETTER: Just as the First Temple at one point lay in ruins and was rebuilt,

so too would the Second Temple.

And they were, in their minds, God's agents.

They were going to defeat the Romans

and the Third Temple was going to descend from the sky like a pre-fab,

completely built, right on that same spot.

And that was in a sense its messianic mission.

That they were doing God's will to throw off the evil empire.

That's what God wanted.

In 1 32 AD, the most prominent rabbi in Judea

publicly declared that Bar Kokhba was indeed the Messiah.

The ranks of the rebels swelled even more.

With hundreds of thousands now ready to follow him

Bar Kokhba nevertheless remained patient.

In order to lull Hadrian and his legions into a false sense of security

he counselled his followers to pretend to be happy and peaceful.

"So long, indeed, as Hadrian was close by in Egypt,

"the Jews remained quiet...

"except that they made the weapons,

"which the Romans demanded of them as tribute,

"of such poor quality that the Romans rejected them.

"By this ruse, they were able to have use of these weapons themselves. "

In a strategic masterstroke, Bar Kokhba bided his time

until Hadrian was well on his way back to Rome.

Then suddenly he launched the revolt.

In the early days of the rebellion

the rebels inflicted tens of thousands of casualties on the Romans.

KIRSCH: In the ancient world

Jews were not known as bookish and prayerful and pious.

They were known as ruthless and ferocious fighters,

they were highly prized as mercenary soldiers

and they showed in the uprising against Rome

exactly how effective they were on the field of battle.

The stunning success of the rebels

forced the Romans to withdraw from the region.

Bar Kokhba then declared Judea to be an independent kingdom.

But the Romans were merely waiting to counterattack

until they had assembled one of the greatest armies in their history.

They had sent three legions against Jerusalem

in the rebellion 60 years earlier.

Now they sent 1 3.

"Hadrian sent against the Jews his best general, Julius Severus,

"who was dispatched from Britain.

"Hadrian ordered him to put to the sword all who stood in their path. "

GAFNI: Rome responds to Bar Kokhba

by throwing masses of its military force into the fray.

Legions would be brought in,

not only from Judea, from Egypt, from the surrounding countries,

but as far as across the Danube River.

A commander would be brought in from Britain.

There was absolutely no way that Hadrian could allow

even partial success to this uprising.

"Severus did not venture to attack his opponents in the open,

"in view of their numbers and their desperation.

"Instead, he isolated them in small groups.

"They dispensed with the rebels who were hiding in their caves

"by filling them with smoke and guarding the exits.

"Then they surprised and killed all who came out to fight.

"580,000 men were slain in the various raids and battles.

"And the number of those that perished by famine, disease and suffocation

"was past finding out. "

With the rebellion crushed,

the people of Judea faced even worse retribution from the Romans

than after the uprising 60 years earlier.

For the Romans now set themselves the goal of wiping the Jews from Judea.

The Bar Kokhba rebellion...

was known, really, as the most disastrous single event

that ever happened to the Jewish people, before the Holocaust.

In fact, when we look at the three literary accounts,

we find that they all agree.

Nearly 600, 000 Jews were killed.

Over 900 Jewish villages were destroyed.

And for one small moment in Jewish history, again,

it looked like Jewish history might have been over.

In the aftermath of the uprising,

the Romans changed the name of the region from Judea to Palestine.

Then they banned all Jews from Jerusalem.

"The emperor then commanded by legal decree

"that the whole nation of the Jews

"should be forcibly removed from the district round Jerusalem,

"so that not even from a distance could they see their ancestral home.

"Thus the city came to be bereft of the nation of the Jews,

"and in honour of the emperor Aelius Hadrian

"the name of the city became Aelia. "

The outcome of the Bar Kokhba revolt

is a much more serious policy on the part of the Romans

prohibiting Jews from even going to Jerusalem.

And they plough over the Temple Mount

and build a temple to their gods on that spot,

thereby showing

'You have no place here. We clearly are the winners. '

In the centuries that followed

whole villages of Jews began to leave Judea

in search of a new life.

They headed for the Jewish communities that had been flourishing for centuries

in Babylon, in Greece, in Rome, and many other places.

But in their new homes

they would soon face a challenge to their survival

every bit as daunting as the Romans.

This threat would come not from outside, but from within...

from a new kind of Judaism called Christianity.

Jesus of Nazareth had called his Jewish followers 'fishers of men'.

Since his death in 33 AD

they had been telling all who would listen

that Jesus Christ was the Son of God

who, after his crucifixion, had risen from the dead.

These 'Christians'

did not mourn the loss of the Temple and its sacrificial rituals,

for they believed God had decided to sacrifice His only son

once and for all.

The Christians preached to Jews and Gentiles alike

but their message that a messiah had come to set the world right

was at its heart a Jewish message.

WOMAN: For centuries, Christianity was a type of Judaism.

For example, in the Gospel of Matthew,

one of the ones that's in the New Testament collection,

that Jesus gives instructions to his followers

on where they should stand when they pray in the synagogue,

on how long their 'tzitzit', their prayer fringes, should be,

on what they should be like when they fast.

I mean, it's all this Jewish stuff.

And when you think of it, that makes sense because Christianity is a Jewish movement.

Like many other Jews,

the Christians believed the Hebrew Bible was the word of God

and therefore told the absolute truth.

But unlike other Jews,

they believed that its most important stories and prophecies

foretold the coming of Jesus.

Churchill once said

that the Americans and the English are divided by a common language.

In the same way, the early Christians are divided from other groups of Judaism

by a common Bible.

They're engaged in competition

for the interpretation of this sacred scripture.

As the Christians won more and more converts

the competition with other forms of Judaism intensified.

Churches sprang up alongside synagogues

in Jewish communities throughout the Roman Empire.

And yet, because of their common roots,

most Christians and Jews felt a kinship with one another.

But then Christianity gained perhaps the most important convert

in its history...

a man who was about to become the Roman emperor.

In 320 AD an army marched to war

for the first time beneath a Christian cross.

The Roman Empire was in the middle of a civil war between two generals

over who would be the next emperor.

According to an historian from the time,

one of the generals, Constantine, was inspired by a vision

to send his legions into battle carrying a cross.

"A most marvellous sign had appeared to him.

"He saw with his own eyes a cross of light in the heavens

"bearing the inscription 'Conquer By This'.

With the cross at their head

Constantine's troops were victorious.

The story of the battle of the cross was spread far and wide throughout the empire

to win support for Constantine

from the rapidly growing Christian movement.

FREDRIKSEN: There's nothing like a voice from heaven to clarify ambiguity.

And in the confusing political situation Constantine finds himself in,

he and the bishops who were working with him

clear up some of the political ambiguity

by beginning to talk about voices from heaven, or signs from heaven

which at crucial moments in Constantine's political career

have indicated who heaven wants to be emperor.

For Jews throughout the empire,

the new emperor's alliance with Christianity

would prove disastrous.

The bishops who allied themselves with Constantine

were part of the one branch of Christianity

that was hostile toward Jews.

FREDRIKSEN: One edge of gentile Christian culture

itself becomes extremely anti-Jewish.

And, unfortunately for later history,

that particular edge of gentile Christianity

wins the patronage of the Roman Empire.

The anti-Jewish Christian bishops

became determined to stamp out the friendship

that many Christians felt toward Judaism.

MEEKS: Take John Chrysostom,

one of the great preachers of the 4th century.

He had trouble because people in his congregation

thought that the festivals of the Jews were ever so much more interesting

than the things that the Church put on,

and so they would trot off during high holy days to visit the synagogues.

This infuriated John.

So he preached a series of eight sermons against the Judaisers,

in which he first, as far as I know, coined the term the 'Christ-killers'

in order to label those people

that he didn't want his congregation associating with.

Obviously this term then is going to have very fateful after-effects

in the history of Christian anti-Judaism.

In the centuries ahead,

this new prejudice of Christians toward Jews

would lead to anti-Jewish laws, violent attacks and mass evictions.

And so the Jews began to search for new homes in North Africa,

in Spain, in Russia.

As the Jews became further and further spread out from one another

Judaism was threatened with disintegration.

The laws that now governed how a Jew should live,

from rituals to social relationships,

had never been written down.

They existed only in an oral tradition

passed from one generation to the next.

MAN: In order to have an ongoing oral tradition,

you have to have a stable community.

How did you know you needed a driver's licence at 1 6?

It's not because you read it in your particular state code,

it's because somebody told you you needed a driver's licence at 1 6.

But that kind of oral tradition requires a stable community.

And if the community is disintegrating, as the Jewish community was in Judea,

from the Bar Kokhba revolt in 1 35 until the end of the 2nd century,

there was a strongly-felt need

for editing that oral tradition so that it might be preserved.

(WlSTFUL ACOUSTlC GUlTAR)

The monumental work of genius that would enable Judaism to survive anywhere

began to take shape in the 2nd century AD

in the countryside

in the mind of an illiterate shepherd named Akiva.

As Akiva spent day after day

observing the natural world around him,

questions began to flood into his mind

about where it had all come from and what it all meant.

And so he taught himself how to read

and began to study the Hebrew Bible.

According to the Talmud

he was awestruck by the power of the Bible

to help him see the world in a whole new way.

"Akiva noticed how the stone at a well

"had been hollowed out by drippings from the buckets.

"He thought, if these drippings can penetrate this solid stone,

"how much more can the study of the word of God

"penetrate the human heart? "

Akiva was a simple shepherd... illiterate.

Didn't know an 'alef' from a 'bet' - an 'A ' from a 'B'.

At the age of 40, discovered that he needed to learn Torah.

And so he began to study with 5-year-olds.

And he learned 'alef', 'bet', 'gimel', 'dalet'

and then he learned the entire alphabet.

Then he learned the Book of Leviticus, and then the entire Torah.

And in a few short years

this illiterate shepherd became the leading sage of his age.

Akiva learned that in addition to the Bible

there existed a vast collection of oral traditions,

passed down to scholars like Hillel and Yohanan ben Zakkai,

and passed on by them to Akiva's generation.

These teachings about justice, mercy

and how to make them real in one's own life

comprised the greatest of all the treasures of the Jews.

But because these teachings had been handed down only by word of mouth

they were so disorganised

that they were in danger of being lost entirely.

Then Akiva began using his remarkable mind

to organise the centuries of Jewish tradition and law

that had been inspired by the Bible.

GAFNI: Akiva, we are told, may have been the first rabbi

to take this enormous mass of oral tradition

that had accrued over hundreds and hundreds of years

and to systematise it.

To create some sort of a thematic structure to this material.

We're actually told that Akiva is like a person going to the marketplace

and buying these vegetables, those fruits, putting everything in his basket

and then coming home and sorting everything out.

And similarly, we are told, Akiva sorted out oral tradition.

I think what we have here is a brilliant legal mind

who realises that if this material is to last many more generations,

some sense must be made of it, it must be put in order.

But Akiva lived during difficult times

when Rome and the Jews were battling over the rebuilding of the Temple.

As a strong supporter of rebellion,

Akiva was arrested by the Romans.

According to the Talmud,

the Romans then condemned Akiva to death.

But not just any death.

Aware of his fame as the greatest of all sages,

they decided to make an example of Akiva

to all who would rebel against Rome.

They sentenced him to be flayed alive.

"As Akiva was given into the hands of the executioner,

"it was just the time to recite the evening prayer.

"Though suffering agonies, Akiva recited his prayers calmly,

"full of devotion.

"And when he was asked whether he was a sorcerer,

"since he appeared to feel no pain,

"Akiva replied 'I am no sorcerer.

'But I rejoice at the opportunity now given to me

'to love my God with all my life,

'seeing that I have hitherto been able to love him

'only with all my means and with all my might. '

"And with that word, he died. "

He's being taken out to be executed

and his last words are words of faith.

"Hear O Israel, the Lord is one

"and one should love God with all his heart and soul. "

And the beautiful Talmudic description has his disciples asking him

"Akiva, how can you maintain that faith in these circumstances? "

And he responds by saying "I've been preparing for this all my life.

"I've been reciting scripture all my life, wondering will I ever have to put up?

"Will I ever have to actually perform these ultimate acts of faith

"in a real world?

"Now that I have the chance,

"how can I refrain from not giving up my life for my faith? "

Akiva was dead.

But the work he had done

to make the teachings of the Jews accessible to anyone anywhere, lived on.

Beginning in the 4th century AD, Akiva's heirs made his work

the basis for an ongoing collection of law and tradition,

called the Talmud.

It contained the teachings of scholars down through the ages

on how Jews should practise Judaism.

SCHIFFMAN: For a Jew to live a proper life and a good life

meant that on the one hand there was a set of rituals to be observed.

But along with the commandments that are ritual commandments

there came a set of ethical commandments.

And these ethical commandments were as important or more important,

whether it's the obvious ones, "Thou shalt not kill or steal",

or the not-so obvious ones,

"Love your neighbour as yourself",

probably the hardest one to do that most of us never really attain.

All of these types of beautiful ethics,

family relations, relations with husband and wife,

with children, with other people, with non-Jews,

all of these ethical laws,

when taken together with the religious commandments,

and with the theology of Judaism,

constitute the life the Jew was and is called on to live.

But the T almud was not just a book of commandments.

It was also a record of great debates between sages

about how to apply the eternal values of the Hebrew Bible

to living here and now.

GEREBOFF:. Abraham was not a person who was just dead for them.

Abraham was a living presence.

They read the story of Abraham in comparison to the story of Noah.

Noah, when he was told the world was going to be destroyed,

they said, in reading the biblical text, they saw

that Noah didn't talk to anybody, he just kept to himself.

But Abraham, when he heard Sodom was going to be destroyed,

Abraham went out and argues with God.

"Will you do this if there are really 50 righteous people there

"or 40 people? "

And from their way of looking at things, these provided-Noah and Abraham-

provided two different models of how to live as a human being.

Do you just hear a message and keep it to yourself?

Or if you hear a message that doesn't make sense

do you have the willingness to ask for a clarification,

or say "That doesn't make sense? "

Above all, the T almud was a how-to book

for practising Judaism.

Any community of Jews anywhere could study the lessons of the Bible

and then debate among themselves how to apply its laws and traditions

to their own time and place.

In synagogues from Spain to Russia to North Africa,

Jews who were isolated in ghettos

could still maintain their connection to their culture and their God.

For instance, a community in Spain,

which already existed in late Roman times,

on the one hand isolated,

hundreds of miles removed both from the land of Israel

and from the other centre of rabbinic knowledge, Babyblonia.

But slowly, this Talmudic material in book fashion, as it were,

makes its way to Spain.

And these Jews can now plug into this culture.

They can plug into this tradition. They can interpret it.

They can use what is applicable to their own lifestyles.

So in many ways, it's a mobile tradition.

The Talmud would become in many ways the mobile tradition

that reaches all corners of the Jewish world.

Nobody now is isolated from the focal point

of Jewish religious activity.

You have the Talmud, you can study it.

You can elaborate, interpret, ask others what it means.

The Talmud now would be the walking Bible, this living Bible,

for Jews throughout the world.

(SOLEMN MUSIC)

With the T almud to bind them together

Jewish communities around the world

thrived in spite of the discrimination they faced.

And invariably their Muslim and Christian neighbours

soon discovered that the Jews among them possessed unique gifts.

One of the skills Jews introduced to country after country

was glass blowing.

Their neighbours also benefited

from the Jewish community's advanced knowledge of medicine

and were inspired by its practice of giving every child an education.

But most important of all, the Jews brought spiritual gifts.

KIRSCH: Among the many contributions

that the Jewish people have made to world civilisation

is this idea that what God demands of ordinary human beings

is not merely the observance of a ritual

or the holding of a particular belief or credo.

It's simply a fierce pursuit of justice.

Moses says "Justice, justice shalt thou pursue. "

That's one of the credos of the Bible and of rabbinical Judaism

and it is one of the moral gifts of the Jews to posterity.

And it finds its expression in both Christianity and Islam

and in the world we live in today.

The importance of compassion for the less fortunate,

of personal ethics,

of laws that applied to everyone equally...

these were just some of the gifts of the Jews.

DORFF:. I think the Jewish tradition has given the world

a sense of appreciation for family and for education.

A sense that we should not only be for ourselves, but also for others,

as the rabbis themselves say.

And that we have to therefore make sure that we do our bit

in making this a better world.

These eternal truths,

communicated first through the stories of the Hebrew Bible,

had become the unshakable foundation of Judaism.

A tiny insignificant people,

seemingly destined to be destroyed by the Assyrians, the Babylonians,

the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans,

had instead survived and flourished.

Not through the power of their weapons,

Iike other great empires,

but through the power of their beliefs and their ideas.

And in the end,

they would have as much impact on who we are and what we believe

as any empire in history.