Ben Hur, the novel, part 9

I apologize for last week but we had a power bump and my router crashed. It took all morning to get somebody on the phone to tell me what to do. But at least I did get somebody.

We have finished Book I of Ben Hur and almost nothing that Lew Wallace said about Jews, their beliefs or customs, has been true. Onward.

We are now past the reign of Augustus and into the reign of Tiberius. Tiberius was nothing but a soldier; he didn’t want to rule. His wiser brother Drusus died of a fall from a horse before Tiberius came to the throne. His nephew Germanicus, says gossip, was poisoned in Syria about 19 CE. Germanicus’ sons died, except for little Gaius, who became Tiberius’ heir.

Herod’s grandson was raised in Rome by Augustus, one of several ethnic princes raised in Roman ways so that if they get to go home and rule, they will impose Roman ways on their homelands. Agrippa will later marry his second or third cousin Cypros, a love match, with four surviving children. One will become the mistress of the man who destroys the Second Temple.

And in Book II chapter 2 we get more false history. Hillel and Shammai were dead by this time. Rabban Gamliel ben Hillel followed him, and then Shimon b. Gamliel. And we get a false evaluation of Jewish logic.

Jewish logic is very like modern American legal reasoning. It has stare decisis in the form of gezerah shavah, when two phrases are alike, cases using them should be judged similarly. Also when cases are alike enough, the new case should come out the same as the old one.

It had a fortiori, known as qal va-chomer, and Jewish law also reasoned in the reverse direction.

It had due process for all.

It had fines for civil cases as well as compensatory and punitive damages for battery. Lex talionis is not part of Jewish law. You can’t award damages in a culture where some people don’t have money. It is a given that all Jews have or can get money for civil damages, or for the poll tax at Purim, or to buy meat for Shabbat.

The man who does not have enough money to pay compensation for a theft can take out an exclusive services contract on himself. Under this agreement, the buyer of the contract has to support the contractor, his wife, and his children at the buyer’s own level. He can’t assign menial tasks. He has to give up the contract at six years or at 50 or whenever the yovel year comes. He can’t destroy the sanctity of marriage. If he commits battery, the damages he pays go toward paying off the contract.

In European culture with its serfdom, serfs didn’t have money. If they committed crimes, they were punished corporally and sometimes capitally. When jails were instituted for the commonalty, they went to jail, sometimes along with their families. The only jails in Jewish law were places where you kept somebody on trial for a capital crime, while you waited for a witness to come forward who could exonerate him.

Jewish law did not allow ex post facto. The law was documented in Torah, exemplified in Prophets, and explained in Mishnah.

A person was innocent until proven guilty, part of a presumption that a condition persists without proof that it has changed. Thus safek tahor tahor, if you have no evidence that an object has been rendered tameh, it is considered tahor and so too a person is innocent until proven guilty.

Civil cases for damages required 3 judges, capital cases required 23; these were bench trials at the hands of experts in Jewish law. If they couldn’t decide, they added two judges. If the town wasn’t large enough to increase the bench, the venue changed to a larger town, the whole way up to the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem.

Evidence required witnesses who were Jews, not under exclusive service contract, and of known probity. They were questioned to make sure that they knew what they were talking about, and that they were talking about the same incident. But if somebody could stand up in court and say that the witnesses couldn’t have seen the incident because they weren’t present at the place and time of the incident, the accused was acquitted.

He was also acquitted if all the judges voted to condemn. That was “a bloodthirsty” court and its judgments were not acceptable. The only judges allowed to speak on the case were those who gave reasons for acquittal. If there weren’t enough, the case was recessed 24 hours (or over Shabbat if necessary) and then the only judges who could speak were the ones who had not yet spoken for acquittal.

Jewish law is a civil code that allows judges to create new law, as long as it does not overturn Torah prohibitions or requirements. It is a common law system which accommodates local custom: “all goes according to the custom of the land” as long as it does not contradict Torah. After the Talmudic period, there would not be another civil code or common law system until Henry II of England, which is the basis of American law.

And in Judah ben Hur’s time, Jews were not allowed to learn Greek philosophy as a consequence of the Seleucid persecutions.

It would take an uneducated self-hating Jew to think that Jewish reasoning wasn’t as good as Greek reasoning. I know that Maimonides insisted you had to learn Aristotle to understand Maaseh Breshit or Maaseh Merkabah but that is irrational. These two concepts dig into the heart of Jewish mysticism. Aristotle knew nothing about Jews. And Maimonides specifies Aristotle’s Physics, to boot, which we know is not even a valid description of the material world let alone of Jewish mystical belief. Maimonides’ antagonists, the Mutakallim, believed in atomism and that a vacuum could exist; both are part of modern physics. Maimonides’ idea is the same fallacy as thinking that translations are valid representations of their source documents: a strawman argument.

So Wallace gives Judah ben Hur an unrealistic attitude for a Jewish hero. It’s the one Wallace needs for his denouement; missionaries to Jews start with the ones who don’t know much about their culture and are therefore vulnerable to misrepresentations about it.