Page 346 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

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of the person’s next existence), is discernable throughout. Great (c. 550–529 BCE) permitted Jews to return to
The dharmas also contributed to the development of the Palestine following the Babylonian conquest, a number
caste system of Hinduism, and thus formed a customary of Jewish scribes provided commentaries on the Torah;
code of social obligations in ancient India. Toward the some of the most significant are found in the Book of
end of the Vedic period, around 500 BCE, many of the rit- Ezra, and they created the foundations of a comprehen-
uals and rules which had developed from oral tradition sive Jewish jurisprudence. In addition to the Torah, Jew-
were collected in texts known as sutras. The Dharma- ish tradition holds that the sacred law also included a
sutras, the rules of daily life, became the first codes of divinely revealed oral law, halakhah. Halakhah, which
Hindu law. Living according to dharma became one of was comprised of the statements of oral positive law
the “jewels” of Buddhism as well, and therefore, in terms (mishna), commentaries on these laws (gemara) and a
of sacred law, Buddhism and Hinduism share a common number of moral and ethical precepts (haggadah), were
origin. In Buddhism, however, the concept of dharma put into written form in the third through sixth centuries
evolved aesthetically, with individuals seeking to achieve CE in the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds.The mish-
an inner tranquility, and it achieved its fullest expression nas are organized categorically and they cover legal mat-
in the Japanese cult of the Buddhist monk Nichiren ters ranging from religious observances to dietary laws,
(1222–1282 CE) and the Lotus school. In India, the contracts and torts, criminal law, family law, and property
Hindu law of dharma became a comprehensive code of and legal procedure. In the last few centuries BCE, legal
personal law, governing marriage and the family, inheri- questions turned into sectarian rivalries between the high
tance, and social obligations. In 1772, the British ordered priests, the Sadducees, who regarded only the Torah as
that the Dharmasutras be considered binding as personal authoritative, and the scribes and laity, the Pharisees, who
law in the Anglo-Indian courts, and thus the Hindu law, regarded the oral law as an equal part of divine law.
in conjunction with English rules of criminal and civil The activities of the Pharisees proved vitally important in
law, remained an effective code in a secularized form in Jewish history, as they developed a method of legal study
the modern age. of the law centered on a rabbinic tradition and scholarly
communities that became a permanent feature of Juda-
Jewish Law ism. Still, later movements in Jewish history, such as the
The Torah, also known as the Pentateuch, is the first Hasidic movement of the eighteenth century and the Jew-
source of sacred law for the Jewish tradition; it is a writ- ish Enlightenment (haskalah) and secularizing reform
ten, substantive law governing Jewish religious, social, movements of the late eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
and familial obligations believed to have been divinely turies, have significantly challenged the binding author-
revealed to Moses during the Exodus from Egypt. During ity of Jewish law to regulate the private and public lives
the fifth century BCE, after the Persian emperor Cyrus the of Jews.

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