post-Biblical times by those who conceived the Judaism of the
later epoch to be something different from the Judaism of the
Bible, something actually opposed to it. Such observers held that
the Jewish nation ceased to exist with the moment when its
political independence was destroyed. For them the Judaism of the
later epoch has been a Judaism of the Synagogue, the spokesmen of
which have been the scholars, the Rabbis. And what this phase of
Judaism brought forth has been considered by them to be the
product of the schools rather than the product of practical,
pulsating life. Poetic phantasmagoria, frequently the vaporings
of morbid visionaries, is the material out of which these
scholars construct the theologic system of the Rabbis, and fairy
tales, the spontaneous creations of the people, which take the
form of sacred legend in Jewish literature, are denominated the
Scriptural exegesis of the Rabbis, and condemned incontinently as
nugae rabbinorum.

As the name of a man clings to him, so men cling to names. For
the primitive savage the name is part of the essence of a person
or thing, and even in the more advanced stages of culture,
judgments are not always formed in agreement with facts as they
are, but rather according to the names by which they are called.
The current estimate of Rabbinic Literature is a case in point.
With the label Rabbinic later ages inherited from former ages a
certain distorted view of the literature so designated. To this
day, and even among scholars that approach its investigation with
unprejudiced minds, the opinion prevails that it is purely a
learned product. And yet the truth is that the most prominent
feature of Rabbinic Literature is its popular character.