The school and the home are not mutually opposed to each other in
the conception of the Jews. They study in their homes, and they
live in their schools. Likewise there is no distinct class of
scholars among them, a class that withdraws itself from
participation in the affairs of practical life. Even in the
domain of the Halakah, the Rabbis were not so much occupied with
theoretic principles of law as with the concrete phenomena of
daily existence. These they sought to grasp and shape. And what
is true of the Halakah is true with greater emphasis of the
Haggadah, which is popular in the double sense of appealing to
the people and being produced in the main by the people. To speak
of the Haggadah of the Tannaim and Amoraim is as far from fact as
to speak of the legends of Shakespeare and Scott. The ancient
authors and their modern brethren of the guild alike elaborate
legendary material which they found at hand.

It has been held by some that the Haggadah contains no popular
legends, that it is wholly a factitious, academic product. A
cursory glance at the pseudepigraphic literature of the Jews,
which is older than the Haggadah literature by several centuries,
shows how untenable this view is. That the one literature should
have drawn from the other is precluded by historical facts. At a
very early time the Synagogue disavowed the pseudepigraphic
literature, which was the favorite reading matter of the
sectaries and the Christians. Nevertheless the inner relation
between them is of the closest kind. The only essential
difference is that the Midrashic form prevails in the Haggadah,
and the parenetic or apocalyptic form in the pseudepigrapha. The
common element must therefore depart from the Midrash on the one
hand and from parenesis on the other.