Shammai

Shammai, an eminent doctor of the Jewish law at the time of Herod, head of a most important school, and supreme judge of the Sanhedrim during the presidency of Hillel (q.v.), along with whom he is, indeed, generally mentioned, and of whom he was, as it were, the complement. Very little is known of the history of his life; but he was probably born in Palestine, and he energetically participated in all the political and religious complications of the country. There was a harshness and rigidity in his character, which contrasts most strikingly with Hillel's proverbial patience. His religious views were painfully strict, and he even tried to extend the rigour which he imposed upon himself to the youngest children; but the zealotism with which later times have charged him is not so much to be ascribed to him as to his school—'the House of Shammai.' This seems, under the adverse circumstances of the commonwealth—sedition within, and the approaching enemy without—to have developed a fanatical zeal that at times surpassed all bounds, and strongly fostered that exceptional exclusiveness which proved both the bane and the saving of Judaism. The discussions of the two rival schools, of which that of Shammai preponderated long after the master's death, turned all upon points of positive law.