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A hint of this approach is offered by the historian K.M. Panikkar when he writes:
The service which a small priestly class rendered to a whole people at the time of the destruction of their political power is paralleled only by the action of the Jewish rabbis when the Temple was destroyed and Jews dispersed by the Romans. At the time when the Jewish people sank into despair, a group of learned men under Johanan ben Zakkai established the great academy at Jabneh in the heart of Roman Palestine itself and guarded zealously the doctrine of Judaism. It sent its messages to the Jewish people dispersed all over the world and thus saved Judaism for the future. That is what the Brahmins did in the 13th and the 14th centuries in the Gangetic Valley.43
Panikkar is referring here to the second crisis created by the loss of political power that the Hindu community had to face under Muslim rule, but he drops a hint which might prove helpful for us as we investigate the first crisis, to which the Manusmṛti constituted a response.
It so happens that the Jewish community also faced a crisis caused by the loss of political power in the first century, when the Romans destroyed its Temple in Jerusalem. Panikkar, in the passage cited earlier, refers to this incident and as to how the community was saved at this moment by the creation of Rabbinic Judaism, which was centred not on worship in the Temple, but in following Jewish Law as collected in the Mishnah, a compendium of oral law which was compiled through the efforts of Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai. The fact that the Manusmṛti was similarly compiled around the same time provides an interesting parallel. This was especially so as its goal was also to save a community which had lost political power, by placing its focus on what we might call ‘social power’ as a counterblast to it—a society so
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