SHAMIKAI (not, as has often been done, to be confounded with Sammeas), an emi nent doctor of the Jewish law at the time of Herod, head of a most important school, and supreme judge of the sanhedrim (ab-beth-din) during the presidency of Ilillel (q.v.), along with whom he is, indeed, generally mentioned, and of whom he was, as it the very counterpart. Very little is known of the history of his life. He most probably was born in Palestine, and most energetically participated in all the political and religions complications of the country. There was a harshness and rigidity in his character which contrasts most strikingly with Hind's proverbial patience. Ilk religious views were painfully strict, and he even tried to extend the rigor which he imposed upon himself, to the youngest children; but the zealotism with which later times have charged him is not his, but his school's, " the House of Shammai," as it was called. 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 chiefly tended to foster 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 death, turned exclusively upon pointsof positive law. There is only one curious metaphysical debate recorded, viz., whether, as one school held, "it was better for man to have been created or not;" or, as . the other asserted, " it would have been better if he never created." Finally, they both airreed in the latter axiom, but with the additimi—" but since lie is now in this world, let him be careful in his actions.- We need hardly point to the strange light which this discussion and final decision throw upon the times of unequaled national misery that begot them.