“THE most important thing to know about the Pharisees is that they are the ancestors of all contemporary Jews. The other sects that existed contemporaneously with them died out shortly after the Second Temple’s destruction. Once they disappeared, the Pharisees no longer were called by that name; their religious practices became normative Judaism. Unfortunately, at the very time all Jews were increasingly identifying as Pharisees, the word began to acquire a new highly-pejorative meaning. The New Testament repeatedly depicted the Pharisees as small-minded religious hypocrites. Eventually, the word ‘pharisees’ came to be synonymous in English with ‘hypocrite,’ a distortion as obnoxious to Jews as the expression ‘to jew’ — meaning to bargain down or to cheat. In actuality, the greatest teachers of Talmudic Judaism, men like Hillel, Rabbi Yokkanan ben Zakkai and Rabbi Akiva, were Pharisees.”
— Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Literacy, the Most Important Things to Know about the Jewish Religion, Its People, and Its History (1991)
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