Attacks on the Talmud

Attacks on the Talmud.

This same Pablo Christiani made an attack on the Talmud which resulted in a papal bull against it and in the first censorship, which was undertaken at Barcelona by a commission of Dominicans, who ordered the cancelation of passages reprehensible from a Christian point of view (1264). At the disputation of Tortosa in 1413, Geronimo de Santa Fé brought forward a number of accusations, including the fateful assertion that the condemnations of pagans and apostates found in the Talmud referred in reality to Christians. Two years later, Pope Martin V., who had convened this disputation, issued a bull (which was destined, however, to remain inoperative) forbidding the Jews to read the Talmud, and ordering the destruction of all copies of it. Far more important were the charges made in the early part of the sixteenth century by the convert Johann Pfefferkorn, the agent of the Dominicans. The result of these accusations was a struggle in which the emperor and the pope acted as judges, the advocate of the Jews being Johann Reuchlin, who was opposed by the obscurantists and the humanists; and this controversy, which was carried on for the most part by means of pamphlets, became the precursor of the Reformation. An unexpected result of this affair was the complete printed edition of the Babylonian Talmud issued in 1520 by Daniel Bomberg at Venice, under the protection of a papal privilege. Three years later, in 1523, Bomberg published the first edition of the Palestinian Talmud. After thirty years the Vatican, which had first permitted the Talmud to appear in print, undertook a campaign of destruction against it. On New-Year's Day (Sept. 9), 1553, the copies of the Talmud which had been confiscated in compliance with a decree of the Inquisition were burned at Rome; and similar burnings took place in other Italian cities, as at Cremona in 1559. The Censorship of the Talmud and other Hebrew works was introduced by a papal bull issued in 1554; five years later the Talmud was included in the first Index Expurgatorius; and Pope Pius IV. commanded, in 1565, that the Talmud be deprived of its very name. The first edition of the expurgated Talmud, on which most subsequent editions were based, appeared at Basel (1578-1581) with the omission of the entire treatise of 'Abodah Zarah and of passages considered inimical to Christianity, together with modifications of certain phrases. A fresh attack on the Talmud was decreed by Pope Gregory XIII. (1575-85), and in 1593 Clement VIII. renewed the old interdiction against reading or owning it. The increasing study of the Talmud in Poland led to the issue of a complete edition (Cracow, 1602-5), with a restoration of the original text; an edition containing, so far as known, only two treatises had previously been published at Lublin (1559-76). In 1707 some copies of the Talmud were confiscated in the province of Brandenburg, but were restored to their owners by command of Frederick, the first king of Prussia. The last attack on the Talmud took place in Poland in 1757, when Bishop Dembowski, at the instance of the Frankists, convened a public disputation at Kamenetz-Podolsk, and ordered all copies of the work found in his bishopric to be confiscated and burned by the hangman.
(see image) PAGE FROM TRACTATE SHABBAT OF THE ROMM EDITION OF THE BABYLONIAN TALMUD, WILNA, 1886.The external history of the Talmud includes also the literary attacks made upon it by Christian theologians after the Reformation, since these onslaughts on Judaism were directed primarily against that work, even though it was made a subject of study by the Christian theologians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1830, during a debate in the French Chamber of Peers regarding state recognition of the Jewish faith, Admiral Verhuell declared himself unable to forgive the Jews whom he had met during his travels throughout the world either for their refusal to recognize Jesus as the Messiah or for their possession of the Talmud. In the same year the Abbé Chiarini published at Paris a voluminous work entitled "Théorie du Judaïsme," in which he announced a translation of the Talmud, advocating for the first time a version which should make the work generally accessible, and thus serve for attacks on Judaism. In a like spirit modern anti-Semitic agitators have urged that a translation be made; and this demand has even been brought before legislative bodies, as in Vienna. The Talmud and the "Talmud Jew" thus became objects of anti-Semitic attacks, although, on the other hand, they were defended by many Christian students of the Talmud.

In consequence of the checkered fortunes of the Talmud, manuscripts of it are extremely rare; and the Babylonian Talmud is found entire only in a Munich codex (Hebrew MS. No. 95), completed in 1369, while a Florentine manuscript containing several treatises of the fourth and fifth orders dates from the year 1176. A number of Talmudic codices containing one or more tractates are extant in Rome, Oxford, Paris, Hamburg, and New York, while the treatise Sanhedrin, from Reuchlin's library, is in the grand-ducal library at Carlsruhe. In the introduction to vols. i., iv., viii., ix., and xi. of his "DiKduKe Soferim, Variæ Lectiones in Mischnam et in Talmud Babylonicum," which contains a mass of critical material bearing on the text of Babli, N. Rabbinovicz has described all the manuscripts of this Talmud known to him, and has collated the Munich manuscript with the printed editions, besides giving in his running notes a great number of readings collected with much skill and learning from other manuscripts and various ancient sources. Of this work, which is indispensable for the study of the Talmud, Rabbinovicz himself published fifteen volumes (Munich, 1868-86), containing the treatises of the first, second, and fourth orders, as well as two treatises (Zebahim and Menahot) of the fifth order. The sixteenth volume (hullin) was published posthumously (completed by Ehrentreu, Przemysl, 1897). Of the Palestinian Talmud only one codex, now at Leyden, has been preserved, this being one of the manuscripts used for the editio princeps. Excepting this codex, only fragments and single treatises are extant. Recently (1904) Luncz discovered a portion of Yerushalmi in the Vatican Library, and Ratner has made valuable contributions to the history of the text in his scholia on Yerushalmi ("Sefer Ahabat ziyyon we-Yerushalayim"), of which three volumes have thus far appeared, comprising Berakot, Shabbat, Terumot, and hallah (Wilna, 1901, 1902, 1904).