Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily. Today we are exploring the history in our upcoming introduction and tour of the entire Talmud. And today I want to talk about anti-Semitism and the Talmud because, for a very long time, the Talmud has been subject to persecution of its own. We usually think of persecution in terms of a people, in terms of an individual, not really in terms of a book. But the Talmud has been persecuted for centuries. And the question is why? What exactly is going on?
Talmudic persecutions really begin with questions and issues that the Christian community at large have had with the Jewish people. The fact that we did not accept Jesus as our savior. But more importantly, there was a major issue and an accusation that Jews have been dealing with for centuries and that is our allegiance, our commitment to the letter of the law. To say that part of our religious life and religious practice involves actually following a set of laws that we bring out in our daily life.
One of the early Christian works called Homilies Against the Jews by John Chrysostom… I’m gonna get his name, I’m not gonna pronounce this correctly. John Chrysostom. By John… I’m messing up this name, it’s not working. By John Chrysostom, I think that’s how you pronounce it. I probably got that wrong.
But he had a work called Homilies [Against] the Jews, and in there he talks about Jews and describes them as slaves to the letter. Being slaves to the law. This is all that they care about rather than the spirit, the idea, what we sometimes call in modern-day parlance, spirituality. This is what Jews did not care about. This was the accusation against the Jews.
Now most accusations against the Jews were rooted in the Bible initially. There were debates and disputes between the non-Jewish world, the Christian world, and the Jewish world, and most of them were, whose interpretation of the Bible is correct? This began to change in the year 1236. In 1236 there was a convert to Christianity named Nicholas Donin. And Nicholas Donin in 1236, he had, because of his own background, he actually had read the Talmud. And he flagged a bunch of passages that he felt were really problematic: “This is not okay.” And essentially, beginning with these lectures that he gave in 1236, he got onto the radar of Pope Gregory, who was the pope and the leader of the Christian world at the time.
And Pope Gregory did not like what he saw. Number one on the list was the divinity of the Talmud: “How can this be divine? This was written by human beings. This is such a ridiculous claim.” They would flag passages in the Talmud that are really not all that hard to find talking about the immorality or the alleged immorality of the Jews. Talking about the minimum age for marriage, talking about different things that they felt: “Why do Jews care about this? This is not a moral people.” Now this began to escalate and once it was on the pope’s radar, this was not good for the Jewish people. And famously in [1240], there was a public disputation.
Nicholas Donin debated against the greatest Talmudic sages of the generation. Most notably Reb Yechiel of Paris, who was one of the Tosafists, which we will talk about later, one of the great commentaries on the Talmud. And at the end of this debate, and they hurled all the classic accusations, again: “How could you say that this is divine? This was clearly written by people.” They would dig up passages that seemed to be hostile towards non-Jews and towards Christians. Now there’s almost a cruel irony in this because the Jewish people, who had very little power and no standing army at that time, were being accused by one of the great world powers at the time of being evil. This was clearly not a fair fight.
But the end of the disputation was even worse. The way that it’s been preserved in Jewish memory is that 24 cartloads of the Talmud were burned in Paris in 1242. And this is something that Jewish people still talk about and is a memory that Jewish people live with.
There is an elegy that was written by Rav Meir of Rothenburg that is called Sha’ali Serufa Ba’eish / My questions, the object of my inquiries, went up in fire. And this elegy, which was written by Rav Meir of Rothenburg, who was probably around 25 at the time that the Talmud burning took place, is preserved in our liturgy and is read every year on Tisha B’Av, the Ninth of Av, when we commemorate the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.
This was not the end of the anti-Semitic accusations against the Talmud. In fact, in many ways it was the beginning. The Talmud, rather than scripture, became the object of anti-Semites’ campaigns against the Jewish people. They said, “We don’t need to debate whether or not scripture, yes, no, which religion does it.” They became laser-focused on the Talmud. And then throughout history, following the Paris disputation, it came up again and again and again.
During the times of Martin Luther, during the times of the Frankist movement, which we will talk about later, which was a break-off in the 18th century of Jews who converted to Christianity. And they had the same exact accusation: “The Talmudists are obsessed with the law, with the nitty-gritty.”
This really reached an apex during the ascent of Nazi Germany. In 1933, there was a book that was published by Alfred Rosenberg. Now don’t get confused by the name Alfred Rosenberg. It sounded Jewish to me too. Alfred Rosenberg was a Nazi official who wrote a book called Unmoral im Talmud, which was basically cataloging all of the immoral passages about how the Talmud was really corrupting and the source of all of the negativity being ascribed to the Jewish people. We still have images of this work, which animated so much of the persecution and the animus that have been directed at Jews. “Do you want to know why Jews are so evil? Do you want to know why Jews are so bad? The place where you can find it is going to be the Talmud,” and that’s where they pointed.
In this book by Alfred Rosenberg, it’s actually interesting, he writes that two-thirds of the Jewish people still follow the Talmud. I wish we still had those numbers. But this was in 1933, was published in Munich, and it was a work once again: “If you want to attack the Jewish people, attack the Talmud.”
What are these debates about? These are not debates about words, and they are not debates about pages. This is not a debate about a collection, a book called the Talmud. This is a debate on a way of life and the system of living that is preserved through the Talmud. There is no question that Jewish life, the underlying authority for all Jewish life—how do we keep Shabbos, how do we keep the holidays, how do we mourn, how do we celebrate, how do we make blessings on food—it all originates at the Talmud.
And because of that, the Talmud became almost a litmus test for how you view the Jewish people. If the sense of a people who are literally bringing divinity into their everyday life—who are bringing divinity into the way that they eat food, the way they mourn, the way they celebrate, the way they keep holidays, the way they keep Sabbath, in their everyday life—this was seen as separating the Jews from the rest of mainstream society. And yet, if you look at history, it is actually the [way of] living that emerges from the Talmud that has actually preserved the Jewish people throughout history. The Talmud is what preserved the Jewish way of life.
Now you can’t even open up a Talmud and learn how to live. It would be nearly impossible. But what is really preserved in the Talmud most notably is not a set of laws. It’s not a law book. We’re going to discuss that. You’re going to go through the Talmud, you will be very disappointed. It is not just a clear set of laws. What the Talmud is, is taking every corner and every crevice of Jewish life, of Jewish thought, and saying, “How can we bring this part of our lives and sanctify it with God?”
As we spoke originally, the archetypal story of the Talmud is the story of the golden calf. And it’s in that story we realize, so to speak, that we need a partnership in the development of Torah. And if we are going to be partners in the development of Torah, the canvas of Torah is life itself, is existence itself. It is why halacha, Jewish law, that emerges from the Talmud, is so focused on the minutiae of Jewish life. Because what we are really sanctifying is not just left in a book, it is life itself. And that is why over and over again throughout history, when people want to attack the Jewish people, they focus on the Talmud.
So thank you so much for listening to Talmud Daily. Just 10 minutes a day and we will give you a tour of the entirety of Jewish thought. Thank you so much for learning with us today and let’s keep making Torah sweet.