The Talmud (15 page)

In the same way that Christian scholars were beginning to take note of Jewish Bible scholarship, the
tosafist
s were carried along by the intellectual currents pervading Christian Europe in the eleventh century. Ephraim Urbach noted that the
tosafists’
style bears many similarities to the glosses that began to be added around this time to the Justinian code.
37
Their method of comparing,
contrasting and challenging Talmudic passages and of reconciling the economic and social realities of their time with Talmudic law reflected the new style of innovative thinking that was taking root in the Church schools. This view reconciled the honour due to earlier generations with the greater knowledge of their own time; later scholars did not consider themselves as great as their predecessors but believed they could see further because, in the words of a proverb adopted from Christian scholastics, they were dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants.
38

These developments were of course no accident. Just as had happened in the early days of the Islamic Empire, a two-way process of influence and counter-influence was taking place. Christian Bible exegetes were gaining biblical insights from dialogue with Jews. Jewish Talmudic scholars were learning analytical methods from their Christian counterparts. The Talmud would soon no longer exist within its own closed world. It would need to find its way in a new, and often more challenging, environment.

Notes

1
Niddah 24b.

2
Maimonides’
Commentary to Mishnah
, Uktzin, 3.12.

3
Every subsection of the work called the Mishnah is also, confusingly, known as a
Mishnah
.

4
Louis Jacobs suggests Maimonides believed that the Mishnah, like the Bible, can be interpreted on its own terms (Jacobs, 1995).

5
The Thirteen Principles of The Faith are discussed extensively in Louis Jacobs
Principles of the Jewish Faith
(New York, 1964); Menahem Kellner
Must A Jew Believe Anything?
(London, 1999); Marc B. Shapiro
The Limits of Orthodox Theology
(London, 2004).

6
Marcus & Saperstein, 1999.

7
Mishneh Torah
can mean Second to the Torah, or Repetition of the Torah. The fifth of Moses’s books is also known in Hebrew as
Mishneh Torah
. Translated into Greek it is Deuteronomy.

8
Fishman, 2011.

9
Jacobs, 1995 s.v. Maimonides.

10
Rabad to Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuvah 3.7.

11
Silver, 1965.

12
Malkiel, 2008.

13
Malkiel, 2003.

14
Malkiel, 2008.

15
Elukin, 2007.

16
Pearl, 1988.

17
For a history and thematic analysis of the legend see Bamberger, 2009, in Hebrew. Other studies include: Joseph Sherman,
The Jewish Pope: Myth, Diaspora and Yiddish Literature
(Oxford, Legenda, 2003); Hymie Klugman, ‘Elchanan, The Jewish Pope’, Midstream 34.1 (1988), pp. 26–7; David L. Lerner, ‘The Enduring Legend of the Jewish Pope’,
Judaism
40
(1991), pp. 148–70.

18
Jestice, 2007.

19
Fishman, 2011.

20
Grossman, 2011
.

21
Bava Batra 2b discusses whether building windows which overlook a neighbour’s property constitutes a form of damages.

22
Grossman, 1988; Stow, 1987.

23
BT Yoma 18b records both Rav and Rav Nahman, who when travelling would call out ‘Who will be mine for a day?’

24
Grossman, 2004.

25
The fourteenth-century Talmudist Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet exclaims that without Rashi’s commentary obscure parts of the Talmud would be ‘like the words of a closed book’. Quoted in Urbach, 1968, p. 19.

26
Brenner, et al., 2003.

27
Solovetchik, 2006.

28
Solovetchik, 2006, p. 37.

29
Fishman, 2011.

30
Teshuvot Maimoniot, Hilchot Ma'achlot Asurot, 5.

31
Cf. Marenbon & Orlandi, 2001.

32
Opera Petri Abaelardi
ed. V. Cousin, 2v (Paris: A Durand, 1849, 1859), Problemata, 1.237–94.

33
Jacobs, 1995.

34
Maharal, Netivot Olam 1
, p. 25, ed. H. Heinig, London, 1961.

35
Tosafot Avoda Zara 57b s.v. L’afukei.

36
Urbach, 1968.

37
Urbach, 1968.

38
Karnafogel, 2000.

PART II

The Talmud in the World

9

Banned, censored and burned – the thirteenth century

Nahum of Gamzu used to say: Even this is for the best.
1

It seems to me, Jew, that I dare not declare that you are human lest perchance I lie, because I recognize that reason, that which distinguishes human beings from beasts, is extinct in you or in any case buried. Truly, why are you not called brute animals? Why not beasts? Why not beasts of burden? The ass hears but does not understand; the Jew hears but does not understand.
2

With these words the twelfth-century abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable, vented his frustration with the Jews. They had once again failed to listen to his arguments showing the Talmud to be false and proving the divinity of Jesus.

Peter was the head of a powerful, international monastic movement who devoted much of his life to the study of other faiths. Peter pioneered the study of both Islam and Judaism, but his interest was far from academic. In those days many religious thinkers were polemicists; anxious to prove the truth of their faith and the falseness of any other belief. By all accounts Peter was a saintly and politically influential man, who had the ear of kings and popes. He had defended Peter Abelard against the accusations of Bernard of Clairvaux and after Abelard’s death had acceded to Héloise’s request to grant him absolution from his sins. He was also a polemicist par excellence.

Peter first encountered Islam during a visit to Spain, sparking an interest which led him to commission the translation of Islamic texts into Latin. He then devoted much of his time to writing refutations of the Muslim faith. Eventually
he turned his attention to Judaism, becoming one of the first to discuss the Talmud; a work which he held in contempt and ridicule.
3

Peter’s work came at a time when Christian scholars were realizing that their attempts, over the last thousand years, to prove the Jews wrong from the Bible were not working because the Jews had their own tradition of biblical interpretation, a tradition which was contained in the Talmud. The Christians were beginning to realize the significance of the Talmud to the Jews, and to understand that if they wanted to prove the Jews wrong they would need to do it by refuting the Talmud, not by bringing arguments from the Bible. The Jews would not accept Christian interpretations of the Old Testament. They had their own. Which were stored in the Talmud.

Peter’s life-long attempts to show both Muslims and Jews the errors of their ways mark the beginning of an onslaught on both religions over the next hundred years or so. Chief amongst the aggressors were the Dominican Friars.

The American historian Salo Baron challenged the ‘lachrymose’ view of Jewish history. He took exception to the popular view, reinforced by nineteenth-century historians, that the Jews had been the most persecuted group in history. He argued that, for example, during the Middle Ages, life for Christian peasants was far worse. To be sure, there were horrific events; crusader assaults, pogroms and the carnage that followed in the wake of blood libels, recurring accusations that Jews had ritually slaughtered Christian children and used their blood to bake Passover bread. But to understand the history of the Jews in any particular period one had to look at what they were doing with their lives. They were not constantly under attack and when they were not, they were living creative lives, learning, working, reading, teaching, raising families and promoting the way of life they believed in.

The history of the Talmud, which has paralleled the history of the Jews, supports Salo Baron’s view. By and large it has been a successful history. Followers of the Talmud have explored the deepest intellectual oceans, traversed broad plains of knowledge and ideas, created and sustained communities and attained a clear and uncompromising sense of personal identity and self-knowledge. But that’s not to say there weren’t lachrymose periods, tearful events in the life of the Talmud and its devotees. The thirteenth century in Christian Europe was one such time.

The disputation in Paris

Institutional prejudice against the Jews took a giant step forward when Pope Innocent III was elected in 1198. Paying lip service to the earlier papal bull,
Sicut Judaeis,
which had granted limited protection to the Jews in papal lands, Innocent introduced measures to distinguish Jews from Christians, including a requirement for them to wear distinctive clothing. He drew clear lines between orthodox and heretical Christian beliefs and urged bishops to enforce correct religious adherence in their localities. His successor, Gregory IX pushed these reforms further, handing power to mendicant orders to assert his authority.
4
Jeremy Cohen notes that the ‘condemnation and persecution of rabbinic literature by the late medieval Church marked an important milestone in the history of Christian-Jewish relations’.
5

In 1236 Nicholas Donin, a Dominican friar who had been born a Jew but converted to Christianity, appeared before Pope Gregory IX. He brought with him a list of thirty five charges that he had compiled against the Talmud. Amongst Donin’s accusations were the charges that the Jews believed the Talmud came from God, that Christians who studied it were to be punished by death and that God is capable of sinning. Notwithstanding the institutional climate driven by the papacy, it has been suggested that Donin’s specific motive for this was to seek revenge against his former teacher, Yehiel of Paris. Yehiel had apparently excommunicated Donin for his heretical views – the same views no doubt which had led to his conversion to Christianity.

It took the Pope nearly three years to respond to Donin’s charges. When he did, he sent Donin off with a letter to be delivered to the Bishop of Paris. The Bishop was ordered to issue instructions to the kings of France, England, Portugal and the Spanish, that all copies of the Talmud and other Jewish books in their lands were to be confiscated. The Pope demanded that the confiscation was to take place on the first Sabbath in Lent, that all confiscated books be examined and any which contained material contradictory to the Christian faith were to be burnt.

The kings weren’t too impressed with the Pope’s edict. England, Spain and Portugal ignored it. The only king to react was Louis IX of France, and his response was far from the Pope’s original demand. Instead, Louis offered the
Jews an opportunity to publicly defend the Talmud. He ordered that a public debate take place, in which Donin would confront the leading rabbis of France with his charges.

It was not the first debate, or disputation, to take place between Christians and Jews and nor would it be the last. But this debate was very different from anything that had gone before. Previously, either the Christians had sought to prove to the Jews that the Hebrew Bible had foretold the coming of Jesus, or the Jews had initiated the debate, attempting to prove the reverse. The debates centred on the interpretation of passages in the Hebrew Bible; the Christians quoting verses from the Jewish prophets that they believed supported their view, the Jews using their tradition of interpretation, which the Christians had recently discovered was bound up in the Talmud, to try to prove them wrong.

Even Salo Baron would accept that in thirteenth-century France Jews had a hard time of it. They were restricted in the trades they could perform, were subjected to blood libels, had been attacked and slaughtered by crusaders and were generally treated as inferior and unwelcome. What is interesting about the previous debates is that despite the power and authority vested in the Church, the Jews had the upper hand; Christianity was trying to justify its existence and not, as might have been expected, the other way round. In matters of religious belief, since Christianity depended on the Hebrew Bible the Jews represented the status quo; it fell to Christianity to prove it was right, not to Judaism to prove its daughter faith wrong.
6

But the debate between Donin and Yehiel was different. This time Judaism was on the back foot, forced to defend itself. Not only that, but the heart of the debate was no longer how to interpret biblical texts which were claimed by both religions. Instead it was the validity and integrity of the Talmud which was at stake, even though it was a rabbinic text which until recently had been of no interest to Christianity at all.

The debate took place in the royal court in Paris on 25 and 26 June 1240, in the presence of the leading French clergy and Queen Blanche, the king’s mother. Nicholas Donin appeared as prosecutor of the Talmud; Yehiel and his colleague,
Rabbi Moses of Courcy were its defenders. It was a tense and dramatic occasion, everyone was aware that the stakes riding on it were high. For Yehiel, it was an intimidating environment:

When he came before the queen and the princes in the king’s court, the Rabbi was alone there with the throng, the queen, the clergy, the rules and all the knights, great and small; of the Israelites there was not one.
7

Our knowledge of the debate comes from the accounts written by the protagonists, Rabbi Yehiel and Nicholas Donin. Donin’s account was in Latin and Yehiel’s in Hebrew. Of course, they each wrote their accounts after the debate had taken place, they each had an axe to grind and the two documents therefore are neither word–for-word transcriptions, nor do they necessarily agree with each other.

Donin’s account of the disputation is held in the French Bibliothèque Nationale. It is appended to the
Extractiones de Talmut
, a work composed by Jewish converts to Christianity, which purports to list all the incriminating passages in the Talmud.
8
The philosopher St Thomas Aquinas probably had a copy of the
Extractiones
in front of him when he composed his polemic against disbelief, the
Summa Contra Gentiles
in which he misunderstands the Talmud in a similar manner to Donin.
9
It might be thought that the scholarly and rational Aquinas, who used the writings of Maimonides to help him expound biblical laws, would help improve Christian understanding of the Talmud. In fact the opposite seems to have happened; his attention to Scripture led him to a literal understanding of biblical Judaism which failed to recognize the role and purpose of the Talmud in the reality of a post-biblical world.
10

It has been argued that Yehiel was less interested in reporting the cut and thrust of the debate than writing an account which would function as a guide for future disputants. His report doesn’t just set out the arguments he used, which he felt others should follow. It also helps others who might find
themselves in a similar position to prepare, by describing the atmosphere in the court in detail, and the manner in which the audience behaved.
11

Yehiel tried to explain that the Talmud was an essential, divinely given companion to the Bible, that without it the Bible could not be understood. He tried to rebut Donin’s specific charges one by one. Many of the charges that Donin had laid were based upon the parts of the Talmud known as
aggada
, which do not deal with law or religious practice but instead introduce fables, folktales, stories, magic and cosmology. Yehiel argued that these passages are intended ‘to draw the heart of a person … if he wants he can believe them, if he doesn’t want to, he need not believe’.
12

Donin mocked the Talmudic statement about the disagreements between Hillel and Shammai: ‘these and these are the words of the living God’
.
How can God change his mind, he asked? Yehiel’s answer was that the statement refers to legal decisions that are reached by majority vote. If a majority in one community decide differently from a majority elsewhere, both decisions are valid.

Yehiel refuted the charges that the Talmud is disparaging to Christians, arguing that Donin misunderstood. The passages that Donin claimed referred to Christians actually referred to pagans and idolaters. This is obviously so since the Christian faith had hardly reached Babylon when the Talmud was under composition and its authors were neither particularly knowledgeable about it nor fearful of it.

The Talmud aflame

Donin’s charges against the Talmud were artificial and Yehiel’s attempt at defence tortuous, but of course this was never going to be a fair contest. It was no surprise that Yehiel didn’t win the debate and what really mattered was not the outcome, but what happened next. The consequences of Yehiel’s defeat were far-reaching. Two years after the debate, in 1242, a papal commission condemned the Talmud and urged Louis IX to issue an edict for all copies of the Talmud to be burnt. Louis was not slow to react. He despatched inspectors across the realm, charging them to ransack the Jewish neighbourhoods in both
cities and villages. The inspectors, most of whom could not read Hebrew, were unable to tell which volumes were copies of the Talmud and which were not. They confiscated everything they found.

Books were the lifeblood of Jewish life; the people may have been as poor as any in the Middle Ages but they had pride in their learning. Their books were often all they had. Study was an end in itself and the highest aspiration of any Jewish parent was that their son would become a rabbinic scholar, an authority in Talmud. They wouldn’t have given up their holy books without a fight, many of those fights would have ended in bloodshed and tragedy.

The impact went far beyond those from whom the books were wrenched. Twenty four wagonloads of books were brought to the pyre in a square in Paris. This was long before printing reached Europe. Every book had been written by hand. Thousands of manuscripts, each of which would have taken weeks or months to write, were burned. Many works of which only a few copies existed were lost to the world for ever. Shmuel ben Shlomo, who may have helped Yehiel prepare for the disputation, complains that:

My spirit is departed, my strength exhausted and there is no light in my eyes due to the wrath of the enemy. He forcefully overpowered us, he took the soul and delight of our eyes, we have no book in our hands to comprehend or to understand.
13