I give the word to my husband Thomas Finn
YOU HAVE NEVER READ THE TALMUD. And neither has the clown in your comment section. He has read a pamphlet.
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I have wanted to write this out for a long time, and today I had a little extra time on my hands. So here it is. Raw and unsweetened.
Enjoy.
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Every time I write about Jews, that comment arrives.
The Talmud.
Not the book. None of them have read it. But five sentences. Almost always the same five. With a page number after each - Sanhedrin 57a, Yevamot 61a, Gittin 57a - so it looks as if someone has looked it up.
No one has.
And I don't mean that as an insult. Or. Yes, I suppose I do.
Because f*ck anyone who picks up a Holy Book and uses it as ammunition without having read three minutes of it, or tried to understand what it is, and why it says what it says.
But most of all, it is a statement of fact. Ask the person who sends you the sentences what the Talmud is. When it was written, by whom, in which language. What the line before says, and the line after. You will not get a single answer. And never, ever a useful one.
And I really ought to stop the post right here. Why waste time on fools. But I won't. Because some people choose to listen to them. They believe that because someone can quote a verse and a page number, they know what they are talking about.
So let me do something else instead.
Let me walk through it with you.
Once, properly. So we never have to do it again.
….
First, what it is.
Jerusalem, year 70. The Romans have burned the Temple. A people is left without a temple, without a land and without a sacrificial service. The only thing they carry with them is the law. The written one, the Law of Moses. And the oral one - the way the law had been read, explained and lived for centuries, carried from teacher to student.
Around the year 200, Rabbi Judah haNasi in Galilee writes the oral law down, because he fears it will be lost now that the people is scattered.
That is what is called the Mishnah.
And then the scholars begin to discuss the Mishnah. In Galilee and in Babylon. Line by line, for three hundred years.
"What does this mean?" "What if?" "What did the other school say?" "What do we do when two rules collide?"
All of these discussions are collected.
That is what is called the Gemara.
Mishnah and Gemara together are the Talmud.
The Babylonian one, which is the one people usually mean, was completed around the year 500. It runs to 2,711 double-sided folios. It is written in Hebrew and Aramaic, without punctuation, in a shorthand style where half a sentence assumes you know the rest of the book.
And here is the first thing none of the pamphlets tell you.
The Talmud is not a book of law. It is the MINUTES of an argument.
It is a book where the minority opinion stands next to the majority's. The rejected view is written down, with a name attached, and preserved for one and a half thousand years. A single page can hold five rabbis who disagree about nearly everything, and end with no ruling at all - with one word, teku. Which means "let it stand."
The most famous example is the two schools, Hillel and Shammai, who disagreed about almost everything. The Talmud lets a voice from heaven say of them both - "These and those are the words of the living God." And then the law follows Hillel anyway.
Why? Because Hillel's students were gentle and humble. And because they always presented Shammai's view before they presented their own.
Read that again.
The school that wins is the one that first states its opponent correctly.
Imagine we did this in politics. In political talk shows. Where neither dialogue nor duel could begin until both sides had accepted the other side's account of their own position. Yes. You're right. It would make for a different world.
Anyway, back to the Talmud.
And then there is a story the Talmud tells about itself. It says it all. The rabbis are arguing over a point of law. One of them, Rabbi Eliezer, stands alone against all the others. He is certain he is right, and he asks God to prove it. And God does. A tree uproots itself. A stream begins to flow backwards. Finally a voice sounds from heaven and says that Eliezer is right.
But the others do not yield. One of them, Rabbi Joshua, rises and says - "The law is not in heaven." God has given it to human beings. Now it is human beings who must understand it, argue over it and decide it. Not with miracles. With arguments, and by majority.
And then the Talmud tells us that God smiled and said - "My children have defeated me."
Think about what that means.
Here is a tradition where not even a voice from heaven is allowed to skip the argument. Everything must come into the light and be defensible. It is the opposite of a secret book.
It is a book about disagreement.
And a book that writes down the losers' arguments.
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Let us look at a single page.
In the middle stand the Mishnah and the Gemara. Toward the spine stands Rashi, a rabbi from Troyes in Champagne, who died in 1105. His commentary is still the one every student reads first, and he explained the difficult words in Old French written in Hebrew letters. He wrote so many of them that his commentary is today one of the most important sources for how French sounded a thousand years ago. Out toward the edge stand his descendants and students, the Tosafists, arguing with him. And in the margin, references to the later codes of law.
ONE PAGE of Talmud is A THOUSAND YEARS OF CONVERSATION at once.
And no one reads it alone. It is read in pairs, they call it 'chavruta', where two people sit across from each other and fight over every single line.
In 1923 a Polish rabbi, Meir Shapiro, proposed that Jews all over the world should read the same page on the same day. If you do that, it takes seven and a half years to get through. In January 2020, around 90,000 people gathered in a stadium in New Jersey to celebrate reaching the last page.
That is the secret book. It gets celebrated in a stadium.
Remember that the next time someone asks you "whether you have read the Talmud."
Look at their profile - find a picture where you can see their eyes, read a little of their posts and comments - and then ask yourself: does this person look and sound like someone who has spent seven and a half years reading what they are asking whether you have read?
I have yet to meet a single one who passed that test. Everyone who has actually studied it - because that is what you do, you don't read it - could not in their wildest dreams imagine asking you whether "you have read it."
….
So where do the five sentences I mentioned at the start come from?
Not from the Talmud. From the pamphlets. And they have a long history.
Paris, 1240. A Jewish convert, Nicholas Donin, presents 35 charges against the Talmud to the king. A disputation is held. Two years later, some 24 cartloads of Talmud manuscripts are driven out and burned. Every single volume had been copied by hand. One could take a year to write.
Rome, 1553. The Pope has the Talmud burned on the Campo de' Fiori. And afterwards it is censored at the printing presses, so that for centuries it could only appear cleansed of the passages the Church disliked.
But there was another Christian voice too. In 1510 the German humanist Johannes Reuchlin was asked by the Emperor to rule on whether the books of the Jews should be confiscated and burned. He said no. You do not burn a book you have not read. It cost him ten years of lawsuits. Ten years of a human life for saying the obvious.
And then came the pamphlets.
Around 1700 the German orientalist Johann Andreas Eisenmenger writes "Judaism Unmasked." Two thick volumes of sentences cut out of the Talmud and later rabbinic literature. Many of them quoted correctly, but torn out of the discussion they stood in, and often from the side of the argument that lost. Nearly everything written about the Talmud in that genre since has been copied from Eisenmenger.
In 1871 the Catholic priest and professor August Rohling publishes "The Talmud Jew." A rabbi in Vienna, Joseph Bloch, publicly calls him a forger. Rohling sues him. The court appoints two experts, both Christian orientalists, to review his quotations. In 1885 - fourteen years later - shortly before the case is due in court, Rohling withdraws it.
In 1892 a Catholic priest in Saint Petersburg, Justinas Pranaitis, publishes "The Christian in the Talmud of the Jews." Kyiv, 1913. A Jewish factory worker, Menahem Beilis, is charged with the ritual murder of a boy. The prosecution calls Pranaitis as an expert on the Talmud. Under cross-examination he cannot even explain the most basic terms and titles in the book he is an expert on. The jury, mercifully, acquits Beilis.
But Pranaitis is still in circulation. The lists going around online today are largely copied from him.
In Germany, Theodor Fritsch collected Rohling's quotations in a handbook that went through 49 editions up to 1944, and Der Stürmer printed them as a standing feature.
And in Kyiv - the same city, fifty years after Beilis - the Soviet Academy of Sciences published a book in 1963 with the same sentences, so crude that even the Western communist parties protested, and it had to be withdrawn.
The pamphlet changed language and regime. The sentences were the same.
….
So when someone sends you five sentences, there are three kinds.
The first kind does not exist.
The most shared is perhaps this one - "Jehovah created the non-Jew in human form so that the Jew would not have to be served by beasts." It is usually attributed to "Midrasch Talpiot." That is not the Talmud. It is an 18th-century book from Smyrna. And no one has been able to point to the sentence in it.
The second kind exists, but means something else.
Yevamot 61a. "You are called man, but the nations are not called man." It is passed around as proof that Jews do not regard others as human. But it is one rabbi's opinion, in a technical discussion about when a grave renders a tent ritually impure.
And the same Talmud says the opposite, by the way, using the same word -
"Beloved is Man, for he was created in the image of God."
And the Mishnah explains why God created one single human being in the Beginning - for the sake of Peace, so that no one could ever say to another, "My father was greater than yours."
And yes, there are also rules in the Talmud where Jew and non-Jew are treated differently. There are in every law of antiquity. But notice which direction it moves in. Unlike other books.
Gittin 61a - one supports the poor of the nations together with the poor of Israel, visits their sick and buries their dead, "for the ways of peace." And in the 13th century Menachem Meiri in Provence writes that the harsh rules applied to the idolaters of antiquity. NOT to the Christians and Muslims he himself lived among.
And then there is the third kind, which exists and is hard.
There are passages in the Talmud about Jesus that can be hard for a Christian to read. That he was executed on the eve of Passover for sorcery. And a story in Gittin 57a about his punishment after death, which I will not repeat here.
One should not - and there is no reason to - pretend that it isn't there. It is there.
But for those of you who are thin-skinned about that sort of thing, for one reason or another - notice who and where. It was written in Babylon, outside the Roman Empire, by a minority whose brothers inside the Empire were now living under a Christian emperor who had begun to legislate against them. It is a persecuted minority's polemic against a majority's religion. And after centuries of censorship it is all but unknown to the Jews who read the Talmud today.
And we have our own pages. "Happy is he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rock," it says in Psalm 137. And Luther wrote in 1543 that the synagogues of the Jews should be burned. NO tradition a thousand years old has only bright pages.
The only question is - what it does with them.
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Now try this idiotic pamphlet test yourself.
Imagine you write a post about Christianity or Christians. And the first thing that happens is that someone comes flying in from the right (or, more likely the left, but let that lie...) with the comment -
The Bible says - "There is no God."
It's right there! Psalm 14, verse 1.
Word for word.
The whole verse, however, reads -
"The fool says in his heart: There is no God."
Five words can prove anything. That is why the pamphlet and the fool in your comment section always give you five words and never the whole page.
So the next time someone sends you a quote from the Talmud, ask three questions.
Does it exist? Look it up. The Babylonian Talmud is online, free, in Hebrew and in English, page by page.
Who says it, and who answers him? Because in the Talmud, someone always answers.
And did it become law? What Jews actually live by is not found in the Talmud's debates but in the codes that came afterwards - Maimonides in the 12th century and the Shulchan Aruch in the 16th. If it isn't there, it is an opinion that lost.
And if you want to keep it really short, ask him one single thing.
State the opponent of what you have been sent. Who answered, and what did they say?
That is what Hillel's school did, and that is why it won.
If he can't do that, he hasn't read the Talmud.
He has read Eisenmenger.
The Lie.
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And no, I haven't read all 2,711 folios either. I have PLENTY to do with Christianity. BUT. I have looked things up the way I show you above - for exactly those reasons - EVERY TIME someone has presented something to me as "the Talmud."
I do it every time. That is the whole difference.
And so should you.