The Talmud (14 page)

We don’t know if Gershom was really responsible for all the innovations attributed to him, nor do we know much about his style of leadership, nor his educational skills. But all that is less important than the impact he had on future generations, of which we do know much. Gershom inspired Europe’s first wave of creative engagement with the Talmud, and in so doing smoothed the way for centuries of Talmudic life in the Western world.

Many of Gershom’s innovations (we’ll call them his, even if they weren’t) were to do with new social conditions. One of the dangers that young people were exposed to was of being kidnapped and forcibly converted to Christianity, as had happened with Gershom’s son. But there was little sympathy for those
who had been forcibly converted; there were many instances of people choosing to submit to death rather than convert, those who preferred the path of life were often reviled. In a landmark pronouncement Gershom ruled that it was forbidden to rebuke or condemn people who had been forcibly converted to Christianity. Whether that changed people’s attitudes, or just the way they behaved in public, is hard to say.

In an age when postal services really were medieval, letters were still a novelty for most people. Although it sounds strange to us, those charged with carrying or receiving letters on behalf of others didn’t always think twice about opening and reading them. People lived far less private lives than today. Even though the Talmud itself had advised on ways in which privacy can be maintained
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natural curiosity overruled any qualms most people had about confidentiality. Many letters would have contained intimate personal messages, confidential negotiations between traders or commercial secrets. In what was both a defence of privacy and one of the earliest regulations against industrial espionage, Gershom prohibited the reading of other people’s letters.

The best known of the innovations attributed to Gershom, and also the most puzzling to understand, was his prohibition against marrying more than one wife, and the severe punishment of excommunication that was to be pronounced against anyone committing the offence. It’s a puzzling enactment because laws are generally not made unless there is a need for them and all the evidence is that Jewish families in Mainz, as was generally the case throughout Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, were small, nuclear and monogamous.
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It is true that in Talmudic legislation men were permitted to marry more than one wife, but it happened so rarely that even in the Talmud itself we don’t find any significant mention of it taking place.
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Several opinions have been put forward to explain this enactment. One view is that it was directed at polygamous immigrants from Muslim countries. Another was that once they became aware of the Talmud, men who had previously been unaware of its sanction for polygamy might be tempted to follow it. Avraham Grossman suggests that it may have been directed against travelling
merchants who stayed away from home for so long that they may have been tempted to take second wives in the lands they travelled to, perhaps even abandoning their first wife altogether.
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The truth is that we don’t know why this regulation was instituted, and like all his other innovations we don’t even know whether it was Gershom who instituted it. But it remains the piece of legislation for which he is (perhaps erroneously) best known.

The vintner of Troyes

Thirty years after Gershom’s death a young wine grower from the French city of Troyes travelled to Mainz to study at the feet of Gershom’s former pupils. His name was Shlomo ben Yitzhak, but he is universally known by the acrostic formed from his name, as Rashi (the ‘R’ stands for Rabbi). He took notes of the lectures he attended in the Mainz
yeshiva.
On returning home he composed a work that has ever since remained the first, and often the only, commentary to which every reader of the Talmud turns. Like Maimonides in Spain, Rashi dominates the story of the Talmud, the pair of them stand head and shoulders above every other. There is little doubt that without Rashi’s commentary many passages of the Talmud would be indecipherable.
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Unlike his predecessors in Kairouan, Rashi provided a running commentary, distinguished by its brevity and simplicity. Although the reader can often follow the literal meaning of the Talmud text, the various steps in a Talmudic argument are not always clear. By judiciously inserting a few words here and there, Rashi deftly links together the staccato flow of the text, fills in gaps and clarifies difficult or ambiguous meanings.

Rashi’s concern is to explain the Talmudic discussion, rather than provide a legal ruling. His occasional use of ancient French to explain the meaning of a difficult word makes him a valuable reference source for medieval linguists.
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If there is any single figure to whom, despite its many setbacks, the survival, continual study and popularity of the Talmud can be attributed, it is Rashi. He
democratized the Talmud;
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armed with a copy of his commentary anyone with a command of the Hebrew language and an analytical leaning is able to read and understand it. As Haym Solovetchik points out, ‘No one ever attempted again to write another commentary to the Talmud and all other commentaries were swiftly consigned to oblivion’.
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But far from Rashi’s commentary closing the story of the Talmud, the fact that he made it so much easier to understand opened the door to its future.

Rashi is distinguished for the education he gave his daughters. The status of women in France at the time was generally more elevated than elsewhere,
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nevertheless Rashi seems to have lavished the same educational care upon his three daughters as he would have done on his sons, if he’d had any. His daughter Miriam is cited in a later work as the example to follow in overcoming a technical problem concerning the absorption by cooking vessels of the flavour of incompatible foods.
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Rashi lived just long enough to witness the devastating rampage of the army of the First Crusade. Heading for Jerusalem, to seize the city from its Muslim rulers, and working themselves up into a religious frenzy as they prepared for their expedition, the least disciplined of the crusader throng took it into their heads to slaughter the Jews of Europe along the way.

The assault began in the spring of 1096 in the Rhineland. In Speyer, Worms and Mainz the crusaders announced their presence with a murderous assault. Following the initial slaughter, those who survived were offered the choice of conversion or death. Most chose the latter option, many slaughtering their own children before committing suicide themselves, rather than condemning them to be tortured and raped by the blood-crazed army. Jewish property too was cast to the flames; this was the first occasion in which the Talmud would be burnt in Europe.

The drunken crusaders ripped their way through Europe, destroying and killing as they went. When they finally reached Jerusalem the small Jewish community was completely wiped out; for the first time in its history the city was empty of Jews.

The trauma of the crusade eventually subsided. It would return, but for now some sort of normality returned. Advances were being made in Christian
scholarship and those who were preoccupied with persuading the Jews of the error of their ways were beginning to realize that their lack of success so far was because neither side understood the other. Each faith interpreted the Bible differently, neither side could relate to the arguments of the other.

If Christians wanted to win their arguments against the Jews they realized they would have to understand Jewish interpretations of the Bible. They also began to appreciate that by reading the Jewish Bible in its original language, instead of Latin, they were likely to learn more about the underpinnings of their own faith. They began to enquire more deeply into what the Jews were studying. They began to talk to the Jews. The Jews, for their part, were happy enough to talk back.

Abelard and Héloise

One of the first to mention the new phenomenon of Jewish–Christian dialogue was Peter Abelard. Abelard, a Frenchman like Rashi, born forty years later, was a controversial, powerfully logical theologian. His rational approach to theology brought him into bitter, book-burning conflict with the supernaturalist Bernard of Clairvaux.

Abelard has gone down in history as the co-star of the medieval tale Abelard and Héloise, immortalized in Alexander Pope’s eighteenth-century poem and recounted in plays, novels, film and music ever since. It’s a true story; Héloise was Abelard’s student; they fell in love and had a child. Héloise’s father sought revenge, he had Abelard seized and castrated. Abelard entered a monastery, Héloise a nunnery, from where they conducted a correspondence that was both passionate and scholarly. Reunited in death they are said to be buried together, in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Amongst his many works, Abelard composed the
Dialogue
between
a
Philosopher,
a
Christian
and
a
Jew
. Abelard tells his readers of a dream he had, in which he is called upon to arbitrate between the three men of God (even philosophers in those days were believers). The structure of the work is reminiscent of the debate that the king of the Khazars had commanded. Although there is no evidence in the
Dialogue
that Abelard knew the Talmud, he does know a lot about Jewish
practices.
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He could only have got this knowledge through conversations with Jews.

In one of his letters to Héloise, Abelard tells her of discussions he has had with a Jew about the significance of a silver coin mentioned in the Book of Kings.
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Around the same time Hugh of St Victor, a member of the twelfth–century, intellectual Scholastic school and his pupil Andrew began to study Rashi’s Bible commentaries. They also studied the Bible commentaries of Rashi’s grandson Rashbam. He was a key figure in what would become known as the logic-chopping, dialectical Talmudic school of the
tosafist
s. It would seem, from the style in which the
tosafists
wrote, that it wasn’t just Christian scholars studying Jewish texts. The
tosafists
were learning new methods of analysis from their Christian counterparts.

Splitting hairs

The traditional Talmud page consists of three columns. The text of the Talmud sits in the centre, the commentary of Rashi is on the inside and the outside column contains a further commentary known as the
Tosafot.

Unlike Rashi,
Tosafot
is not a person and the commentary was not written at one time. Rather,
Tosafot
is a compilation of comments from scholars who flourished from the generation following Rashi to the fourteenth century. The people who contributed to the
Tosafot
are called
tosafist
s. The first
tosafists
were Rashi’s pupils and amongst the most important are two of his grandsons, Shmuel, generally referred to as
Rashbam
,
whose Bible commentaries Hugo and Andrew studied, and his youngest brother Jacob, known as Rabbenu Tam.

The
Tosafot
are glosses or novellae on the Talmud text. The method of the
tosafist
s marked a wholly new development in Talmud study. Rather than explaining the text of the Talmud, more or less word for word as Rashi had done, they focused only on topics to which they had something to add.
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What they have to say about the topics that interest them can be quite lengthy and they frequently resolve the issue they are dealing with by cross-referencing to other passages in the Talmud. They treat the Talmud as a unitary work which, provided the text is correct (and they sometimes are forced to concede that it isn’t), should be internally consistent. If they find a contradiction or difficulty
between two Talmudic passages that cannot be easily resolved they tend to resort to hair-splitting, casuistic analysis.

This method was not universally acclaimed. The sixteenth-century mystical Talmudist, Judah Loew of Prague, best known for his legendary creation of a
golem
, a humanoid made out of clay which inspired Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
, is particularly censorious of the place of the
Tosafot
in Talmudic study. He notes that
Tosafot
only became well known because the first printers of the Talmud placed it in a prominent position on the page. Had it not been for that accident of printing, the study of
Tosafot
would not have become popular. Loew argues that had other works, which concentrated on interpreting the legal outcomes of the Talmudic discussions, been printed in its place, young people would find Talmud study far more interesting and engaging.
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The
tosafist
method was very different from that of the more conservative view of the Spanish school. The Spanish excelled in clarifying and codifying the law. They did not concern themselves with analysis of the text. It is this, more than anything else, that led to a divergence between the two schools.

The
Tosafot
were composed by students in the study houses who would record what their teachers said, often challenging their remarks, before summarizing the discussion. As can happen when an inattentive student takes notes, they sometimes got things wrong. Ephraim Urbach in his comprehensive study of the
tosafist
s notes some of the reactions of the teachers when they discovered that their words were incorrectly recorded for posterity. Rabennu Tam is recorded as vehemently disputing a comment that had been attributed to him, protesting that the student who recorded it was confused.
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Rabbenu Tam was himself accused by a later scholar of transmitting errors; ‘heaven forfend that such an astute mind as his could hold such an opinion, one in which even children do not err’.
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