The Talmud (18 page)

The
Tur
had served its purpose but Caro saw the need to expand it, bring it up to date and produce an authoritative guide to the law that would be applicable everywhere and serve to assist rabbis and judges in their decision making. He produced a commentary on the
Tur
which he called the
Bet Yosef.
It was the most comprehensive guide to Jewish law that had ever been produced, both in its breadth of content and the manner in which it explained things. Louis Jacobs described it as the ‘keenest work of legal analysis in the history of Jewish law’.
17

The
Bet Yosef
was so momentous that, once he finished it, Caro felt compelled to produce a digest. He decided to write a work for ‘young students’ to help them clearly know the law. Unlike the
Bet Yosef
, it would not contain complex analysis. This book would be laid out, like a table is for a meal, with everything to hand and clearly in its place. He called it
Shulchan Aruch
or the Laid Table.

Shortly after the
Shulchan Aruch
was written, Moses Isserles of Krakow in Poland criticized its Sephardic outlook (the Sephardim were the Jews who had originated in Spain, who often had different customs from the northern Europeans, or Ashkenazim). Isserles interpolated his comments into Caro’s work, whenever he felt the Ashkenazi practice needed to be recorded.
Caro’s
Shulchan Aruch,
printed with Isserles’s glosses, is still the unchallenged compendium of Jewish law. Although a changing world has led to a plenitude of new works dealing with technical, social, scientific and economic matters of which Caro and Isserles would have had no conception, the
Shulchan
Aruch
still lies beneath them all as the law code par excellence, the definitive summary of how things should be done.
18
The scholars in the old academies of Babylon, with their multifaceted view of the world and their reluctance to provide definitive rulings, would have been astonished.

Christian Hebraists

Protestantism began to take hold in Europe in 1517, in the wake of Martin Luther’s challenges to Catholic doctrine. One of its chief pillars was the principle of
sola scriptura;
the belief that the Bible is all that is needed to interpret the word of God.
Sola scriptura
contends that Scripture is complete; it holds absolute authority over the believer.
19
This position is of course far removed from the rabbinic principle that the Bible can only be understood through a tradition of interpretation, which is found in the Oral Law.
Sola scriptura
is closer to the literalist, Karaite position. At first sight, therefore, the Talmud had even less in common with Protestantism than it had with Catholicism; there didn’t seem to be any reason why Protestant thinkers would react to it any differently than the Catholics had done for so long.

But the leading Protestant theologians saw things differently. They believed that if Protestantism was to really get to grips with the true meaning of Scripture, the Old as well as the New Testament, it would need a much deeper understanding of biblical texts. From the days of the earliest Church Fathers the Old Testament had been taught, studied and read in Latin. But Latin was not its original language. It was a translation. And, as everyone who has studied texts in any language knows, translations are slippery things. When there’s more than one way to translate a word, such as the French word
aimer,
which in English
can mean to love or to like, the translator has to make a decision. That decision reflects the translator’s personal opinion, it can radically change the meaning of a passage. Particularly if the translator lived in the fourth century, when the Bible was translated into Latin; a period in history when translation techniques were not all that sophisticated.

Understanding the true meaning of the original Hebrew text was a priority for Protestants if they were to make progress in advancing the principles of
sola scriptura.
They would have to learn Hebrew.

We can’t tell whether the doctrine of
sola scriptura
led to Christian study of Hebrew, or whether it was the other way round. There is some evidence that a few imaginative scholars, humanists who admired and promoted the study of classical art, literature and language, had already started to learn Hebrew out of intellectual curiosity. In so doing, they discovered that their comprehension of the Old Testament improved and this may have led in turn to the development of the idea of
sola scriptura
.

One of these pioneering scholars was Conrad Pellican. Born in Alsace in 1478, around the time the first copies of the Talmud were being printed, he entered the Franciscan order at the age of fifteen. He is the first Christian scholar that we hear of who studied the Talmud systematically. He had a Jewish teacher, his intention being, according to Stephen Burnett, to contend with Judaism more successfully.
20
But whatever the reasons for his initial interest in Hebrew and Talmud, he was obviously drawn to the subject. He composed a Hebrew Grammar in 1501, just two years after starting to study the language.

Pellican’s encounter with the Talmud was benign. Not so for his older contemporary Johannes Reuchlin, perhaps the best known of all Christian Hebraists.

Pfefferkorn v. Reuchlin

Reuchlin was a well-respected humanist scholar who had studied in universities across Europe before moving to Basel where he taught Greek and obtained a doctorate in Imperial Law. Successfully navigating his way past a career setback, when he backed an unsuccessful move to unseat the heir apparent to the Duchy
of Wurtemburg, he was appointed as a judge to the Supreme Court in Speyer and as legal counsel to the Swabian League, a newly formed political alliance in southern Germany. At the age of fifty seven he retired to concentrate on his studies.
21

Reuchlin was a self-taught Hebrew scholar. He became interested in
kabbalah
and sought to use it to prove the doctrines of Christianity.
22
In 1494 he wrote a book in which he tried to reconcile Jewish mysticism with Christian doctrine and Greek philosophy. Like Pellican he also wrote a Hebrew grammar which became the standard in its field. Five years after he retired he wrote his classic mystical study,
On The Art of Kabbalah
.

While the Christian Reuchlin was developing his knowledge of Jewish literature and language, Josef Pfefferkorn, a Jew from Moravia or, according to some, Nuremberg, was going the other way. Around 1504 he converted to Christianity and five years later, following in the tradition of Nicholas Donin, Pablo Christiani and Pablo de Santa Maria, he declared war on the Talmud. He approached the Emperor Maximillian with a plan to destroy and confiscate all Jewish books, arguing that they posed an obstacle to the conversion of the Jews. The Emperor agreed and set Pfefferkorn to work. Unfortunately the Archbishop of Mainz took umbrage, he considered this an intrusion onto his territory, and demanded that a proper legal process be set in place. The Emperor backed down and set up a commission to investigate Pfefferkorn’s proposals. He appointed Reuchlin as a member.

All the commissioners, with the sole exception of Reuchlin, endorsed Pfefferkorn’s idea. Reuchlin, who shared many of the anti-Jewish sentiments of his age, argued that the Talmud should be preserved and studied by all Christians, because it contained valuable information on medicine and plants, good legal verdicts and many theological arguments ‘against the wrong faith’.
23
He quoted the Jewish convert, Bishop Pablo de Santa Maria of Burgos who had cited the Talmud over fifty times in the book he had written defending Christianity.

Things didn’t go well for Pfefferkorn. After much wrangling the Emperor decided not to proceed with the confiscation project. Pfefferkorn then turned his ire on Reuchlin, who had described his writings as ignorant rantings and
hatemongering. The two men swapped abuse. When he attacked Pfefferkorn’s lack of education and poor knowledge of Hebrew, Reuchlin’s fellow commissioners, who shared the same shortcomings, took exception. Reuchlin found himself first hauled before the inquisitional tribunal in Cologne and then to the episcopal court in Speyer. He was charged with promoting Judaism.

The affair became a cause célèbre. Reuchlin’s fellow humanists saw the attack on him as an attack on them all. Reuchlin complained that once they were done with him, the scholastic theologians, who preferred the disciplines of logic and the Aristotelians to the humanist focus on art and language, would ‘gag all poets, one after another’.
24

The court in Speyer acquitted Reuchlin of all charges but the inquisitor appealed to Rome. The affair dragged on for years until finally, in 1520, the inquisitor’s appeal was allowed, Reuchlin was convicted and ordered to pay the costs of the case. He died two years later, his scholarly reputation intact but his finances in tatters.

It wasn’t quite the end of the story. In 1518, Gershom Soncino, who had pioneered the printing of the Talmud, published
De Arcana Catholicae Veritatis,
a virulent text by Petrus Galatino that lambasted the Jews and their Talmud. Although it seems odd for a Jew to publish such a work, Soncino knew exactly what he was doing.

The book’s tortuous subtitle, in Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann’s translation from the Latin, was
A Work Most Useful for the Christian Republic on the Secrets of the Catholic Truth, against the Hard-Hearted Wickedness of Our Contemporary Jews, Newly Excerpted from the Talmud and Other Hebrew Books, and in Four Languages Elegantly Composed.
25
The author, Galatino, believed that the Second Coming was about to happen. The Talmud may have been the work of hard-hearted, wicked Jews but this didn’t stop him from using it to support his argument.  The first of the twelve books in his opus was called
On the Talmud, and Its Content
.

As far as Soncino was concerned, Galatino’s book vindicated Reuchlin. If, as Galatino claimed, the Talmud contained the secrets of the Second Coming, confiscating and burning it was not only futile, it was counterproductive. If the Church could learn from it, why destroy it?

Soncino took a risk with his own community in publishing the work, even though the intricacies of theological struggles within the Church would have
been lost on most of them. But Soncino recognized the importance of Reuchlin, and the whole humanist endeavour, to the survival of the Talmud in sixteenth-century papal Europe.

Reuchlin’s doggedness, at great personal cost, had saved the Talmud from the flames. But that wasn’t all. He may have been defeated at the appeal in Rome but he had an admirer in Pope Leo X who had read Reuchlin’s works on
kabbalah
.
26
When Daniel Bomberg, a printer working in Venice, approached the Vatican asking for a licence to print a full copy of the Talmud, the Pope agreed. It is worth contemplating what the Pope’s answer might have been, had he not been an admirer of Reuchlin, and had Reuchlin not fought so hard against the Talmud’s enemies.

Notes

1
Bava Metzia 107b.

2
Friedman, 1987.

3
Peters, 1995.

4
Peters, 1995.

5
Starr-LeBeau, 2003.

6
Roth, 1995.

7
Friedman, 1987.

8
Roth, 1995.

9
Baer, 1961.

10
Felipe Fernández-Armesto records the game-changing events that took place that year, across the world.
1492, The Year Our World Began
, (Bloomsbury, London, 2009).

11
Cited in
1492, The Year Our World Began
, Felipe Fernández-Armesto (Bloomsbury, London, 2009), p. 87.

12
Fishman, 2011.

13
Talya Fishman has treated the whole subject of the Talmud’s transition from an oral to a written text in great depth, although her work has not been universally accepted. It is too big a subject to deal with in anything other than a book, I have tried simply to give a flavour of what happens when an oral tradition is crystallized in printing.

14
Carlebach, 2006.

15
Caro recorded his discussions over a period of fifty years with his mentor, or
maggid
, in
Maggid Mesharim
. The book was first published in Amsterdam in 1704, though probably in a truncated form. A detailed study of the work was published by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, 
Joseph Karo, Lawyer and Mystic
 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1962).

16
Introduction to
Bet Yosef
, various editions.

17
Jacobs, 1995 s.v. Karo.

18
That’s not to say there is no diversity in Jewish law and practice, there is a range of opinions on almost every topic. But those differences tend to stem from the way a ruling of the
Shulchan Aruch
applies to the case in hand, or because of a perceived latitude or ambiguity in its text. It is rare for orthodox scholars to overrule or ignore a ruling of the Shulchan Aruch.

19
Sola Scriptura: The Protestant Position on the Bible
, Joel R. Beeke et al., (Soli Deo Gloria Publications, Lake Mary, FL, 2009).

20
Burnett, 2005.

21
Rummel, 2002.

22
The Wisdom of the Zohar
, Isaiah Tishby, I, 33 (Littman, Oxford, 1989).

23
Burnett, 2005.

24
Rummel, 2002, p. ix.

25
Schmidt-Biggemann, 2006.

26
Burnett, 2012.

11

A royal Talmud, a Protestant rabbi

Rav Yehuda quoted Rav: There are three things for which one should pray: a good king, a good year, and a good dream.
1

The Venetian printers

Andres de Bernaldez who had watched the Jews leave Spain, recounts how they screamed and wailed when they first saw the sea, hoping for some miracle.
2
It didn’t come. The Spanish Jews boarded any boat that would have them and dispersed across southern Europe, settling wherever they could. Their wanderings were long, and wearisome. Those amongst them who had mastered the art of printing took their craft with them. They established presses in Fez, in Constantinople and in Thessalonika.
3
But they only printed occasional volumes of the Talmud. A full, printed edition was still some way off.

Many of the refugees from Spain landed in Italy. Those who settled in Rome became known as the Pope’s Jews
4
and lived under a certain degree of protection. They fared better than their comrades in Florence where the vituperative preacher Savonarola was agitating to have the Jews expelled. A small number also arrived in Venice, hoping to find a haven amongst its long-established community of Jews.

Not long after they arrived, in 1509, Venice was heavily defeated in battle against the League of Cambrai, an alliance of European forces. Its straitened
rulers were casting around to restore the ambitious, mercantile, maritime republic’s reputation, and its wealth.

The Venetians saw an opportunity to raise taxes from the Jews. Although they’d lived in Venice for at least two hundred years the Jews had never been granted permanent resident status.
5
Until now. As if to reinforce the fact that they could remain in the city and pay their taxes they were shunted, in 1516, onto a small island containing a foundry, or
ghèto
. Venice became the site of the world’s first ghetto. The Spanish exiles, squeezed into the ghetto alongside their co-religionists, found themselves enjoying a greater period of stability than they had imagined possible during the long years of their wandering.

Long before its military defeat Venice had established itself as a major centre of printing. It didn’t invent the art, the Chinese did that and the Germans are considered to be the first to recreate it in Europe. But Venice in the late fifteenth century is where printing became an industry. The republic produced books in larger quantities, and distributed them over a wider area, than any other European city.
6

To publish a book in Venice the printer had to obtain copyright. A complex system had been introduced in the late fifteenth century in which printers were to seek certification as to the value of the work, and a ‘privilege’ to print it.
7
Printers could also obtain patents for their inventions and in 1515 Daniel Bomberg, a Christian originally from Antwerp, did just that, for his new Hebrew typeface.
8

Bomberg didn’t pioneer Hebrew printing in Venice. That distinction went to Aldo Manuzio who mainly printed Greek classics but had experimented with Hebrew type in a 1498 imprint.
9
But Bomberg was the first specialist Hebrew printer in the city, and his workshop became the pivot upon which the Talmud’s future history would turn.

In 1515 Daniel Bomberg was approached by an Augustinian monk, Fra Felice de Prato. Like so many others, Felice was a convert from Judaism. Unlike many other converts he was no enemy of the Talmud. Felice asked Bomberg to print some Hebrew books for him, one of which was the Talmud. The two
men applied to the Pope for a copyright, and backed up their application with another to the Council of Venice. They took the opportunity to request an exclusive licence.

The Council was sympathetic to Bomberg’s request but the hundred ducat fee he offered for the licence was too low. His second bid of one hundred and fifty ducats was also turned down. Even three hundred were not enough. Finally, at the fourth time of asking and after a year of negotiation the Council agreed to grant him an exclusive licence to print the Talmud, for five hundred ducats.
10

Bomberg’s workshop was a model of co-existence. Jews, Christians and converts worked together. Bomberg’s first edition of the Talmud, which was completed by 1523, became the template for all future editions; even today most copies of the Talmud use his pagination and layout. Over the next few years he produced two more editions. Then he printed an edition of the almost-forgotten Jerusalem Talmud.

Gershom Soncino, whose printing of the Talmud predated Bomberg’s by maybe forty years complained that Bomberg had copied his text. He probably had, both editions contain the same errors. But Bomberg was no plagiarist. Printing has the effect of giving texts an authoritative status, he would have been criticized if his work had differed from other printed texts already in the public domain. Bomberg may have copied Soncino when he could, but Soncino had only printed fourteen of the thirty seven volumes whereas Bomberg printed them all. Most of his work was new, and far more comprehensive. Instead of just including Rashi and
Tosafot
as Soncino had done; Bomberg’s volumes contained appendices including Maimonides’s commentary on the Mishnah and that of Asher ben Yehiel.
11

Other than that which he copied from Soncino, all Bomberg’s work was edited and typeset from manuscripts. They needed careful checking and cross referencing. Bomberg’s editors faced a mammoth task which they astonishingly completed in only three years. When they finished, one, Cornelius Adelkind, wrote a paean of praise to Bomberg who had

gathered and assembled the entire Talmud and these commentaries, which had been scattered in every land both distant and near and joined to them many other books.
And he accomplished more than his predecessors. He expended his fortune and his wealth and sent couriers, riding swift steeds, to call the finest craftsmen that could be found in all these regions to do this awesome work … .
12

Bomberg achieved more than anybody else in making the Talmud widely accessible. News of his publication spread rapidly through Europe. The German printer Michael Buchfuhrer headed to Venice to purchase copies for distribution in Prague.
13

But the story didn’t have a happy ending. Marco Antonio Giustiniani, a well-heeled, aristocratic printer, set up a Hebrew press in competition to Bomberg. Where Bomberg’s trademark had been quality, Giustiniani’s was economy. He plagiarized many of Bomberg’s titles, printed them badly on substandard paper and sold them cheaply. Bomberg’s press closed in 1548, quite possibly due to unfair competition from Giustiniani.

But nor did Giustiniani prosper. A dispute broke out when he plagiarized another printer’s commentary on Maimonides’s law code,
Mishneh Torah
. Rabbi Moses Isserles, the leading rabbinic authority in Poland, decreed that it was forbidden for Jews to buy Giustiniani’s books. Giustiniani appealed to the Pope. Leo X was long gone, this Pope was Julius III who shared none of Leo’s humanist predisposition.

The Pope set up a commission of six cardinals to investigate the printers’ dispute. Both Giustiniani and his opponents engaged Jewish converts to Christianity to represent them. The case disintegrated into an assault on the Talmud. The head of the commission, who would one day become Pope Paul IV, demanded that the Talmud be burnt.

The homes of the Jews in Rome were searched and all copies of the Talmud seized. Pyres were lit in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome on the Jewish New Year in 1553 and in St Mark’s Square in Venice on Saturday 21 October of that year. The Talmud was once again consigned to the flames.
14
Any Christian caught in possession of a copy had their property seized, a quarter of its value going
in reward to those who had denounced them.
15
The Hebrew printing shops in Venice closed. Only in the Duchy of Milan was the decree resisted, until 1559, when what turned out to be the last of the wave of Talmud book burnings was held in Cremona.
16

Forbidden books

Immolating the Talmud was just the beginning of the future Pope Paul IV’s campaign to regulate theological thought. When he became Pope, one of his first acts was to order the publication of a register of forbidden books, the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
With the Protestant Reformation well under way in western Europe the Catholic Church’s concerns about heresy were far greater than just worrying about what the Jews were reading. Over five hundred authors, both Protestants and humanists, were on the list, including Rabelais and Erasmus.
17
But the Talmud was on the list too. Bomberg’s work had led to it becoming too widely available, even some of the great noble houses of Italy had copies, as the Roman Inquisition discovered when it began its policy of raiding stately homes. The Talmud had insinuated its way into the Medici Library in Florence; it even turned up in the Vatican itself.
18

The policy of banning heretical works came in for severe criticism, even in the strictest Catholic circles. The Jesuits warned that outlawing books would be counterproductive and hinder, rather than assist, missionary activity. The Christian Hebraist, Andreas Maes protested against the proscription and immolation of the Talmud based on nothing more than the doubtful testimony of converts. Gradually the mood changed even within the Church, from an outright ban on suspect books to one of censorship instead.
19

Five years after the list of forbidden books was published, the Council of Trent, which was responsible for the regulation of Catholic doctrine, decreed that the Talmud would be tolerated provided all ‘slanderous attacks’ on
Christianity were censored out. It was both a reprieve from the flames for the Talmud, and tacit permission for printing to recommence in Venice.

The censorship of the Talmud was to be carried out by Jews, overseen by Inquisitors appointed by the Church. The Jewish censors had to walk a fine line. Book owners and printers who were obliged to present their volumes for censorship wanted to get them back quickly, with a minimum of fuss. The authorities wanted the books censored thoroughly. Rather than having the censors scour every possible book to see if it needed censoring, one Jewish censor, Abraham ben David Provençal worked with the inquisitors to produce an
Index Expurgatorius; a
checklist of which books were required to be censored.
20

It wasn’t just books which were subject to the censor’s control, so too were the printing presses. It was in the interest of the printers that their works were censored judiciously. If the books were over-censored people wouldn’t think them worth buying. Under-censored and their customers would worry that the Inquisition might come along at any moment and seize them.
21

It was commercial impediments like this which ruined Ambrosius Froben, a printer in Basel. Some years earlier, in a rare display of unity, Swiss Protestants and Catholics had banded together when they’d heard of the opening of a Jewish printing press in Tiengen. They overruled the bishop who had given the printers a licence to print and demanded that the press be closed immediately. They’d heard that the Talmud was to be printed there.
22

Ambrosius Froben didn’t want the same thing happening to him. When he was approached by Simon von Günzberg of Frankfurt, who wanted him to print copies of the Talmud for resale, he tried to make sure he wouldn’t run foul either of the censors or of zealous, local burghers. The contract he signed with Günzberg named Marco Marino, the papal inquisitor of Venice, as the principal censor. He also engaged his own in-house censor to supervise the day-to-day works. The result was a heavily expurgated edition, which satisfied the German authorities but not the customers. The Basel edition of the Talmud flopped. Froben had worried too much about the authorities, and not enough about his customers.

Over and again the Italian Jews tried to produce an expurgated version of the Talmud which would meet the Council’s criteria. But, whatever its enemies
believed, the Talmud doesn’t dwell much on Christianity. It had developed in a Muslim environment, Christianity for the most part was outside its frame of reference. There are scattered references to Jesus in the Talmud, but many of them tend to refer to him in passing, whilst dealing with another subject. As Peter Schäfer has shown, the handful of references tend to be little more than polemical counter-narratives that parody Gospel stories.
23
They are more likely to have been directed at the competing Christian sects in Sassanian Babylon than serious attempts to undermine Christian belief.
24

With very little material in it that dealt with Christian theology, there wasn’t much for the Jews to identify and expunge. But this didn’t satisfy the censors who needed to show their superiors wholesale obliteration of the text. They were forced into a corner, censoring items that didn’t need censoring, just to prove they were doing their work properly.

To try to regulate the situation and pre-empt the demands of the censor, a council of rabbis meeting in Ferrara in 1554 instituted a regime of self-censorship.
25
They decreed that any newly published Hebrew book would have to carry the approbation of three rabbis.
26
But even this measure failed to satisfy the Talmud’s critics and in 1596 a new edition of the forbidden books list renewed the blanket ban on the Talmud. The era of printing the Talmud in Italy had come to an end.

Henry VIII’s Great Matter

In 1529 Richard Croke, an envoy of England’s King Henry VIII arrived in Venice. He had been sent to consult the Talmud. Henry was in the middle of his ‘Great Matter’, his struggle to get permission from the Pope to divorce Catherine of Aragon, youngest daughter of Isabella and Ferdinand, who had expelled the Jews and their Talmud from Spain.