The Talmud (20 page)

Over the next five years Selden was in and out of the Tower. It took an apology to the king before he was granted absolute freedom. Amongst the many things he did with his imposed leisure was to study the Talmud. Unlike the Hebraists on the Continent he almost certainly had no tutor, there were no
learned Jews that he could consult. But his depth of learning was such that for the rest of his life he studied the Bomberg edition of the Talmud that Cotton had obtained from Westminster Abbey, and composed six works of Talmudic scholarship, covering topics as diverse as natural law, divorce, inheritance, the calendar, the Karaites and his final work, a two-thousand-page study of Jewish jurisprudence.

Selden’s Talmudic writings influenced a generation of British political thinkers. Jason Rosenblatt, in his masterly study,
Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi
,
demonstrated how Selden’s works inspired Isaac Newton, Milton, Ben Jonson and Hobbes, amongst others. The German Hebraist Johann Stephanus Rittangel, knowing full well that Selden was not a Jew, nevertheless wrote to him as ‘Rabbi’ Selden. Rosenblatt laments the obscurity into which his Talmudic works subsequently fell.

The Talmud has had many great and distinguished scholars during its long lifetime. But none quite like John Selden. His name deserves to rank amongst them.

Notes

1
Berachot 55a.

2
1492, The Year Our World Began
, Felipe Fernández -Armesto (Bloomsbury, London, 2009).

3
Heller, 2006.

4
Wisch, 2003.

5
Ravid, 1987.

6
Bernstein, 2001.

7
Brown, 1891.

8
Brown, 1891.

9
Bernstein, 2001.

10
Brown, 1891.

11
Heller, 2006.

12
From the colophon to tractate Soferim quoted in Heller, 2006, p. 75.

13
Heller, 2006.

14
Heller, 2013. It is probable, as Marvin Heller notes, that Meir Benayahu (Benayahu, 1971) is right in saying that the commission was investigating more than just the printing of the Mishneh Torah. The Pope’s decree to burn the Talmud does not mention the Mishneh Torah and more than three years elapsed between the original complaint to the Pope and the burning. The true situation was probably far more complicated than historians have been able to unravel so far.

15
Godman, 2000.

16
Raz-Krakotzkin, 2007.

17
Raz-Krakotzkin, 2004.

18
Burnett, 2012.

19
Raz-Krakotzkin, 2007.

20
Sonne, 1943.

21
Sonne, 1943.

22
Burnett, 1998.

23
Shäfer, 2007.

24
Shäfer, 2007.

25
Popper, 1969. See also Stephen G. Burnett, Hebrew Censorship in Hanau: A Mirror of Jewish-Christian Coexistence in Seventeenth-Century Germany, in
The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492 and After
, R. B. Waddington and A. H. Williamson (eds) (Garland, New York, 1994).

26
More recently, however, Daniel Ungar has argued that the rabbis’ decree was a stratagem for protecting the copyright of the author and publisher. Daniel Ungar, Copyright Enforcement by Praise and Curse: The Colourful Development of Jewish Intellectual Property
Intellectual Property Quarterly
1, 2011, pp. 86–107.

27
Katz, 1994.

28
Chibi, 1994.

29
Chibi, 1997.

30
Katz, 1994.

31
Nelson, 2010.

32
Bartolucci, 2007.

33
Deuteronomy 17.14–15.

34
Neuman, 2005.

35
Not all who cited the Talmud and other rabbinic sources were skilled Hebraists. Many, such as Carlo Sigonio, a pioneer in the field of Hebrew Republicanism, freely admitted that they had no command of Hebrew. Sigonio and many others relied on translations of rabbinic works which by now were becoming freely available.

36
1 Samuel 8.5.

37
1 Samuel 8.11–17.

38
Nelson, 2010.

39
On the question of Milton’s ability to read Talmud see
Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism,  Hellenism and Christianity
, Jeffrey S. Shoulson, Columbia University Press, New York, 2001;
Torah and Law
in Paradise Lost, Jason P. Rosenblatt (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1994), Mattern, 2009 and the sources cited in Nelson, 2010, p. 160n. 66.

40
Mattern, 2009.

41
Nelson, 2010.

42
Bodian, 2006.

43
Nelson, 2010.

44
For a full treatment of Grotius’s arguments see Nelson, 2010, p. 97ff.

45
See Ziskind, 1978 for the full argument. Cunaeus based his analysis on the minority view of Rabbi Yehuda in Nedarim 61a who absorbs the Jubilee year into the beginning of the subsequent seven-year cycle, rather than treating it as the outside the cycle. Usually, unless there is a good reason, the majority view in a Talmud discussion is the one that is adopted by subsequent law makers.

46
Laplanche, 2008.

47
Laplanche, 2008.

48
Bodian, 1999.

49
Ziskind, 1978.

50
There almost certainly were a few Jews in England throughout the whole of this period, but in Selden’s day at least there were only a handful, mainly ex-conversos with links to the Amsterdam community, and it is unlikely that he had contact with any of them.

51
Rosenblatt, 2008, p. 105 and frontspiece.

52
‘Selden, John (1584–1654)’, Paul Christianson in
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds) (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004).

53
(Rosenblatt, 2008).

12

The wisdom of the Greeks

Yohanan ben Zakkai said: If you have a sapling in your hand and someone says ‘the Messiah has come’; first plant the tree, then go to greet the Messiah.
1

The Talmud’s encounter with the world of Protestant scholarship was only brief. Their paths diverged in the face of new scientific discoveries, new ways of thinking and, from the Talmud’s side at least, new things to worry about.

The Talmud had encountered many enemies. But even those who saw it as an object of contempt, to be destroyed and eradicated from human history, agreed with its underlying premises; that the world had been created by God who continued in some unknowable way to manage its affairs, and that the Hebrew Bible was his unmediated word. The Talmud’s enemies disagreed with each and every conclusion that its compilers drew from those facts, but the facts themselves were immutable. Or they had been, up till now.

One of the incontrovertible facts of God’s creation was the way in which the universe operated. The Bible stated quite clearly that Heaven and Earth were created first, with the sun, moon and stars coming into existence on the fourth day. The earth clearly stood at the centre of God’s creation and any fool could see, just by looking at the sky, that the heavenly bodies orbited it. When Nicolaus Copernicus proved from his observations that the earth revolved around the sun, he was roundly denounced by Orthodox Church theologians. As for the Talmudists, most of them were so immersed in their world of study that the news never reached them. Those who did hear mention of it paid little attention. Scientific progress fell into the category of ‘Greek Wisdom’. It held no interest for them.

But even in the most closed societies there are always a few who are open to new ideas. Particularly when it came to astronomy, which had always occupied
a special place in the Talmudic world. The Babylonian Talmud, conceived in the ancient birthplace of astrological and astronomical study, contains a number of passages which speculate on the size of the heavens, the seasons of the zodiac and the movements of the stars.
2
Several medieval Talmudists had written astronomical treatises.
3
Many Arabic astronomical works had been translated into Hebrew.
4

The genesis of their astronomical interest lay in a practice in ancient Jerusalem. Its high court had been required to regulate the calendar by proclaiming that the new moon had been sighted. Witnesses would appear before the court declaring they had seen the new moon, but they couldn’t always be taken at their word; frequently they got it wrong. They may have mistaken the last appearance of the waning moon for the beginnings of the new one. Or they could have been misled by a patch of light from the setting sun reflecting off a cloudy sky. Gamaliel II, whom we met in the first chapter, had charts and calculations on the wall of his study showing the shape, orientation, position and size of the new moon at different times of the year. He would examine the witnesses to see if what they had seen corresponded to his astronomical charts.
5

Nicolaus Copernicus had studied at the University of Cracow, in Poland. The city would become home to Moses Isserles, who as we’ve seen, had commented extensively on the
Shulchan Aruch
, Joseph Caro’s definitive law code. Isserles had inherited the Talmud’s interest in astronomy, he even wrote two treatises on astronomical matters. He has been cited as the founding father of Talmudic astronomy in Poland,
6
placing him at the beginning of a process in which modern technical and scientific discoveries were incorporated into Talmud study.
7
But although Isserles lived in the same city as had Copernicus and was in his teenage years when the great astronomer published his theory, he either didn’t know about it or, more probably, dismissed it; in his universe the sun continued to revolve around the earth. But despite his old-world astronomical
view he did open up the subject to his Talmudic students. One in particular was profoundly influenced by what he heard.
8

David Gans had studied the Talmud under Isserles before leaving Cracow for Prague, the seat of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II. Rudolphine Prague, as it was known, was at that time a sizzling hub of cultural, scientific and intellectual activity, a place where anyone with a creative talent or an enquiring mind wanted to be. Gans, who took a far greater interest in science than most of his Talmudic contemporaries, came into contact with some of the leading practitioners of the age, including the imperial astronomer Tyco Brahe and his assistant Johannes Kepler.

Brahe and Kepler worked out of an observatory that the Emperor had made available to them in his summer palace near Prague. On three separate occasions Gans spent five days with them in the observatory which contained, according to Gans’s account, ‘great and wondrous astronomical instruments, that no eye had ever beheld’.
9

One of the astronomical passages in the Talmud discusses whether the planets revolve or are stationary.
10
The Talmud records that the ‘sages of Israel’ abandoned their view that the planets revolved against the backdrop of the sky, in favour of the view of the ‘sages of the world’, presumably Ptolemy’s disciples in Alexandria,
11
who maintained that they were stationary but affixed onto a revolving sky. Gans records a conversation he had with Brahe in which the astronomer expresses astonishment that the Talmud had changed its opinion. Brahe told Gans that according his observations the rabbis of the Talmud had been right and the other sages wrong.
12

Gans was not the first Talmudist to have questioned the retraction. One of his teachers, Yehuda Loew, known as the Maharal of Prague, legendary creator of
the
golem,
13
had already expressed a similar view.
14
The Talmud doesn’t explain why it had originally held a dissenting view about the rotation of the planets, nor why it reversed its opinion. Rabbi Yehuda, the author of the Mishnah, whom the Talmud cites as the person responsible for the change of opinion, probably considered the new Ptolemaic system to be scientifically correct and could see no good reason for maintaining the old position. If so his attitude to science, in the second century, was far more in the spirit of the world in which Gans aspired to move, a world in the grip of a scientific revolution, than those he had left behind in Cracow, who ignored Copernicus’s discoveries.

It wasn’t just in the realm of theory that the new science challenged the Talmud. New discoveries also affected Talmudic law. The Talmud believed that lice, unlike fleas, do not sexually reproduce.
15
Presumably it assumed that they spontaneously generate in the skin or fur of the animal in which they live. This belief has a legal consequence. The Talmud forbids the killing of animals on the Sabbath. But if lice do not sexually reproduce, then they are not animals. So, although it is forbidden to kill fleas, which do sexually reproduce, it’s OK to kill lice.

Isaac Lampronti, the author of a Talmudic encyclopedia
16
and a ‘most celebrated physician-theologian amongst the learned’
17
raised this question with his teacher Judah Briel. Since it was now recognized that lice, like all other creatures, were born through sexual reproduction, shouldn’t the law allowing them to be killed on the Sabbath be abolished? Briel did not agree. One of the reasons he gave was that the rabbis of the Talmud had ultimately been proved correct about the rotation of the planets. They’d been vindicated and should never have given way. The same thing applied here, argued Briel. Modern
science had probably got this wrong, just like Ptolemy had. The Talmud’s view on how lice reproduced would, said Briel, probably one day be vindicated.
18

The scientific advances which prompted Lampronti’s question would change the Talmud’s world, just as it would everywhere. But the Talmud had no bone to pick with science, it may have taken it time to adjust to the new discoveries but science was nothing more than the means of understanding God’s creation. A far greater challenge than science came from philosophy. The philosophy of one person in particular. He didn’t particularly have the Talmud in his sights, his aim was broader than that. But the challenge was felt most keenly by the Talmud because, as befits a Talmudic paradox, it came from someone who had been reared in its orbit.

The first secular European

Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 to a family, who like most of the city’s Jews at the time, were
conversos
, recently arrived from Portugal. Most of Spinoza’s biographers assume that he had received an education in Talmud but, as Edward Feld has argued, there is no reason to assume that. As a child he received a formal Jewish education and he was well versed in Bible and the Hebrew language. But rarely in his writings does he mention, let alone quote the Talmud, only six times altogether, and even then his references are offhand and careless.
19
It’s odd because he is a stern critic of Maimonides’s philosophy and of the belief in the divine authorship of the Bible. If he had been familiar with the Talmud one would expect him to offer a more systematic treatment of it, since it was a fundamental part of the system he was arguing against. Feld suggests that he left school at an early age, before he had graduated to the Talmud classes.
20

Nevertheless, whether Spinoza studied Talmud or not, we do know that he was taught by people who were well versed in the discipline, and their methods of thought would certainly have influenced his. As did the Amsterdam that he lived in, a wealthy, tolerant city, enjoying the Golden Age of the new Dutch Republic, with its burgeoning worldwide trade and expanding empire. This was the city where Rembrandt was painting, where Descartes had lived, where boats
arrived daily from Borneo, Africa, Brazil and North America carrying exotic cargoes, strange animals and precious merchandise. Amsterdam had its dark side too, the West India Company played its part in the slave trade, populating the plantations of the Caribbean with victims seized from their homes in Africa. Economically prosperous, its elegant, canal-side houses filled with art, sculpture and fine furnishings, Amsterdam was a place of merchants, bankers, artists and intellectuals. We saw how the Political Hebraists had flourished in Amsterdam; it was a city where minds were open to new ideas, and Baruch Spinoza’s fertile mind, seeking to forge coherence from multiplicity, was foremost amongst them.

Spinoza was a fiercely rational philosopher who challenged religious thinking and current beliefs in the nature of God. He could not accept that there is a divine Being who created and controlled the world, but that didn’t mean he denied the existence of God. For Spinoza, God and nature are one and the same. As for the Bible, he was the first to maintain that it was the product of human minds, conceived by inspired people. The Bible, according to Spinoza, is a system of law and ritual which, if followed, promises worldly happiness, but it has nothing to do with eternity.

Needless to say Spinoza’s theology did not go down well with the Jewish community in Amsterdam. He was excommunicated at the age of twenty three, before he had even published anything. He spent the rest of his life developing his philosophy whilst earning a living as a lens grinder, a craft at which he excelled but which didn’t bring him worldly happiness. The dust which he inhaled as he polished the glass for his lenses killed him before he was forty five.

Spinoza was a Jew and a philosopher of religion, but he wasn’t a philosopher of Judaism. His ideas about God were anathema to both Jews and Christians. The Talmudic world rejected his ideas, and continues to do so today, but it was unable to escape the consequences of his life and thought. By subjecting religion to the new tools of rationalism he opened up the Talmud to a new form of investigation. That’s why he is part of the Talmud’s story. He separated the realms of reason and ritual and in so doing laid the foundations for nineteenth-century thinkers to construct an academic discipline in which Talmudic texts would be subjected to the same forms of analysis and criticism as any other work of classic
literature.
21

From this point forward religious theorists who reflected the new ways of thinking would appropriate Spinoza to validate their ideologies.
22
In time a Jewish enlightenment would emerge, which would simultaneously enrich and challenge the Talmud. The excommunicated Spinoza, who never stopped thinking of himself as a Jew, unwittingly created the conditions for the Talmud’s entrance into modernity. He marks a turning point between the medieval and the modern in Jewish religious thinking.
23

Away from the light

The scientific revolution didn’t reach everywhere, and it didn’t always survive in those places it did reach. Prague had been a centre of scientific innovation under Rudolf II. It didn’t last. The devastation of the Thirty Years’ War and the victory of the Counter-Reformation marked its demise. A similar decline took place in Poland; Cracow’s reputation for astronomical excellence came to an end; social instability and the rise of obscurantism impeded the influx of new ideas.

The Talmudic communities of eastern Europe, in Poland and Lithuania, whose populations had swelled over the previous centuries, knew little of science, and even less of the Enlightenment that was coming in its wake. They carried on much as they had done for centuries. All that distinguished them from their Christian neighbours was their faith, their language and their various customs. Including their educational system. Education was considered to be a communal responsibility, and was administered accordingly. At its heart sat the Talmud. A communal edict in Lithuania in 1622 required every town or village which was large enough to engage a rabbi to maintain a Talmudic school, or
yeshiva.