The Talmud (17 page)

By now it was obvious to Ramban that living conditions could only deteriorate. Although he was well into his seventies he took the decision to leave Spain and make the perilous sea journey to Israel. He landed in Acre in 1267 where he completed the work for which he is most famous, his commentary on the Torah. His last communal role was as the Rabbi of Acre. Ironically, his predecessor in the post had been Yechiel of Paris, who had also upped sticks and made the journey to Israel a few years earlier, following the trauma of his disputation.

These were the most famous disputations of the thirteenth century, but they were by no means the only ones. The accounts that both Yehiel and Ramban wrote of their experiences served as a sort of manual for other, less experienced rabbis when they were summoned to a debate.

One of the members of the committee of censors that was established in the wake of the Barcelona disputation was an erudite friar, Raymondi Martini. Martini had been singled out for a special education as a young man and had already written at least two polemics against Islam. In 1278 he produced his most famous work, the
Pugio Fidei adversos Mauros et Judaeos,
or Dagger of Faith against the Moors and Jews.

Way back in the early fifth century St Augustine had declared that the Jews were permitted to dwell amongst Christians due to the special status that God had given them. Unlike Christian heretics, their presence in Christian Europe had been ordained by God. Their exile and suffering was a consequence of their refusal to accept the truth of Christianity and as such was a testament to its veracity.

Successive Popes had paid lip service to the doctrine, even though as we have seen, it was breached far more frequently than was affirmed. But despite the breaches, in theory Augustinian protections still held good. Now, in a radical departure from Augustine doctrine, Martini came up with a doctrinal defence of Dominican aggression. He sought to justify their mission against the Jews theologically. There was, he argued, a difference between the Jews who lived
before Jesus, and those after. The ancient Jews, he claimed, agreed with the Christians. But the modern Jews had wilfully rejected Christianity, and should be treated as heretics.
27

Martini used his comprehensive knowledge of Jewish sources to assert that the Talmud actually refuted the practices of contemporary Jews. Certainly his knowledge of Talmudic and other rabbinic texts was extensive and his argumentation complex and learned. He may well have intended the
Pugio
as a guide to help Christian disputants in much the same way as Yehiel and Ramban had recorded their debates as a practical manual for those Jews who found themselves forced into disputation.
28
The
Pugio
became the essential companion for any aspiring Christian disputant for at least the next four centuries. It was widely copied and recopied in manuscript form and was finally printed in 1651. It remains the most comprehensive and well-known polemic against the Talmud ever written.

Meanwhile the young student Meir ben Baruch, who had witnessed the Paris burnings and written an elegy lamenting the occasion, had acquired a reputation as the leading Talmudic scholar of his generation. Now an old man in his late sixties, Meir had authored many works on religious law, had served as the head of the supreme religious court in Germany and was the principal of the leading rabbinical academy in Europe. Over one thousand responses of his legal responses still survive today.

Back in the Rhineland, in Meir’s home city of Rothenburg, conditions had greatly deteriorated. The Jews found themselves under continuing attack and his students, who included many who would become leading lights of the next generation, feared for their lives. They prevailed on Meir to leave Germany for a safer clime. The
Pugio
had already been copied and recopied many times when the young student set off with his family on the lengthy journey across land and sea to settle in Israel.

Meir and his fellow travellers had got as far as Lombardy when he was arrested and sent back to Germany. On his arrival he was delivered into the hands of the Habsburg emperor, Rudolph I. Rudolph, who needed to augment his treasury, decided that Meir was too good a catch to let go easily and imprisoned him, hoping to receive a hefty ransom. His followers raised twenty three thousand marks but Meir refused to allow it to be paid, fearing that if he
was released this would only embolden the Emperor to kidnap and hold others to ransom. Meir’s followers prevailed upon the Emperor to allow him access to his books, and he wrote several works whilst in prison. Meir was never released. He died seven years later.

The spread of
kabbalah

For the best part of a millennium the Talmud had been the pre-eminent, non-biblical corpus in the Jewish world. True, the Mishnah was older and the Talmud’s authority was based on the fact that it interpreted the Mishnah, but the two works were so close that the older had effectively been absorbed into the newer, they were even written as one. But a new work was appearing on the scene, one which, whilst paying lip service to the supremacy of Talmud would come in time, in certain places and amongst certain people, to rival and even occasionally to surpass it.

The practice of Jewish mysticism was as old as the faith itself. The book of Ezekiel opens with the prophet’s mystical vision of God’s throne, known as the heavenly chariot, and the Talmud itself refers to two distinct types of mystics, those who contemplate the ‘works of the chariot’ and those who busy themselves with the ‘works of creation’.
29
The tale above, about the four scholars who entered the orchard is one of several mystical narratives in the Talmud.

Mystical texts too had been known for centuries. The oldest, the Book of Creation, dates back to the fifth century and seems to have been in regular use;
30
Sa’adia
Gaon
composed a commentary to it in 931
ce
.
31
Mystical texts were often structured similarly to the homiletical collections that were composed in the Talmudic period in Israel and recounted the supernatural exploits of Talmudic sages, even though in most, if not all cases, the name of a sage was only adduced to give the narrative credibility.

But although there was almost certainly a long-standing undercurrent of mysticism in Jewish circles we hear little of it until the twelfth century, when mystical schools emerged in both Spain and Germany.

All the prominent early mystics were students of the Talmud. Ramban, who had conducted the dispute in Barcelona, wrote commentaries on parts of the Talmud and on the Torah. His Torah commentary offers both rational and mystical interpretations. The Pietists in Germany produced works which used Talmudic traditions as a starting point but then set off on mystical tangents.
32
But many mystics were ambivalent about the study of Talmud, they felt it focused too much on rigid legal analysis and downplayed the importance of spiritual and ethical matters. The Talmudists had abandoned the quest for God in favour of the precise formulation of the law.
33

In these circles a new category of ethical law emerged, the ‘law of heaven’. It didn’t override the law of the Talmud, a crime was still a crime. But the Talmud’s mechanical application of the law was subordinated to an absolute morality; a crime which necessitated a greater struggle against the ‘evil inclination’, such as when a pious but starving man steals food, is to be judged less harshly than a theft instigated by wicked intent.
34
Similarly, Talmudic law forbids people spitting at each other but there is only a penalty for damages if the spit lands on the other person. Heavenly law focuses exclusively on the intent, spitting is an offence, wherever it may land.
35

During the thirteenth century mystical pamphlets began to circulate in Castile, in Spain. By the end of the century they had been compiled into a collection known as the
Zohar
, which means ‘radiance’.

As befits any mystical tome the origins of the
Zohar
are lost in the mists of time. Traditionally it is ascribed to Shimon ben Yohai, a second-century pupil of Rabbi Akiva. Until recently the academic view was that it had been composed by the thirteenth-century Spanish mystic Moses de Leon. However, the language and complexity of the work suggests that it is a compendium of texts that may well have been edited together by Moses de Leon and his colleagues, but much of which was of a significantly earlier provenance.
36
Over the coming centuries the
Zohar
would prove to be a challenging companion to the Talmud. Some considered it to be the more important of the two. Asher Lemlein, a sixteenth-century kabbalist mocked those who thought the study of mundane laws was
more important than knowledge of the Creator. He likened the Talmudists to a king’s workers and the Kabbalists to those who sat alongside the monarch in his council.
37

Notes

1
Ta'anit 21a.

2
Langmuir, 1990, p. 207.

3
Chazan, 2005.

4
Lower, 2004.

5
Cohen, 1999, p. 317.

6
Eisenberg, 2008. Eisenberg sees the disputation between Donin and Yehiel not as an inquisitorial event, as earlier historians assert, in which the Church sought to expose and eradicate heresy. Rather, he shows that the disputation was part of a wider Church campaign against new ideas being promoted in the universities and ‘textual communities’, who were revising accepted canonical texts in new ways. Texts were a threat to established orthodoxies. The Jews with their interpretative tradition were, from the Church’s perspective, just such a textual community.

7
Ms. Moscow – Guenzberg 1390 (Mosc.) 85a quoted in Eisenberg, 2008, p. 43. It is not clear where Moses of Courcy was.

8
Eisenberg, 2008.

9
‘By this is refuted the error of the Jews, who say in the Talmud that at times God sins and is cleansed from sin’,
Summa Contra Gentiles
1.95.8 (Hanover House, New York, 1955).

10
Cohen, 1999.

11
Eisenberg, 2008.

12
Ms. Moscow – Guenzberg 1390 (Mosc.) 86b quoted in Eisenberg, 2008, p. 46.

13
Urbach, 1968, p. 377–8.

14
Shaali Serufa
forms part of the liturgy for the fast day of the 9th of Av, which commemorates the destruction of the Temple and other national tragedies.

15
Chazan, 2005.

16
Schwarzfuchs, 1967.

17
For a full account of Bernard Gui’s attitude towards and campaign against the Talmud see Cohen, 1982.

18
B. Hagigah 14b.

19
B. Hagigah 15b.

20
Dan, 1999.

21
The Albigensian dispute between the Pope and the Cathars in Languedoc is the only recorded example of a crusade conducted by the Church against fellow Christians.

22
Chazan, 1977.

23
Like Maimonides,and several others, he was also known by his patronymic, as Nachmanides.

24
Chavel, 1983. There has been much discussion in modern scholarly circles as to whether Ramban really believed that it was not obligatory to believe the many
aggadic
(non-legal) passages in the Talmud. Most modern Jews, aware that many
aggadic
passages contradict each other and that much of Talmudic science and medicine reflects merely the knowledge of the time, regard
aggada
as instructive, insightful or illustrative but not necessarily true. Ramban, however, belonged to a period when many people did believe in the literal truth of
aggada
and in his other writings there is little indication that he doubts its veracity.

25
Chavel, 1983.

26
Cohen, 1999.

27
Rooden, 2001.

28
Wiersma, 2009.

29
B. Hagigah 13a.

30
Dan, 1999. Although only once mentioned by name (and even that may be a reference to a different work), devotees of the
Sefer Yetzirah
(Book of Creation) do however find other allusions to it in the Talmud. Cf. Kaplan, 1997.

31
Kaplan, 1997.

32
Dan, 1999.

33
Fishman, 2011.

34
Alexander-Frizer, 1991. Alexander-Frizer discusses what she sees as a similar relation between intention and deed, between ‘this-worldly and other-worldly recompense’, in the writings of Peter Abelard.

35
Sefer Hasidim
ed. Margolis, Section 44.

36
Rapaport-Albert & Kwasman, 2006.

37
Carlebach, 2006.

10

Printers and polemics

R. Hanina said: Everything comes from heaven. Except for cold draughts.
1

Forced, and not so forced, conversions

By the fourteenth century the southward march of Christian armies into Islamic territory in Spain, was all but over. Granada was the only area to remain in Muslim hands. The victory of the Cross over the Crescent led to an outpouring of religious triumphalism.
2
Actions to convert the Jews to Christianity increased dramatically, They were seen as not just the enemies of God and Christendom, they’d been exposed as heretics; forsaking the Bible and placing themselves under the jurisdiction of the Talmud.
3

The conversion drive was not without success. At first a trickle of converts made their way towards Christianity, some out of genuine belief, others from expediency. The trend accelerated as the century wore on until, in 1391, an outbreak of riots and pogroms directed against the Jews led to a bursting of the flood gates. Suddenly the
conversos,
as they were called, were numbered not in their tens, hundreds or thousands, but in their myriads. About half of the Jewish population is thought to have converted.
4

But the conversion policy backfired. Mainstream Spanish society was wholly unprepared for an event of such magnitude. Instead of just Jews and Christians (the Muslims had long been forced out), the population now comprised three
distinct groups. Old Christians, Jews and
conversos
or New Christians. It didn’t bode well for the
conversos.

The Old Christians resented the sudden influx of people who, almost overnight, had moved from the fringes of society to its heart and now demanded the same rights and privileges as those who had always been loyal to the Cross. What did it matter, argued the Old Christians, if these people had changed their religion? They still had Jewish blood in their veins. And wasn’t it the case, they added, that most of them still kept up their Jewish practices, as if they had never converted?

The
conversos’
dilemma
w
as that it’s one thing to submit to pressure to convert to avoid persecution and oppression. It is quite another to give up the habits, practices and beliefs of a lifetime. Many
conversos
started to live a dual life. They were Christians in public. But in secret, in a clandestine, underground existence they were still Jews. Stories began to circulate of
converso
women sweeping their houses on a Friday, when surely Saturday was the time for Sabbath preparations. When these women had finished sweeping they were seen placing pots of food in the embers of their fires, to keep it warm for the following day. And when sun set on a Friday evening, they lit candles. Some were said even to be holding secret prayer services in their homes.
5

If these practices, which were nothing more than traditional Jewish Sabbath preparations, had been ordained by the Bible, there’d have been no problem. They may not have been what native born Christians did, but nor would they have intimated a rejection of Christianity. But they weren’t Bible practices. The Bible commands the Sabbath. But it’s the Talmud that ordains the practices the
conversos
were following. The difference probably didn’t even occur to them, they were only doing what they had always done. But they weren’t doing what the Church had expected of them. They’d accepted Christianity. But they hadn’t rejected the Talmud.

One man rejected it though. As a child he’d been known as Solomon ha-Levy. He was raised in a learned home, he was well educated and had grown into a skilled Talmudist, even engaging in erudite correspondence with the leading scholar in Spain, Rabbi Isaac ben Sheshet. He qualified as a rabbi and ministered to the Castilian town of Burgos. Until he converted to Christianity. He changed his name to Pablo de Santa Maria. He became a bishop. And like
Nicholas Donin, Pablo Christiani and so many other converts before him, he became an ideological opponent of the Talmud.

Pablo de Santa Maria was not the only distinguished
converso
Talmudist to become a Christian scholar. Another was Jeronimo de Santa Fé. He wrote
Hebraeomastyx,
an anti-Jewish treatise in which he attacked the Talmud, taking his arguments directly from Ramon Martini’s
Pugeo Fidei.
He caught the eye of the Church dignitaries in Avignon, in Provence. The Catholic Church had recently split, there was now a pope in Rome, and another, Benedict XIII, in Avignon. Benedict, who was known as the anti-pope, had jurisdiction over Spain. He engaged Jeronimo de Santa Fé to conduct yet another disputation, this time in Tortosa.

There had been many disputations by this time but Tortosa hosted the longest of them all. It lasted for over a year, with one short break. Its purpose, as always, was to persuade the Jews of their errors of their ways and oblige them to convert. No new arguments were raised or compelling insights evoked. But the Jews were on the back foot, their leadership weak and their spirits shattered. By the time it finished many of the Jewish delegates, who were so exhausted by the year-long ordeal, and so impoverished by the time spent away from their trades, had converted out of desperation.
6

More than a century had now passed since the first
conversos
were baptised but the resentment of the Old Christians hadn’t abated. When nine days of rioting broke out in 1467, the king brought in legislatation against the newcomers. He decreed that no
converso
could hold an official position in Toledo or Ciudad Real.
7

The Old Christians blamed the Jews for the
conversos’
inability to integrate. They argued that there was too much contact, the
conversos
were too close to the Jews, and they remained under their influence. In order to bring the
conversos
into line, to teach them to be true to their new faith, all traces of heresy would have to be rooted out. King Ferdinand, who was himself partly descended from Jewish stock
8
consulted the bishops. The bishops’ solution took even the Old Christians by surprise. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

The Inquisition was established in 1480 with a mandate to purge all heresy from those
conversos,
who, despite their pledges to Christianity, were really
crypto-Jews. There had been previous papal inquisitions in Spain, but this was the first to be set up under a royal mandate. Led by the notorious Thomas de Torquemada, it sought to root out and prosecute
anyone who had been spotted observing Talmudic law. A handbook written to guide the inquisitors advised them that the Bible decreed eternal damnation for heretics. There was every justification therefore for guilty
conversos
to be put to death.
9

But punishing guilty
conversos
wouldn’t solve the underlying problem
.
To ensure that no taint of Jewish influence could contaminate those who were not yet guilty, in 1492 Ferdinand and his queen, Isabella, expelled all the Jews from Spain. Fifteen hundred years of unbroken Jewish settlement came to an end.

1492 was one of those rare years in which everything changes all at once.
10
Granada, the last remaining Muslim kingdom in Spain, fell to Christian conquerors. Christopher Columbus landed in America. By the end of the year there were Spaniards in America, but there were no longer any Muslims or Jews in Spain. Andres de Bernaldez, a Spanish priest who watched the Jews pack up and leave, reported that there was ‘no sight more pitiable … there was not a Christian who did not feel their pain’.
11

As the departing Jews packed their bags, they took their copies of the Talmud with them. Not all were densely written manuscripts, carefully inscribed. A few of the exiles, the wealthiest and those renowned for their scholarship, carried with them the products of the very latest technology. Some even took the new technology itself. As the Talmud cast its final, backward glance at Spain, it did so from a printed folio. The age of the scribe and their manuscripts was coming to an end. Printing had arrived. And a new chapter in the history of the Talmud was about to begin.

Printing the Talmud

The earliest known Spanish imprints of the Talmud were produced in Guadalajara, a little way to the north-east of Madrid. The ancient town had been founded in the eighth century on the site of an old Roman settlement. By
the fifteenth century it was the seat of the Mendoza family, patrons of the arts and literature. Like so many earlier homes of the Talmud it was a cultured city. The refined atmosphere was just the setting to stimulate an interest in printing and the construction of the earliest presses.

The few surviving printed volumes of the Talmud from Spain, and contemporaneous editions from Portugal, contain Rashi’s commentary in the outer margin and the main text in the centre. They don’t always correspond exactly to texts printed today.

The reason is that, for the whole of its early life, the Talmud was mainly transmitted by word of mouth. There were manuscripts but not everyone possessed them, and the Talmud is such a large document that virtually nobody had a complete copy. Students were taught to memorize their studies, rote learning was the order of the day.

Oral texts are fluid and organic; not everyone has a perfect memory. When manuscripts began to be produced, successive scribes and readers inserted comments or even emended texts, an activity which was considered quite acceptable.
12
It wasn’t until it was printed that the text became fixed.

Printing brought many benefits. But it set in stone an opus which had started life as an organic tradition. If we think of the transmission of an oral text as a continuous process, like a shifting landscape of desert sands, then a printed copy is a snapshot, taken at a moment in time; a random but defining, apparently authentic, configuration of the sands, or in our case the text, at the moment the shutter was pressed.
13
The reason why modern editions of the Talmud differ from the early Spanish volumes is simply that they were based on different manuscripts, with different printers making different decisions about how the text should read.

The early imprints were only of individual volumes, thirty seven of which make up a full set. In 1483, round about the same time as the Spanish volumes were being produced, Joshua Solomon of Soncino in northern Italy established his Hebrew printing press. Amongst the works he and his nephew Gershom
produced were several volumes of the Talmud, complete with Rashi and
Tosafot
commentaries.

Gershom Soncino became known as one of the leading printers of his generation; in the course of his lifetime he produced over a hundred Hebrew titles and a similar number of Latin, Greek and Italian works. But although the Soncino family would go down in history as pioneers, their work on the Talmud was shortly to be eclipsed by an even more ambitious project taking place in Venice, a little over a hundred miles to the east.

Printing the Talmud standardized the text and brought it within the reach of a much wider audience. Adding commentaries to the printed page, something that was unknown in manuscripts, revolutionized the method of study.
14
But a full forty years was to elapse from when the Soncinos produced their first volume until the first complete printed copy of the whole Talmud was produced. And that full copy may well never have seen the light of day at all, had it not been for the revolution that was taking place in the Church, the challenge of the Reformation and the emergence of the early Christian Hebraists.

The laid table

Amongst the families who had been driven out of Spain was that of Ephraim Caro. The family had hailed from Toledo and, following the expulsion, settled in Turkey where Ephraim taught the Talmud to his son Yosef. Yosef was a sensitive young man who kept a diary in which he recorded conversations he had with a heavenly mentor. He described this mentor, known as a
maggid
in mystical terminology, as a personification of the Mishnah. One of his companions, Solomon Alkabetz, records that he heard the
maggid
speaking from Joseph’s mouth.
15

Yosef Caro’s mystical proclivities led him to settle in Safed, the city in northern Israel which was home to the new, burgeoning kabbalist movement. Caro became one of Safed’s leading lights, with a profound knowledge of the
Talmud. He could see that, in the three hundred years since Maimonides had written his legal code, the
Mishneh Torah
, the legal landscape in the widely scattered Jewish world had become almost anarchic. Caro complained about the many books of law and practice that were circulating, it was as if everyone was writing books and nobody knowing which opinion to follow.
16

Caro’s solution to this was to write a book. But it was not a book like any other. He took as his starting point a work known as the
Arba’ah Turim,
or Four Rows, named after the four sets of stones on the ancient High Priests’ breastplate. The
Arba’ah Turim
, commonly abbreviated as the
Tur,
had been written by Jacob, the son of Asher ben Yehiel, a pupil of Meir of Rothenburg who had been held captive by Rudolph the Hapsburg emperor.

Jacob had written the
Tur
in the early fourteenth century. He had based it in part on Maimonides’s
Mishneh Torah
but, unlike Maimonides, he cited the Talmudic sources of the law, omitted everything that was no longer relevant, such as the ancient order of service in the Jerusalem Temple, and introduced rulings by the French and German scholars who, by and large, lived and worked after Maimonides.