The Talmud (25 page)

The incident was the catalyst for an outpouring of anti-Jewish feeling in the European media. The influential
Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung
dramatically announced that three rabbis had been imprisoned with orders to translate the Talmud so that the secrets of the Jewish religion could be discovered.
18
The Times
in London devoted large amounts of space to discussions of whether the Talmud prescribed ritual murder.
19
A pernicious but unsigned piece in
The
Times
, purporting to be written by a convert from Judaism, repeated the old charges of ritual murder and laid the blame squarely at the feet of the Talmud.
20
It was not tolerant, post-enlightenment Europe’s finest hour.

Abraham Geiger was unwilling to get caught up in the reverberations of the Damascus Affair. On 22 May 1840 the
Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung
carried an advertisement signed by ‘prominent Jewish businessmen’ calling on ‘the most dauntless hero of our faith, Dr Geiger’ to respond to the attacks on the Talmud. It was not a friendly call, the sarcastic tone of the advertisement indicated that it had been placed by people who had it in for Geiger, and who wanted to embarrass him. Unfortunately Geiger didn’t let them down. He condemned the charges of murder in Damascus as laughable but he couldn’t help having a go at the Talmud itself. He declared that the views of the Talmud did not carry any divine authority and wondered why the men who had placed the advertisement had appealed to him, rather than the venerable rabbis who saw salvation in the Talmud and yet would not raise their voices to save its honour.
21

The academic Talmud

In his final years Abraham Geiger managed to obtain an academic post, as the head of a new rabbinic college in Berlin. It was a fitting appointment. For he wasn’t just the leading theologian of the German Reform movement. He was also one of the leading lights in a new secular enterprise, inspired by the religious enlightenment and the work of men like Moses Mendelssohn. It was known as
Wissenschaft des Judentums
, the Scientific Study of Judaism. It would lead, a century later, to the establishment of Jewish Studies faculties at universities throughout the world.

The
Wissenschaft
movement was both the product of the
Haskalah
, the religious enlightenment movement and a reaction to it. It was the product of the Enlightenment, inasmuch as it treated Judaism as any other cultural phenomenon, using scientific methodology to investigate its history, culture and development. It was a reaction to it, because growing acculturation was creating a new kind of Jew, one with little or no interest in their religious heritage.
Wissenschaft
, which separated scholarship from belief had, in theory,
no religious axe to grind. It provided a means for assimilated Jews to reconnect with their cultural heritage.
22

The new science subjected the Talmud to detailed, critical scholarship. As Marc Shapiro points out, traditional Talmud scholars had always tried to resolve difficulties in the Talmud text by referring to, or even proposing alternative readings.
23
But the new critical scholars went far further than this; they actively collected and compared as many variant sources as possible, assessed the Talmud’s language against other ancient Semitic tongues, and re-evaluated its understanding of history, medicine and the natural world.

Even its relation with the Mishnah was challenged. It may have been the core text, upon which the Talmud was a commentary, but in 1861 Hirsch Mendel Pineles challenged the fundamental principle that it was the authentic interpretation of the Mishnah. His book claimed to defend the Mishnah, against the many misinterpretations that he sought to demonstrate had been made by the Talmud.
24

Even Czar Nicholas I of Russia, who hated the Jews, was caught up in the
Wissenschaft
endeavour, though not as he had intended. During his reign Nicholas had made life as difficult as possible for his Jewish subjects, expelling them from their homes, forcibly drafting young boys into the army from the age of twelve, keeping them there for a minimum of twenty five years; frequently snatching them from the streets or kidnapping them from their homes. He passed legislation banning them from the major cities and herded them into villages in the Pale of Settlement, a strip of land running from the Baltic to the Black Sea, taking in large chunks of Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine.
25
He set up a network of schools with the avowed aim of bringing them ‘nearer to the Christians and to uproot their harmful beliefs which are influenced by the Talmud’.
26

In 1841 Nicholas commissioned a report which concluded that the Talmud was the reason the Jews refused to assimilate into Russian society. He decided
that the only way to expose the Talmud was to have it translated, so that people could see what it really was. He offered large sums of money to anyone who could translate it.

In Germany, Ephraim Moses Pinner had already drawn up plans to translate the Talmud into German. He wanted to make it accessible to German-speaking Jews, and to counter the accusations of its opponents. He applied to Nicholas for funding for his project, and Nicholas assented, assuming that Pinner would provide the condemnation of the Talmud that he sought.

In 1842 the first volume appeared. Nicholas purchased one hundred copies. The kings of Prussia, Holland, Belgium and Denmark also bought copies. When Nicholas discovered that Pinner had produced a direct translation, which didn’t seek to distort or polemicize against the Talmud, he was furious. He withdrew his funding. No further volumes appeared.
27

Hirsch Mendel Pineles’s defence of the Mishnah and Pinner’s desire to make the Talmud accessible to those who couldn’t understand the original were just two of the many endeavours in the growing field of academic Talmud scholarship. Over the course of the nineteenth century new tools appeared, all designed to facilitate critical scholarship. Amongst the most important were Raphael Rabbinowicz’s 1867 comprehensive listing of all the variant readings contained in known Talmudic manuscripts and printed versions, and Marcus Jastrow’s
Dictionary
.

Jastrow wasn’t the first to try his hand at writing a dictionary. The German scholar Wilhelm Gesenius had produced a Latin lexicon in 1815 that was subsequently translated into English. But Jastrow’s work, which gives Talmudic examples for each word, remains the standard study aid for English-speaking Talmud students even today.

Academic Talmudic scholarship wasn’t confined to Jews. It attracted the attention of the missionary Protestant, Franz Delitzsch, and his students. Delitszch was a Lutheran Bible commentator with a profound knowledge of, and a keen interest in rabbinic literature.
28
His knowledge proved to be the downfall of August Rohling, a priest and professor of Hebrew Literature at Charles University in Prague.

In 1871 Rohling published
The Talmud Jew,
an annotated collection of quotations allegedly from the Talmud. Unfortunately he made all the quotations up,
and it was quite clear that his intention was nothing other than scurrilous. Rohling compounded his stupidity when, called as a witness in a blood libel trial, he came out with the old calumny that the Talmud instructed Jews to use Christian blood in their rituals. Joseph Bloch, a young rabbi, soon to become a member of the Austrian parliament, called Rohling a fraud and offered to pay him three thousand florins if he could translate a page of the Talmud. Rohling, who wasn’t up to the task, tried to avoid the challenge by suing for libel. Bloch called upon Franz Delitzsch, who comprehensively refuted Rohling’s polemic. Rohling dropped the case before it came to court, was forced to pay costs and was suspended from his university chair.
29

In 1878 August Wunsche, a student of Delitszch, translated passages from the Talmud. And in 1887 Hermann Strack, a Protestant missionary and professor of the Old Testament at Berlin University published his Introduction to the Talmud. Strack’s book has been enlarged and reprinted several times. It remains a classic work for academic Talmud scholars today.

Rohling was also indirectly responsible for the first full German translation of the Talmud. Not content with one downfall, August Rohling had sought another by commissioning a converted Jew to write a book proving that the Talmud demanded ritual murder. The author of the book was convicted of defamation. Lazarus Goldschmidt, an expert in Semitic languages living in Leipzig was urged by his non-Jewish landlord to write a translation of the Talmud, to put accusations like this to rest.
30

The end of the old ways

The old ways were also changing in Poland and Russia. So much was happening to destabilize the established patterns of life. By the middle of the nineteenth century a three-way, cultural struggle was taking place between the Hasidim, their traditionalist opponents and those committed to the
Haskala
. At any time and in nearly any place two of the factions would be engaged in joint enterprise against the third, dividing families and communities and causing social upheaval.
31

At the same time, gradual emancipation was making people more politically aware, active and organized. Karl Marx’s writings were being discussed, workers’ groups were meeting, and agitating. Zionism was on the agenda, news of pioneers who were rebuilding the homeland was firing imaginations, particularly amongst the young. If that wasn’t distraction enough, there were economic pressures, industrialization, urbanization and ever-growing waves of emigration to the utopias of America and northern Europe. Set against a background of anti-Semitic legislation, persecutions and pogroms, it’s little wonder that the long-established, Talmud-based system of education was crumbling.

In the
yeshivot
, traditionally and exclusively dedicated to Talmud study, students were becoming politically aware, often without the knowledge and approval of the teachers. Many
yeshivot
themselves were changing; a new impetus towards ethical education was gaining ground, eating into the long hours that were once dedicated solely to the Talmud. Known as the
Musar
movement, founded by the saintly Israel Salanter, its goal was moral improvement through introspection and the study of inspirational, ethical literature. The influential, elite
yeshiva
at Volozhin, and those which had been founded in its image, frowned upon
musar
. For them the proper study of Talmud, and Talmud alone, provided all the character-building a student would ever need.

By the beginning of the twentieth century the once, seemingly monolithic, eastern European communities were fragmenting into a mosaic of differing sects, movements, parties and factions. Each with their own perspective on the Talmud, or none. Meanwhile the USA was setting a different pace.

A seafood banquet

In 1883 the Reform movement’s college in Cincinnati held a banquet to celebrate their first-ever graduation ceremony. By this time the number of Jews in the USA had swelled considerably. The Reform movement was still dominant but it now catered for many tastes, from out-and-out rejectionists of the Talmud on one wing, to traditionalists on the other. Neil Gillman describes it as the ‘American Reform coalition’.
32

The college invited the movement’s leading lights to the banquet. As the first diners took their seats some could be seen shaking their heads in disbelief, turning and murmuring discontentedly to their neighbours. As more diners filed into the room the murmur turned into a hubbub. Finally a good number of red-faced, furious-looking people stormed out of the room. One man waved the menu card in the air, yelling ‘This is a disgrace’.

The printed menu for the nine-course banquet had been on the tables when they entered the room. On it were clams, crabs and shrimp, all of which are specifically prohibited in the book of
Leviticus.
33
The main course was beef and the desert, cheese and ice cream, a combination of meat and milk dishes the prohibition of which was so ancient that even the Talmud is aware of
it.
34

The walkout in Cincinnati was when the Talmud in the USA started to fight back. The fight intensified a few years later when a conference of Reform rabbis in Pittsburgh declared allegiance only to the moral laws of Judaism, rejecting Talmudic legislation as apt ‘to obstruct, rather than further, modern spiritual elevation.’
35

In a deliberate secession from the Reform movement, the traditionalists announced the creation of a new rabbinical seminary in New York, based on ‘conservative’ principles. Known as the Jewish Theological Seminary, its constitution declared its commitment to ‘historical Judaism’ as expounded in ‘Biblical and Talmudic writings’.
36
The curriculum was to combine traditional Talmud study with
Wissenschaft
subjects including Jewish philosophy, history and literature.

In 1901 the Seminary’s governors persuaded Solomon Schechter to leave the hallowed tranquillity of Cambridge University in England, to take up the position of president. Born into a Hasidic family in Romania, Shechter had been brought up in a traditional, eastern European
yeshiva
before moving to Berlin where he was drawn to the
Wissenschaft
school. Academically orientated and traditional in outlook, he attracted a circle of similarly minded scholars to the Seminary, many of them recent immigrants from Europe. He laid the foundations for the Seminary to become one of the world’s leading centres of
Talmudic research and study for most of the twentieth century. But the scene of his greatest achievement was not Romania, Berlin, Cambridge or New York. It was the back alleys of Cairo.