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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 was 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.

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

5 Starr-LeBeau, 2003.