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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.

Initially Henry thought his chances of having the marriage dissolved were good. It was only a few years since his sister, Queen Margaret of Scotland had been granted permission to divorce, as had King Louis XII of France. But as David Katz points out, Henry had left it too late. Rome had just been sacked by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V; the Pope was virtually a prisoner with no authority to take independent decisions, and Charles was a nephew of Catherine of Aragon, who was fighting against the divorce with all her might.27

One of the stratagems that Henry used to justify a divorce was to argue that his marriage to Catherine had been invalid from the outset. She had previously been married to Henry’s brother Arthur, but he had died young. The book of Leviticus in the Old Testament prohibits marriage to the widow of a brother. Henry had only been able to wed Catherine after obtaining a dispensation from the previous Pope, on the grounds that her previous marriage to Arthur had not been consummated. Now the future Bishop of London, John Stokesley, was advising him that the dispensation should not have been granted since the Pope had no power to overturn a divine law. Stokesley said the marriage between Catherine and Henry should never have taken place and it needed to be annulled.28

The trouble was that although Leviticus forbade a man from marrying his brother’s widow Deuteronomy demanded that, if there had been no children from her first marriage, the widow had to marry her dead husband’s brother. According to Deuteronomy, Henry had been obliged to marry Catherine. Unless he could find a way out.

John Stokesley argued that the requirement to marry a dead brother’s widow, known as levirate marriage, only applied to the Jews.29 He suggested that Henry find Jewish scholars who would bring evidence from the Talmud to support this view, and to show that in fact the Jews had abandoned this law.30 Stokesley wanted to argue the Deuteronomy injunction out of existence. Henry imported a copy of Bomberg’s printed Talmud into England for his advisers to consult and Richard Croke was despatched to Italy to find Talmudists who would help him.

In Venice, Croke engaged Francesco Giorgi to help him. Giorgi was a leading Christian Kabbalist with good contacts in the ghetto. Giorgi introduced Croke to Elijah Halfon, a rabbi and Kabbalist, who confirmed that levirate marriage, like most of Jewish law, only applied to Jews. However, the Vatican also engaged a Talmudist, Jacob Mantino, an exile from Spain, who took the other side and confirmed the Pope’s view.

The situation wasn’t helped by a separate quarrel between Halfon and Mantino, over a messianic pretender named Solomon Molcho. Molcho was a converso from Portugal who believed he was the Messiah, and who had attracted a sizeable following. Mantino was an avowed opponent of Molcho, whilst Halfon was a supporter. Their conflicting opinions on the question of Henry’s divorce were influenced by their personal antagonism over Solomon Molcho.

Realizing that Halfon’s testimony would not sway the Pope, Richard Croke turned to Marco Raphael, a Jewish convert to Christianity whose principal claim to fame was that he had invented an invisible ink. Raphael enthusiastically supported Henry’s position and Croke brought him to England to testify in front of Henry. However Raphael’s evidence turned out to not be of much use since he could not confirm that Henry was free from the stricture to marry his brother’s widow. Henry turned his not inconsiderable ire on Raphael and we hear no more of him.

But at the end of the day Henry’s whole exercise of relying on the Talmud to legitimize his divorce turned out to be fruitless. As things turned out his lover, Anne Boleyn, became pregnant. Henry broke from the Catholic Church, divorced Catherine on his own authority and married Anne.

The Hebrew Republic

The seventeenth century saw the development of modern political thought. Ideas that we take for granted today, such as individual rights and freedoms, the nation state and religious tolerance all began to emerge during this period. One of the drivers for these new ideas was the revival of the Hebrew language by the Christian Hebraists and their investigation of the biblical text.

Some Christian thinkers began to see the Bible’s account of how the ancient Israelite nation was governed as a blueprint for the administration of their own nations. They believed that the Old Testament presented the ideal political constitution, one designed by God for the Children of Israel.31

Some, notably Jean Bodin in France, saw the Israelite monarchy under King David and his descendants as the paradigm; for them the Hebrew Bible advocated the rule of kings.32 They backed up their claims with a passage from Deuteronomy:

When you come to the land the Lord your God gives you and have taken possession of it and settled there, and you say, ‘Let us set a king over us like all the nations around us’, you may appoint a king whom the Lord your God chooses.33

It is an ambivalent passage which permits, but by no means demands, that the Israelites appoint a king over themselves. Not all Hebraists read it in the same way. They didn’t all believe that the Hebrew Bible advocated monarchy. Some looked elsewhere in the Bible for evidence of the ideal government. They found plenty of options; aristocracy, theocracy, even democracy. As Kalman Neuman puts it, Political Hebraists did not share a political vision, but they did create a common language of discourse. In time this discourse would influence the great political thinkers of the seventeenth century, including Hobbes and Spinoza.34

Although they delved deeply into the biblical text most Hebraists had neither the knowledge of Jewish law nor sufficient command of Hebrew to investigate the Talmud, nor even the many commentaries that had by now spun off from it. But some began to feel that the Hebrew Bible alone could not lead them to a full understanding of what they regarded as the idealized, divinely sanctioned form of national government. And so, from amongst the Hebraists arose a small group with the skills and erudition to look beyond the Bible itself. They had a few tools to help them do this, including an Aramaic lexicon that Johannes Buxtorf, perhaps the most erudite of all Hebraists, was engaged in producing in Basel.35

They based their investigations on the prophet Samuel’s warning to the Israelites when they decided to ask God for a king ‘to judge us, like all the nations’.36 Samuel adjures them:

This will be rule of the king who will reign over you: He will take your sons for himself and place them in his chariots and as his horsemen, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will appoint to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and to plough his ground and reap his harvest, and to make his weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his servants. He will tithe your seeds and your vineyards and give it to his officials and servants. He will take your menservants and maidservants and the best of your young men and your donkeys and he will put them to his work. He will tithe your flocks, and you will be his slaves.37

This passage seemed to prove that the Israelites had been wrong in asking for a king. Monarchy was not the way to go. Republicanism seemed to be a much better option.

Wilhelm Shickard, Professor of Hebrew at the University of Tubingen, marshalled the Talmudic and rabbinic sources on the passages from Deuteronomy and Samuel in his legal treatise, The Hebrew King’s Law. His sources were used in a bitter dispute between Claude de Saumaise, or Salmasius, and John Milton, author of Paradise Lost. Salmasius had written an impassioned defence of the monarchy after the execution of England’s Charles I. Milton, a staunch republican who equated monarchy with idolatry 38 had written a fierce riposte. Neither man, it appears, could read the Talmud 39 but Shickard had set out the sources clearly enough for Milton to accuse Salmasius of plagiarizing Shickard 40 and misrepresenting him.41 The Hebrew Republic, based on Talmudic sources marks the beginning of modern republican, political theory.

New Israel

The Dutch Republic had recently freed itself from Spanish rule. The newly independent nation bought into a founding myth that proclaimed them, like the biblical Israelites, as having been redeemed from slavery. They even called themselves the New Israel. It seems like a harmless name but it was responsible for a deep split in Netherlands Protestantism during the early part of the seventeenth century.

For the orthodox Calvinists, the victory of New Israel over Catholic Spain had been a vindication of their true faith. They believed they were now obliged to enforce that faith by regulating religious belief. Their opponents argued that by defeating Spain, New Israel had scored a victory over tyranny. As such, it was their duty to establish a free, tolerant society in which people could follow their conscience in religious matters.42

Hugo Grotius, one of the pioneers of modern international law and a former child prodigy who had gone to university at the age of eleven, cited the example of the Hebrew republic to support the tolerant view. In a nutshell, he argued that the ancient Hebrew republic was the ideal society because it had been ordained by God. In this society all law, both religious and civil, had been placed into the hands of a single, law-making body, the Sanhedrin. This implied that both religious and civil law have an identical purpose, to regulate society. Since matters of personal conscience and religious belief have no bearing on the smooth running of society, the Sanhedrin, and by implication the Dutch law makers, have no jurisdiction over personal belief. Conscience and faith, argued Grotius, lie outside the law.

Up to this point he was doing little more than restating the arguments of the sixteenth-century Swiss theologian Thomas Erastus. But Grotius then moved on to cite the Talmud. He showed that that under certain circumstances the Sanhedrin had the power to suspend religious law and to punish those who ‘commit a crime in sacred matters’43 The civil court therefore had absolute jurisdiction even over religious matters. There were no grounds for a separate religious authority beyond the government of the state. The Talmud proved, to Grotius’s satisfaction, that religious tolerance was axiomatic.44

Petrus Cunaeus was a friend and colleague of Hugo Grotius. A professor of Law at Leiden University and amongst the most influential writers on the Hebrew Republic, Cunaeus pioneered a new perspective on land ownership. The Bible had decreed that the Land of Israel was to be divided equitably amongst the twelve Hebrew tribes, and that territory could not be sold in perpetuity. Cunaeus quoted Maimonides and the ‘requirements of Talmudic law’45 to show that his theories of land ownership would lead to a harmonious and equitable society.46

Political Hebraists, whose Protestantism was firmly wedded to the belief that the Jews had to be converted, made full use of the Talmud, but they did not flatter or lionize it. They recognized the ability of the ancient Talmudists to interpret the biblical text but in their eyes this was because of their command of the ancient Hebrew language, not due to any merit possessed by the Talmud itself. They used it to develop their political ideas but Cunaeus rejected ‘its trifles’, by which he meant the allegorical and non-legal material which supports Jewish tradition. Indeed, he considers the Karaites, who considered the principles of the Talmud to be worthless, and who focused only on the biblical text, to be ‘more intelligent’ than the Talmudists.47 Likewise, Hugo Grotius only supported the rights of Jews to settle in Holland because he believed that the Dutch Reformed Church was the most likely to be able to convert them.48

England’s Protestant Chief Rabbi

The Hebraists in England were less disdainful towards the Jews than their European colleagues. They could afford to be, officially there had been no Jews in England since Edward I expelled them in 1290. They wouldn’t be formally readmitted until midway through the seventeenth century, when Menasseh ben Israel, the leading rabbi in Amsterdam and a correspondent of Hugo Grotius and Petrus Cunaeus,49 began to lobby Cromwell for their return.50 It was the absence of any Jewish scholarly presence in Shakespeare’s sceptred isle that made the achievements of John Selden, described by Milton as ‘the chief of learned men’ and by Grotius as ‘the glory of the English nation’,51 so remarkable.

John Selden was a lawyer by profession. In his mid-thirties he had caused a rumpus within the Church by arguing in his book The Historie of Tithes that priests did not have a divine right to receive tithes from their parishioners. This had been a burning political issue for some years. Selden’s book showed that there was no direct historical connection between the tithes that the Old Testament demanded for the Hebrew priests, and the voluntary system of tithing which had found its way into the Church in the early medieval period. His work threatened to deprive the clergy of a significant proportion of their income.

Selden was elected to Parliament in 1624. Five years later he found himself on the wrong side of a dispute between the king’s supporters and their opponents. He insulted the king’s chief spokesman in Parliament, took the side of John Rolle, an MP who was refusing to pay customs duties and commanded the Speaker of the House to put the matter to a vote, on pain of being removed from office. He was hauled before the Privy Council for his pains, and cast into the Tower of London.52 It was from the Tower that he wrote the letter to his friend, the antiquarian scholar Sir Robert Cotton, which, according to Jason Rosenblatt, would change the course of his life and deepen his scholarship. Selden, whose enforced idleness left him with ‘much time here before me’, asked Robert Cotton to borrow for him a copy of the Talmud from the Westminster Abbey Library.53

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).