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Banned, censored and burned – the thirteenth century

Nahum of Gamzu used to say: Even this is for the best.1

It seems to me, Jew, that I dare not declare that you are human lest perchance I lie, because I recognize that reason, that which distinguishes human beings from beasts, is extinct in you or in any case buried. Truly, why are you not called brute animals? Why not beasts? Why not beasts of burden? The ass hears but does not understand; the Jew hears but does not understand.2

With these words the twelfth-century abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable, vented his frustration with the Jews. They had once again failed to listen to his arguments showing the Talmud to be false and proving the divinity of Jesus.

Peter was the head of a powerful, international monastic movement who devoted much of his life to the study of other faiths. Peter pioneered the study of both Islam and Judaism, but his interest was far from academic. In those days many religious thinkers were polemicists; anxious to prove the truth of their faith and the falseness of any other belief. By all accounts Peter was a saintly and politically influential man, who had the ear of kings and popes. He had defended Peter Abelard against the accusations of Bernard of Clairvaux and after Abelard’s death had acceded to Héloise’s request to grant him absolution from his sins. He was also a polemicist par excellence.

Peter first encountered Islam during a visit to Spain, sparking an interest which led him to commission the translation of Islamic texts into Latin. He then devoted much of his time to writing refutations of the Muslim faith. Eventually he turned his attention to Judaism, becoming one of the first to discuss the Talmud; a work which he held in contempt and ridicule.3

Peter’s work came at a time when Christian scholars were realizing that their attempts, over the last thousand years, to prove the Jews wrong from the Bible were not working because the Jews had their own tradition of biblical interpretation, a tradition which was contained in the Talmud. The Christians were beginning to realize the significance of the Talmud to the Jews, and to understand that if they wanted to prove the Jews wrong they would need to do it by refuting the Talmud, not by bringing arguments from the Bible. The Jews would not accept Christian interpretations of the Old Testament. They had their own. Which were stored in the Talmud.

Peter’s life-long attempts to show both Muslims and Jews the errors of their ways mark the beginning of an onslaught on both religions over the next hundred years or so. Chief amongst the aggressors were the Dominican Friars.

The American historian Salo Baron challenged the ‘lachrymose’ view of Jewish history. He took exception to the popular view, reinforced by nineteenth-century historians, that the Jews had been the most persecuted group in history. He argued that, for example, during the Middle Ages, life for Christian peasants was far worse. To be sure, there were horrific events; crusader assaults, pogroms and the carnage that followed in the wake of blood libels, recurring accusations that Jews had ritually slaughtered Christian children and used their blood to bake Passover bread. But to understand the history of the Jews in any particular period one had to look at what they were doing with their lives. They were not constantly under attack and when they were not, they were living creative lives, learning, working, reading, teaching, raising families and promoting the way of life they believed in.

The history of the Talmud, which has paralleled the history of the Jews, supports Salo Baron’s view. By and large it has been a successful history. Followers of the Talmud have explored the deepest intellectual oceans, traversed broad plains of knowledge and ideas, created and sustained communities and attained a clear and uncompromising sense of personal identity and self-knowledge. But that’s not to say there weren’t lachrymose periods, tearful events in the life of the Talmud and its devotees. The thirteenth century in Christian Europe was one such time.

The disputation in Paris

Institutional prejudice against the Jews took a giant step forward when Pope Innocent III was elected in 1198. Paying lip service to the earlier papal bull, Sicut Judaeis, which had granted limited protection to the Jews in papal lands, Innocent introduced measures to distinguish Jews from Christians, including a requirement for them to wear distinctive clothing. He drew clear lines between orthodox and heretical Christian beliefs and urged bishops to enforce correct religious adherence in their localities. His successor, Gregory IX pushed these reforms further, handing power to mendicant orders to assert his authority.4 Jeremy Cohen notes that the ‘condemnation and persecution of rabbinic literature by the late medieval Church marked an important milestone in the history of Christian-Jewish relations’.5

In 1236 Nicholas Donin, a Dominican friar who had been born a Jew but converted to Christianity, appeared before Pope Gregory IX. He brought with him a list of thirty five charges that he had compiled against the Talmud. Amongst Donin’s accusations were the charges that the Jews believed the Talmud came from God, that Christians who studied it were to be punished by death and that God is capable of sinning. Notwithstanding the institutional climate driven by the papacy, it has been suggested that Donin’s specific motive for this was to seek revenge against his former teacher, Yehiel of Paris. Yehiel had apparently excommunicated Donin for his heretical views – the same views no doubt which had led to his conversion to Christianity.

It took the Pope nearly three years to respond to Donin’s charges. When he did, he sent Donin off with a letter to be delivered to the Bishop of Paris. The Bishop was ordered to issue instructions to the kings of France, England, Portugal and the Spanish, that all copies of the Talmud and other Jewish books in their lands were to be confiscated. The Pope demanded that the confiscation was to take place on the first Sabbath in Lent, that all confiscated books be examined and any which contained material contradictory to the Christian faith were to be burnt.

The kings weren’t too impressed with the Pope’s edict. England, Spain and Portugal ignored it. The only king to react was Louis IX of France, and his response was far from the Pope’s original demand. Instead, Louis offered the Jews an opportunity to publicly defend the Talmud. He ordered that a public debate take place, in which Donin would confront the leading rabbis of France with his charges.

It was not the first debate, or disputation, to take place between Christians and Jews and nor would it be the last. But this debate was very different from anything that had gone before. Previously, either the Christians had sought to prove to the Jews that the Hebrew Bible had foretold the coming of Jesus, or the Jews had initiated the debate, attempting to prove the reverse. The debates centred on the interpretation of passages in the Hebrew Bible; the Christians quoting verses from the Jewish prophets that they believed supported their view, the Jews using their tradition of interpretation, which the Christians had recently discovered was bound up in the Talmud, to try to prove them wrong.

Even Salo Baron would accept that in thirteenth-century France Jews had a hard time of it. They were restricted in the trades they could perform, were subjected to blood libels, had been attacked and slaughtered by crusaders and were generally treated as inferior and unwelcome. What is interesting about the previous debates is that despite the power and authority vested in the Church, the Jews had the upper hand; Christianity was trying to justify its existence and not, as might have been expected, the other way round. In matters of religious belief, since Christianity depended on the Hebrew Bible the Jews represented the status quo; it fell to Christianity to prove it was right, not to Judaism to prove its daughter faith wrong.6

But the debate between Donin and Yehiel was different. This time Judaism was on the back foot, forced to defend itself. Not only that, but the heart of the debate was no longer how to interpret biblical texts which were claimed by both religions. Instead it was the validity and integrity of the Talmud which was at stake, even though it was a rabbinic text which until recently had been of no interest to Christianity at all.

The debate took place in the royal court in Paris on 25 and 26 June 1240, in the presence of the leading French clergy and Queen Blanche, the king’s mother. Nicholas Donin appeared as prosecutor of the Talmud; Yehiel and his colleague, Rabbi Moses of Courcy were its defenders. It was a tense and dramatic occasion, everyone was aware that the stakes riding on it were high. For Yehiel, it was an intimidating environment:

When he came before the queen and the princes in the king’s court, the Rabbi was alone there with the throng, the queen, the clergy, the rules and all the knights, great and small; of the Israelites there was not one.7

Our knowledge of the debate comes from the accounts written by the protagonists, Rabbi Yehiel and Nicholas Donin. Donin’s account was in Latin and Yehiel’s in Hebrew. Of course, they each wrote their accounts after the debate had taken place, they each had an axe to grind and the two documents therefore are neither word–for-word transcriptions, nor do they necessarily agree with each other.

Donin’s account of the disputation is held in the French Bibliothèque Nationale. It is appended to the Extractiones de Talmut, a work composed by Jewish converts to Christianity, which purports to list all the incriminating passages in the Talmud.8 The philosopher St Thomas Aquinas probably had a copy of the Extractiones in front of him when he composed his polemic against disbelief, the Summa Contra Gentiles in which he misunderstands the Talmud in a similar manner to Donin.9 It might be thought that the scholarly and rational Aquinas, who used the writings of Maimonides to help him expound biblical laws, would help improve Christian understanding of the Talmud. In fact the opposite seems to have happened; his attention to Scripture led him to a literal understanding of biblical Judaism which failed to recognize the role and purpose of the Talmud in the reality of a post-biblical world.10

It has been argued that Yehiel was less interested in reporting the cut and thrust of the debate than writing an account which would function as a guide for future disputants. His report doesn’t just set out the arguments he used, which he felt others should follow. It also helps others who might find themselves in a similar position to prepare, by describing the atmosphere in the court in detail, and the manner in which the audience behaved.11

Yehiel tried to explain that the Talmud was an essential, divinely given companion to the Bible, that without it the Bible could not be understood. He tried to rebut Donin’s specific charges one by one. Many of the charges that Donin had laid were based upon the parts of the Talmud known as aggada, which do not deal with law or religious practice but instead introduce fables, folktales, stories, magic and cosmology. Yehiel argued that these passages are intended ‘to draw the heart of a person … if he wants he can believe them, if he doesn’t want to, he need not believe’.12

Donin mocked the Talmudic statement about the disagreements between Hillel and Shammai: ‘these and these are the words of the living God’. How can God change his mind, he asked? Yehiel’s answer was that the statement refers to legal decisions that are reached by majority vote. If a majority in one community decide differently from a majority elsewhere, both decisions are valid.

Yehiel refuted the charges that the Talmud is disparaging to Christians, arguing that Donin misunderstood. The passages that Donin claimed referred to Christians actually referred to pagans and idolaters. This is obviously so since the Christian faith had hardly reached Babylon when the Talmud was under composition and its authors were neither particularly knowledgeable about it nor fearful of it.

The Talmud aflame

Donin’s charges against the Talmud were artificial and Yehiel’s attempt at defence tortuous, but of course this was never going to be a fair contest. It was no surprise that Yehiel didn’t win the debate and what really mattered was not the outcome, but what happened next. The consequences of Yehiel’s defeat were far-reaching. Two years after the debate, in 1242, a papal commission condemned the Talmud and urged Louis IX to issue an edict for all copies of the Talmud to be burnt. Louis was not slow to react. He despatched inspectors across the realm, charging them to ransack the Jewish neighbourhoods in both cities and villages. The inspectors, most of whom could not read Hebrew, were unable to tell which volumes were copies of the Talmud and which were not. They confiscated everything they found.

Books were the lifeblood of Jewish life; the people may have been as poor as any in the Middle Ages but they had pride in their learning. Their books were often all they had. Study was an end in itself and the highest aspiration of any Jewish parent was that their son would become a rabbinic scholar, an authority in Talmud. They wouldn’t have given up their holy books without a fight, many of those fights would have ended in bloodshed and tragedy.

The impact went far beyond those from whom the books were wrenched. Twenty four wagonloads of books were brought to the pyre in a square in Paris. This was long before printing reached Europe. Every book had been written by hand. Thousands of manuscripts, each of which would have taken weeks or months to write, were burned. Many works of which only a few copies existed were lost to the world for ever. Shmuel ben Shlomo, who may have helped Yehiel prepare for the disputation, complains that:

My spirit is departed, my strength exhausted and there is no light in my eyes due to the wrath of the enemy. He forcefully overpowered us, he took the soul and delight of our eyes, we have no book in our hands to comprehend or to understand.13

No complete manuscript of the Talmud exists from before this time.

Amongst the onlookers at the conflagration was Meir ben Baruch, a young student from the Rhineland, who had gone to Paris to study with Yehiel. Distraught at the events he followed the example of so many other traumatized scholars of his time. He expressed his grief in a lamentation:

Oh you who have been consumed with fire,

Pray for the peace of those who mourn you,

Who long to dwell in your court of your habitation,

Who choke in the dust of the earth,

Who grieve and are confounded by the immolation of your parchments.14

The censor’s pen

Back in Rome, Gregory was already dead, and his successor Celestine only survived in the papal office for fifteen days. A new Pope, Innocent IV, was now on the throne. He seemed content to carry on Gregory’s anti-Talmud policy.

In 1244 he wrote to King Louis in Paris, encouraging him in his work and urging him to continue burning all copies of the Talmud, wherever they were found. But his policy would shortly change. Three years later after he had written to Louis, a delegation of French rabbis appeared before Pope Innocent, pleading that without the Talmud they could not understand the Bible and reminding him that the Church had long afforded the Jews the guarantee that they could practise their religion, as long as it did not harm or undermine the Christian faith.

Innocent listened. He modified his stance, now ordering that all Jewish books be inspected, by monks well versed in Hebrew. As long as any material ‘harmful’ to Christianity was removed, the books could continue in use. This was the beginning of the policy of Talmudic censorship, a policy which continued for many centuries. Censorship was the means of separating out material of which the Church did not approve, whilst allowing Jews access to their rabbinic law.15 Most printed copies of the Talmud today still reflect the work of the censor’s pen.

The advent of censorship did not remove the physical threat to the Talmud. It continued to come under attack in France. Louis IX’s son Philip, who was a weaker character than his father, came under continuing pressure from the Church to legislate against the Jews. In 1283 he issued an edict which, alongside forbidding them to live in villages, chant loudly or build cemeteries, forbade the possession of the Talmud. Any copies in their possession were to be burnt.

The next king of France, Philip the Fair, expelled the Jews in 1306, probably for financial reasons.16 He allowed them back nine years later at which time the burning of copies of the Talmud and other Jewish books in France resumed. The conflagrations continued until 1319, when the Dominican inquisitor Bernard Gui built a pyre in Toulouse.17 By this time the Talmud had virtually disappeared from France.

But it would return.

In September 2008 Pope Benedict XVI met Jewish leaders in Paris. The weight of history, both recent and medieval, hung heavily on both communities. In his address to the Jews the Pope quoted from the Talmud. It was no accident. Relations between the Church and the Talmud have come a long way since the thirteenth century.

Maimonides under attack

The Talmud was not the first rabbinic book to be burnt. There had been an incident just a few years earlier, the consequence of a fierce dispute within Jewish intellectual circles. In this case however the burning had the cathartic effect of cooling tempers and restoring a sense of perspective to the disputants.

Over fifty years had elapsed since Maimonides had first published his philosophical treatise Guide for the Perplexed. The book had caused quite a stir. Maimonides’s attempts to reconcile the secular Aristotelian philosophy of the day with traditional Jewish belief had divided the intellectual world. The battle was between faith and reason. Traditionalists took exception to his view that there was no conflict between the Bible and philosophy, they held the position that a faith found on revelation could not, and should not, be subjected to rational examination; God’s word was all that was needed. The rationalists, on the other hand, could not conceive of a world in which God’s revelation could conflict with his creation.

The battle had started in the second century bce, when the Hebrew faith first encountered Greek rationalism. A parable in the Talmud tells of four scholars in the time of the Mishnah who engaged in mystical contemplation. They entered the ‘orchard’, a metaphor to describe the highest levels of spiritual elevation. It was not a comfortable experience for them. Ben Azzai died, Ben Zoma went mad, Elisha ben Abuya became a heretic and only Rabbi Akiva emerged unscathed.18 The Talmud goes on to tell us that ‘Greek songs never ceased from Elisha ben Abuya’s mouth’ and ‘when he stood up in the study house many heretical books’ fell from inside his cloak.19 Elisha’s heresy was his study of Greek philosophy. The disparaging tales that the Talmud’s authors recount about him leave us in no doubt about their views on the matter.

The battle between faith and reason was ancient and in the thirteenth century it was by no means confined to the Jewish world. Christianity and Islam were experiencing the same tensions. It was the mood of the times. Although the Jews in Muslim lands had shared the long Islamic tradition of philosophical enquiry, many of them considered Maimonides’s ideological rationalism a step too far. All the more so for those in Christian Europe who’d had far less exposure to speculative thought.

Maimonides’s philosophical work Guide for the Perplexed was not written until he was in his fifties and was only made popularly available in Hebrew towards the end of his life. The storm over it did not erupt until after his death. But, as we saw previously, there had already been disquiet over his legal compendium, Mishneh Torah, and the embers of the earlier controversy were still hot. When his critics read the Guide, the storm erupted again. This time it was even more bitter.

And yet, as Joseph Dan has written, although the battle was between faith and reason, the letters and pamphlets which have survived from that time do not discuss whether Maimonides was right or wrong. They concentrate on only one thing; was there a contradiction between Maimonides and the Talmud? If there was no contradiction, if Maimonides could be shown to be in accord with tradition, then the veracity of his arguments would be proved. The rationalists, as Dan points out, succumbed to the values of their opponents, who accused Maimonides of being in conflict with the Talmud.20

The argument was vitriolic and raged across Europe. It came to an end unexpectedly, in 1232, when the Dominicans, who were busy investigating the Church’s own Albigensian heresy,21 suddenly turned their attention to the Jews and cast Maimonides’s works to the flames in 1232. Maimonides’s supporters hurled blame at their opponents for dragging the friars into the row, but whether the Dominicans burnt his works of their own initiative, or whether they were put up to it by the same type of fanatic who, some years later, desecrated his tomb in Tiberias, remains a mystery.

Disputation in Barcelona

The events that had taken place in Paris resonated throughout Europe. They particularly had an effect in Spain where the Christian reconquest of the country was proceeding apace. The Golden Age had drawn to a close, the Muslim rulers were being driven southwards as the Christian kingdoms in the north expanded their reach. When, in 1236, King Ferdinand III of Castile captured Cordova, the destiny of Spain’s Jewish communities would now be shaped by events in Christian France and Germany, instead of those in the Muslim world.

The Dominicans, the Order to which Nicholas Donin had belonged, pursued an active missionary agenda in Spain, just as they did in France. Charged with operating the Inquisition by Pope Gregory and faithful to their responsibilities, they were fanatical defenders of Orthodox Church dogma. Although they focused their attentions equally on Muslims, Jews and heretics, the Jews were the easiest group for the Dominicans to prey on. Unlike the Christian heretics, Jews made no attempt to conceal themselves or to disguise their religious beliefs.22 Fewer and less organized than the Muslims, they posed little danger; they had no retreating co-religionists in the south who may turn and launch a counter-attack. The Jews, visible, unprotected and vulnerable, were an easy target.

To make things worse, several Jewish converts amongst the Dominican friars were actively agitating against the Talmud, as if they believed that by discrediting it they could hasten the abolition of the Jewish faith. Nicholas Donin had been a convert and now in Barcelona another convert, Pablo Christiani, began to foment against the Talmud.

Even though centuries of Muslim rule had left Spanish society more tolerant towards minorities than France, the Jews were nevertheless disenfranchised. They had long been obliged to attend forced sermons at the king’s command, to hear friars preach the gospels to them. In this atmosphere of strident invective, Christiani did not need to manufacture charges against the Talmud as Donin had done. He could simply take advantage of the polemical mood to persuade the Jews of the error of their ways and of the truth of Christianity. He prevailed upon the king to order a compulsory debate.

King James I of Aragon was more than willing to accede to Christiani’s request. He relished the idea of a debate, particularly if it could be open and cordial. He ordered that it take place in the royal palace in Barcelona and summoned the leading rabbi in Spain, Moses ben Nachman. As is traditional for prominent rabbinic scholars, he was known by the acrostic formed by his title and initials. Ramban was to argue in favour of the Talmud.23

Yehiel in Paris had been a well-known and respected rabbi, but Ramban was in a different league. A physician by profession, he was one of those people who seem able to do anything and to excel at whatever they do. He’d been the head of a rabbinic school in Gerona before being appointed chief rabbi of Catalonia, and, despite his religious and medical duties, he found the time to author over fifty works, principally on Talmud, philosophy and mysticism. He also wrote poetry. His works, particularly his commentaries on the Torah and the Talmud, are still read today.

Ramban was in his late sixties when he received the king’s summons. According to the account that he wrote of the debate, he only agreed to participate if he was allowed to speak freely and if the king himself agreed to take no active part. He didn’t want to get into an argument with the monarch. He repeated the request to speak freely to Friar Ramon, the head of the Dominical Order. Friar Ramon agreed, just as the king had already done.

The disputation took place over four days in July 1263. As in Paris, it was attended by the leading clergy and noblemen. Pablo Christiani was the main advocate for the Dominicans, supported by four colleagues. Ramban was the sole spokesperson for the Talmud although unlike the debate in Paris, other Jews were present.

Christiani opened by declaring it was his intention to prove from the Talmud that the Messiah had already come, that he was both human and divine and that he had died to atone for human sin. He quoted Talmudic homilies in support of his view.

Ramban argued that not only had Christiani misconstrued the passages he was quoting, but that in any event Jews were not obliged to take the folklore and stories in the Talmud literally. This is the same argument that Yehiel had used in Paris. He explained that there were three levels of Jewish literature; Bible, Talmud and aggada. The Bible was to be believed with perfect faith. The legal part of the Talmud, which explains the commandments in the Torah, is also to be relied upon but aggada should be treated like sermons; ‘if one believes it, all well and good, if not, one will not be harmed spiritually’.24

The debate proved inconclusive. Pablo Christiani was not able to persuade Ramban and the other Jews present that the Messiah had already come, and Ramban was not able to refute Christiani to a point where he could demand he cease his proselytizing activity. The king seems to have been won over by Ramban at least to some degree. At the end of the debate he presented him with three hundred dineros and said he had never heard someone who was wrong argue his case so well.25

However the king also decreed that he would come to the synagogue the following Sabbath with Pablo Christiani and Friar Ramon, where they would preach the gospels to the Jews. Ramban remained behind in Barcelona for the occasion, to try to reassure the frightened congregation. He listened patiently whilst Christiani and Friar Ramon each preached to them, but leapt to his feet to protest when the Friar intimated that he had been won over by Christiani during the disputation.

Despite the goodwill that the king showed Ramban, he came under further pressure from the Dominicans to impose strictures upon the Jews and their Talmud. A month later he issued a series of royal edicts in which he ordered the Jews to attend Christiani’s missionary sermons whenever required. They were also required to show Christiani their books, which he would use to convince them of the truth of his case.

Two years later the Bishop of Gerona got hold of a copy of Ramban’s account of the debate. It clearly did not accord with his own understanding of what had been said because he charged him with blasphemy. Ramban appealed to the king, arguing that he had promised him freedom of speech. The king supported him, demanding that the trial be adjourned until he had the opportunity of judging it himself.

The trial never took place and the Dominicans now appealed to Pope Clement IV. He in turn ordered the Archbishop of Tarragona to seize all the copies of the Talmud and other Jewish books in his kingdom and submit them to Pablo Christiania and his fellow friars for examination and censorship. The Pope instructed the censors to return to the Jews all books which accorded with the Bible and all which clearly did not contain blasphemies.26

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.