Unit 16 · The Talmud in History

In 1239 Nicholas Donin, a former student of the rabbis who had become Christian, sent Pope Gregory IX a list of charges against the Talmud. He claimed it insulted Christianity and turned Jews away from the Bible. The pope wrote to rulers across Europe asking them to seize the books. Only in France, under King Louis IX, was the order carried out in full.

The hearing held in Paris in 1240 is called a disputation, a staged public debate on religion. It was not an equal debate. The rabbis, led by Rabbi Yechiel of Paris, answered questions before judges who had power over their community. A Hebrew account of the event, known as the Vikuach of Rabbi Yechiel, gives the rabbis’ side. Latin records give the side of the accusers.

Rabbi Yechiel’s answers, as the Hebrew account tells them, included several arguments. He said the Talmud’s harsh words about a man named Jesus referred to a different person. He also pointed to the Talmud’s many teachings of kindness toward all people. Historians still study both accounts to learn what was said and how each side remembered it.

After the judges ruled against the Talmud, royal officers gathered the volumes. Most historians date the public burning in Paris to 1242, though some sources give a slightly later year. Medieval Jewish writers remembered about twenty-four wagonloads. Every one of those books had been copied by hand, so the loss was enormous for teachers and students.

Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, later a leading legal authority in Germany, is said to have witnessed the fire as a young student. He wrote a kinah, a poem of mourning, that begins by asking the Torah, burned in fire, to ask after the welfare of those who grieve for it. Some Ashkenazi communities still recite this kinah on Tisha B'Av, the fast day that mourns the destruction of the Temples.

The burning did not end Talmud study in France at once, but it weakened it. Many historians connect the decline of the great French schools of the Tosafists with the burnings and the later expulsions of Jews from France. Rabbinic tradition, in turn, placed the event inside a long memory of loss and survival.

Burning was one response to the Talmud; censorship was another. A censor read a book and struck out or changed words that church officials disliked. From the 1500s on, many Talmud volumes were printed only after such review. Words for non-Jews, such as goy, were often replaced with terms meaning idol worshiper or with the name of an ancient people, so the text would not seem to speak about Christians.

The Basel Talmud, printed in Basel, Switzerland, in 1578–81 by the press of Ambrosius Froben, is a well-known censored edition. Censors removed a whole tractate, Avodah Zarah, which deals with idol worship, along with many shorter passages. Later printers often copied the Basel text, so some of its changes spread into editions used for centuries.

Jewish readers responded in several ways. Some copied the missing lines by hand into the margins of their books. Later, small booklets collected the censored passages so students could restore them. Modern scholars compare printed editions with older manuscripts to see what the censors changed.

Printing with movable type reached Europe in the mid-1400s, and Jewish printers soon set single tractates in type. The first complete printed Babylonian Talmud came from Venice. Its printer was Daniel Bomberg, a Christian from Antwerp, who worked with Jewish editors and typesetters. The edition appeared in 1520–23 with permission from the Pope.

Bomberg’s edition set the daf, the double-sided leaf, in a layout that later printers followed. Each leaf has a front side, marked a, and a back side, marked b. That is why a citation like Berakhot 2a points to the front of the second leaf. Tractates begin on leaf 2, a custom that goes back to these early printings.

Because nearly every later edition kept Bomberg’s numbering, a student in Vilna, New York or Jerusalem could find the same passage by the same number. Printing did more than make copies cheaper. It gave readers across the world one shared map of the text, which made it easier to argue about the same lines.

Printing did not end the attacks. In 1553 church officials in Rome ordered the Talmud seized, and copies were burned in the Campo de’ Fiori, a public square, on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. Burnings followed in other Italian cities, including Venice. For a time, printing the Talmud in Italy stopped.

The Council of Trent was a long meeting of Catholic bishops held between 1545 and 1563. After it, the church issued an Index of forbidden books in 1564. Historians describe its rule on the Talmud this way: the book could appear only if censored, and some later rulings added that it must not carry the name Talmud. Printers sometimes used other titles for the same text.

These rules shaped the Talmud that many Jews held for centuries. Editions printed under them left gaps, changed words and softened lines. The Basel edition was made under this system. The history shows how the outside world could set the shape of a page that looked, to its readers, like one unbroken tradition.

Open a printed Talmud and the layout tells a story. In the center stands the Mishnah, the early rabbinic law code, followed by the Gemara, the later discussion of it. On the inner side of the page runs Rashi’s commentary. On the outer side runs Tosafot, the notes of the medieval French and German scholars who followed him.

Printers set this frame in the 1500s, and it became standard. The layout lets a reader move from a line of Gemara to Rashi’s plain explanation and then to Tosafot’s harder questions without turning a page. Later editions added more notes in the margins and at the back of each tractate.

The page also joins places. The Mishnah was edited in the land of Israel around 200 CE. The Gemara grew in the academies of Babylonia. Rashi worked in Troyes, France, in the 1000s. A student who reads one page is, in effect, sitting with teachers from three lands and many centuries.

As Jews were pushed out of parts of western Europe, many settled in Poland and Lithuania. By the 1500s these lands held large Jewish communities with their own courts and schools. A yeshiva is an academy for advanced Talmud study. Poland’s yeshivas drew students from far away, and scholars there wrote commentaries still printed with the Talmud.

Students in a yeshiva often learn in chavruta, a partnership of two who read aloud, question each other and argue. The room is loud. Rabbinic tradition praises this method; one Talmud passage compares study partners to iron sharpening iron, based on Proverbs 27:17. A teacher gives a lecture, and pairs then work through the text on their own.

In the 1800s, Lithuania became known for a new kind of yeshiva. The yeshiva of Volozhin, founded in 1803 by Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, a student of the Vilna Gaon, gathered young men from many towns into one full-time school. Later yeshivas in Lithuania, and later still in America and Israel, followed its model.

Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720–1797) lived in Vilna, today Vilnius in Lithuania. He is known as the Vilna Gaon, gaon meaning genius. He held no official post as a community rabbi. Instead he studied, wrote notes and taught a small circle of students, who spread his methods.

The Gaon cared about the exact wording of texts. He compared versions and suggested corrections where he believed copyists or printers had made mistakes. Many of his notes, printed in later editions, are marked with his initials. He also studied mathematics, astronomy and grammar, since he thought they helped in reading the sources.

Lithuanian Jews who followed his approach came to be called misnagdim, meaning opponents, because they opposed the new Hasidic movement of his time. Hasidic Jews, for their part, stressed joy, prayer and the spiritual leader. Today both groups study Talmud intensely, and historians describe their early conflict without treating either side as the only true heir.

Shas is a Hebrew abbreviation for the six orders of the Mishnah, and it became a common name for the whole Talmud. The Romm family press in Vilna printed a new edition between 1880 and 1886. It kept Bomberg’s page numbers but surrounded them with far more commentary than any earlier edition.

The Vilna Shas includes Rashi and Tosafot, the notes of later scholars, cross references to the Bible and to legal codes, and short corrections such as those of the Vilna Gaon. Many older commentaries were printed at the back of each volume. Editors worked with manuscripts and earlier editions to fix errors, though some changes from censorship remained.

The edition was so thorough and so widely sold that it became the standard. Most printed Talmuds today, and most digital ones, reproduce its layout. When a teacher in Chicago and a student in Jerusalem say ’look at Rashi on Berakhot 2a,’ they are almost always picturing a Vilna page.

In 1923 Rabbi Meir Shapiro of Poland spoke at a large gathering of the Agudath Israel movement in Vienna. He proposed that Jews everywhere study the same daf yomi, the daily page, on the same day. A traveler could walk into any study hall and join the class already underway. The first cycle began that year.

The Babylonian Talmud as printed has 2,711 leaves in the Daf Yomi count. At one leaf a day, a cycle lasts about seven and a half years. Its end is marked by a siyum, a celebration for finishing a text. Rabbi Shapiro later founded the Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin in Poland, which opened in 1930.

Daf Yomi began mainly among Orthodox Jews, and it remains strongest there. Over time, podcasts, apps and classes in many cities made it easier to join. People from other movements, and some who study for history or culture, now take part too. Supporters praise the shared rhythm; others prefer slower, deeper study of fewer pages. Both approaches have long roots.

The Holocaust, the Nazi murder of about six million Jews, destroyed the Jewish communities of Poland and Lithuania where so much Talmud study had grown. Teachers and students were killed, and yeshivas, libraries and printing houses were ruined. Some scholars escaped to the land of Israel, America and elsewhere, and rebuilt schools there.

After the war, many survivors lived in displaced persons camps in Germany. They asked for books to study. With the support of the U.S. Army, a full edition of the Talmud was printed in Heidelberg, completed around 1950. It is often called the Survivors’ Talmud. Its title page showed barbed wire and a labor camp below, with a picture of the land of Israel above.

Historians note the irony that this Talmud was printed in Germany, the country that had tried to destroy those who studied it. For survivors, it was a sign that learning would go on. The edition connects to the chapter’s larger story: burned in Paris, censored in Basel, destroyed in Europe, and printed again.

In Berlin in 1819, a group of young Jewish scholars formed a society to study Jewish history and texts with the methods of the new German universities. Their movement is called Wissenschaft des Judentums, German for the science of Judaism. Leopold Zunz, one of its founders, is remembered as a pioneer of the field.

These scholars asked historical questions. When was a passage written? Which rabbi lived where? How did the wording change as scribes copied it? They compared the Talmud with Greek, Roman and Persian sources of the same era. This approach is often called text criticism, the careful comparison of versions to recover how a text developed.

Traditional readers and academic readers often ask different questions of the same page. A yeshiva student asks what the law is and how the argument holds together. A historian asks when and how the passage took shape. Many readers today use both approaches. Some Orthodox scholars have been wary of historical methods, while Conservative and Reform institutions adopted them widely.

Because of burnings, censorship and time, very few complete medieval copies of the Talmud survive. The most famous is the Munich codex, a manuscript book now held in the Bavarian State Library in Munich. A scribe finished it in 1342, probably in France. It is the only surviving manuscript that contains nearly the whole Babylonian Talmud.

The Munich codex was copied almost two centuries before Bomberg’s printing, and before most censorship. So it sometimes preserves wording that later editions lost or changed. Scholars compare its readings with the printed text and with smaller manuscripts and fragments to see which version may be older.

Such differences are called variant readings. Many are small, like a missing word or a different spelling of a rabbi’s name. Some change the meaning of an argument. Printed collections and, more recently, online databases gather variant readings so readers can see them side by side.

Jewish custom holds that writings containing God’s name should not simply be thrown away. Worn-out pages are stored and later buried. Such a storeroom is called a genizah. The Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, old Cairo, kept a genizah for centuries, and Egypt’s dry air preserved what was placed there.

In 1896 and 1897, Solomon Schechter, a scholar at Cambridge University, brought a vast collection of these papers to England. Others went to libraries around the world. Estimates of the total vary, but they are usually given as hundreds of thousands of fragments. They include letters, contracts, poems, and pieces of the Bible, Mishnah and Talmud.

Some Genizah fragments of the Talmud are older than any complete manuscript. They let scholars check readings and see how texts looked centuries before printing. The letters and contracts also show daily life: marriages, trade and questions sent to rabbis. Historians call the Genizah one of the richest sources for medieval Jewish life around the Mediterranean.

The Talmud names few women scholars, but Beruriah stands out. Rabbinic tradition identifies her as the wife of Rabbi Meir, a tanna of the 100s CE, and as a learned woman in her own right. The Gemara records several of her sayings and arguments. Tractate Pesachim 62b even says she learned hundreds of teachings in a single day.

One well-known story appears in Berakhot 10a. Some troublemakers were bothering Rabbi Meir, and he prayed that they would die. Beruriah pointed to Psalm 104:35, which asks that sins cease from the earth. She read the verse as asking for sins to end, not sinners. Pray that they turn back, she told him. The Gemara reports that Rabbi Meir did so, and the men changed their ways.

Readers use Beruriah’s story in different ways. Many modern teachers hold her up as proof that women’s learning has roots in the Talmud itself. Others note that a later story, told in medieval commentary, paints her fate darkly, and they discuss what that tale says about its tellers. Both conversations are now part of how students read her.

For most of Jewish history, advanced Talmud study was mainly for men. Views on why, and on whether that should change, differ. Some rabbis cited a Mishnah passage (Sotah 3:4) where Rabbi Eliezer warns against teaching a daughter Torah, while Ben Azzai says a father should teach her. Later authorities debated how to read that dispute.

In the 20th century, women teachers became famous for classic texts. Nechama Leibowitz (1905–1997) taught Bible and its commentaries in Israel for decades and won the Israel Prize in 1956. Her worksheets reached students around the world. Schools for women’s advanced study followed, such as Drisha in New York (1979) and Matan in Jerusalem (1988), where women learn in a beit midrash, a house of study.

Today the picture varies. Reform and Conservative seminaries teach Talmud to women and men together and ordain women as rabbis. Many Modern Orthodox communities support women’s Talmud study, and some ordain women with other titles. Many Haredi communities focus women’s learning on Bible, law and ethics rather than Gemara. Each group gives reasons drawn from its reading of the sources.

The Siyum HaShas marks the end of a Daf Yomi cycle through the whole Talmud. On January 1, 2020, the thirteenth cycle ended with a celebration at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, organized by Agudath Israel of America. News reports put the crowd at about 90,000. Other siyums were held around the world.

A few days later, on January 5, 2020, a women’s Siyum HaShas took place in Jerusalem, organized by Hadran, a group that teaches Talmud to women. About three thousand women attended. Its founder, Rabbanit Michelle Cohen Farber, had taught a daily class for the whole cycle. Women spoke about learning while raising children and working.

The two celebrations showed both the size of Daf Yomi and the range of people it reaches. Some observers noted differences, such as who spoke and who sat where. Others focused on what the events shared: the same final page, the same prayer for learning, and the same wish to begin again the next day with Berakhot 2a.

The State of Israel, founded in 1948, inherited laws from Ottoman and British rule and added its own. In matters of marriage and divorce for Jews, rabbinical courts apply halakhah, Jewish law as developed from the Talmud. Most other areas are run by secular courts and laws passed by the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

In 1980 the Knesset passed the Foundations of Law Act. It says that when a judge faces a legal question with no answer in statute, case law or analogy, the judge should decide in light of the principles of freedom, justice, equity and peace of Jewish heritage. Judges and scholars have long debated how much this law requires and how to use it.

Some Israeli judges, notably Justice Menachem Elon, cited Talmudic sources in their rulings, for example on debt, privacy or the duty to rescue. Others preferred general legal principles shared with other democracies. The debate is not only legal. It asks what role an old religious text should play in a modern state with citizens of many faiths and none.

S. Y. Agnon (1888–1970) grew up in Galicia and later lived in Jerusalem. His Hebrew stories are full of phrases from the Talmud and prayer book, and many of his characters are scholars and their families. In 1966 he shared the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Hebrew writer to receive it.

Chaim Potok (1929–2002), an American rabbi and novelist, wrote The Chosen (1967). It follows two boys in Brooklyn in the 1940s, one from a Modern Orthodox home and one the son of a Hasidic leader. A key scene shows them studying Talmud together, arguing about a hard passage. The novel also shows a scholar who uses text criticism, which troubles some in the boys’ world.

For many readers who never enter a yeshiva, these books are their first picture of Talmud study. Teachers note that novels show what the page feels like: the arguing, the friendship of study partners, the tension between old and new ways of reading. They are fiction, though, and they present one writer’s view of a varied world.

For centuries, owning a full Talmud meant buying dozens of heavy volumes. In the 20th century, new translations and editions made the text easier to enter. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz began a Hebrew edition with explanations in 1965 and finished it in 2010. English editions followed from several publishers.

Sefaria, a nonprofit founded around 2011, built a free online library of Jewish texts. In 2017 it added the William Davidson Talmud, a free English translation and explanation based on Steinsaltz’s work, under a license that allows noncommercial use. Readers can click a line and see the commentaries, verses and later sources that cite it.

Some teachers welcome this openness: a student anywhere can find a passage in seconds. Others worry that clicking is not the same as struggling through a page with a chavruta and a teacher. Many learners do both, using screens to look things up and a partner to argue. The debate itself echoes an older one about what printing did to learning.

Jewish immigrants from central and eastern Europe settled in Chicago in large numbers in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They built synagogues, schools and study halls, first on the West Side and later on the North Side and in the northern suburbs. Many brought traditions of Talmud study from their home towns.

In 1922 the Hebrew Theological College was founded in Chicago to train rabbis and teachers. It later moved to Skokie. In 1960 a branch of the Telshe Yeshiva, whose home in Lithuania had been destroyed in the Holocaust, opened in Chicago. Today Talmud classes meet in Orthodox, Conservative and Reform synagogues and in community programs across the area.

Chicago also has a place in the history of religious conversation. At the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893, held with the World’s Columbian Exposition, Jewish speakers presented their tradition to a wide audience. Schools and study groups in the region continue to bring learners of many backgrounds to the same texts.

Law students learn to read cases, find the rule and test it against hard facts. Some law schools offer courses on Jewish law alongside Roman, Islamic and common law. Instructors note that the Talmud records not just rulings but whole arguments, including the losing side.

The opening Mishnah of Bava Metzia, a tractate whose name means the middle gate, is often used. Two people come to court holding a garment. Each says, I found it, or, it is all mine. The Mishnah rules that each swears an oath and they divide it. Later lines adjust the division when one claims only half.

Comparative law teachers ask how this rule weighs honesty, evidence and fairness when no one can prove the facts. They compare it with other systems’ rules for disputed property. Students discover that questions about the lost object, the worker’s wage and the stranger’s rights are asked across many legal traditions.