Bringing the Talmud into the 20th Century - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > June 1990

Bringing the Talmud into the 20th Century

By Walter Reich

A hurtling satellite peering down from Europe’s night sky during the past millennium couldn’t have missed the blazing emblems of Christendom’s sustained disapproval of the Talmud; pyre after pyre of burning books, ordered by pope after pope, in town after town—Paris, Toulouse, Perpignan, Rome, Bologna, Ferrara, Mantua, Florence, Venice, Cremona. In the last such auto-da-fé, held in 1757 in the Polish town of Kamenets-Podolski, nearly a thousand copies of the offensive book, having been dragged through the streets, were thrown into a pit and burned by the hangman. Nor have modern attitudes, as reflected in our everyday language, been […]

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Footnotes

1.

The Talmud, The Steinsaltz Edition: Volume I Tractate Bava Metzia, Part I, commentary of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, translated and edited by Israel V. Berman (New York: Random House, 1990) 252 pp., $40.00; and The Talmud, The Steinsaltz Edition, A Reference Guide, by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (New York: Random House, 1990) 323 pp., $40.00