During the medieval period, the Church sometimes held formal debates with Jews, hosted by universities. One of the recurring topics was whether the Talmud should be allowed in a Christian society. Debate leaders on the Christian side were often converted Jews who had become Franciscan or Dominican friars. At the conclusion of the Disputations of Paris (1242) and Tortosa (1415), the Talmud was banned and publicly burned. At the Disputation of Barcelona (1263), Rabbi Nachmanides was expelled from Aragon and the Talmud officially censored.
But in each case, the effect was damaging but not lasting. In 1416, for example, the King of Aragon cancelled decrees against the Talmud and specifically protected the Jews. Obviously, it’s a bad situation to be dependent on a change of personnel. Just to put in a plug for our American system, one reason that Jews have flourished here is our commitment to rule of law, and for the laws to be fair to all. This notion hadn’t developed yet in medieval France or Aragon. We know what happened in the next generation of rulers in Aragon: the Inquisition and expulsion.
Meanwhile, in the city of Trent, in what’s now northern Italy, a two year old boy disappeared on March 23, 1475. The city was part of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by the Hapsburg family of Austria. The boy’s father reported him missing and, at the same time, said that he suspected the Jews had taken the child. It was Good Friday, a time when feeling against Jews ran high, and the father suspected that the child’s blood had been used in making matzoh for Passover. This was the rumor that had been circulating for several centuries, never quite substantiated (since it was far from true).
The Jewish community of Trent pitched in on the city-wide search for the boy, worried that they were being framed. Then, on Easter morning, the cook in a wealthy Jewish household found the child’s body in a ditch when he went out to get water. The Jews reported their find to the Podesta (the elected ruler of a medieval Italian city), but of course the ruling Christians took the body’s location, near a Jew’s house, to mean that the Jews were guilty. Most of the Jews were arrested, tortured, and questioned. Sixteen men were executed by burning at the stake, and the others were expelled. A Papal investigation and proclamation reasserted general protection for Jews, but in nearby cities, there had already been pogroms against them.
The child, Simon, was canonized and in 1515 the city began building the Palazzo Salvadori on the ruins of the synagogue. The Palazzo includes a stone bas-relief showing the child being stabbed to death over a basin. Apparently, QAnon rumors in 2022 picked up on the image as evidence that the blood libel is true.
With the blood libel apparently substantiated through trial evidence and publicized through the German-speaking Hapsburg territories, the stage was set for increased Northern European persecution of Jews. Just as past waves of persecution had often been led by converted-Christian Jews, a converted-Christian Jewish man took the lead in the early 16th century.
Johannes Pfefferkorn was born in Nuremberg, trained as a kosher butcher. In 1505, now living in Cologne, he became a Christian and was hired as an administrative assistant at the Dominican Friary. There, he began to write very short books against Jews, demanding that they and their books should be legally suppressed. Pfefferkorn’s first book was Der Judenspiegel (“Mirror of the Jews,” I think), printed in 1507. He attacked Judaism, but as a kosher butcher, he knew the blood libel wasn’t true. Jews have strong prohibitions against eating or even touching blood.
Pfefferkorn’s angle was that Jews should be converted to Christianity by force, and for their own good. The obstacles, he said, were usury and the Talmud. As a side note, the idea of money-lending as a sin was soon (1515) to expire, thanks to a Christian man who was becoming very wealthy lending money to Emperor Maximilian. Perhaps he, too, supported blocking Jews from money-lending so that he would have less competition. Maximilian had already expelled Jews from his lands in Austria.
In 1509, influenced by Pfefferkorn’s books, Emperor Maximilian ordered all Jewish books to be collected and delivered to Pfefferkorn so that he could burn them. The orders were carried out in Frankfurt, Mainz, and other cities. But the Jews appealed to the Archbishop of Mainz to hold an evidentiary hearing. For a year, he sought informed opinions from scholars at German universities and others—-the Inquisitor of Cologne, a rabbi-turned-priest, and most significantly, an independent Greek and Hebrew scholar named Johannes Reuchlin.
Reuchlin emerged as the defender of the Jews at this time. He had begun life as a typical Latin-learning student in Germany, but when he was assigned as companion to a German prince heading to study in Paris, he joined the growing ranks of Greek scholars. Greek was a brand new subject of study in Paris, following on the influx of Greek teachers coming as refugees from captured Constantinople. Traveling with another German prince to Italy, he made friends with the Pope’s secretary in Rome and later came back to study Hebrew with one of Rome’s great Rabbinic scholars. He knew Pico della Mirandola, a nobleman and scholar who introduced Hebrew Kabbalah study to the Christian world. In 1506, Reuchlin wrote a Latin-Hebrew dictionary and grammar.
Reuchlin gave his opinion to the Archbishop that apart from two short minor works, the Talmud and other books of the Jews were too important and valuable to suppress. He even proposed that German universities should create posts for professors of Hebrew and ask the Jews for library suggestions. His opinion caused the Emperor to hesitate to continue condemning Jewish books.
Pfefferkorn wrote a pamphlet that alleged Reuchlin had been bribed by the Jews. Reuchlin replied with his own pamphlet, defending himself and attacking Pfefferkorn. But their war escalated to include supporters on each side. Theologians at the University of Cologne got the Inquisitor to condemn Reuchlin’s pamphlet. In 1513, Reuchlin was called in for a trial before the Inquisitor at Cologne, and the case eventually was appealed to Rome. Other German scholars defended Reuchlin. Martin Luther rescued Reuchlin by posting his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, so that Reuchlin looked like a traditionalist by comparison. Now in old age, he achieved his goal of establishing Hebrew studies at German universities.
Meanwhile in Venice in the same year of 1517, a young German printer published the first complete Rabbinical Bible. This massive work included not just the Hebrew text, but also an Aramaic translation (the Targum) and commentaries. The printer, Daniel Bomberg, was not himself a Jew, but a converted Jew got him interested in Hebrew books and served as editor. And in 1520, the first complete printed copies of the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds were also printed, in Venice. For the Bible and the Talmud, he obtained the permission of Pope Leo X.
Bomberg’s Talmud and Hebrew Bible set the standards for later publications. He included the chapter and verse numbers established by the Latin Vulgate Bible right on the page with the Hebrew text, and that became standard. His Talmuds became the standard for page layouts, including that their page numbers are still used for reference.
But the war over the Talmud wasn’t going to be settled so easily. Even within the printer’s lifetime, the battle began again. Pope Paul III proposed to censor the Talmud in 1548, but Daniel Bomberg successfully argued back that old manuscripts should not be altered. After his death, by 1553, the Talmud was again censored and burned in some parts of Italy.
The period when the Babylonian Talmud was being written isn’t in my proper area of study, but I have some personal opinions about why some parts of it are stridently anti-Jesus. Its two parts, the Mishna and Gemara, seem to have been compiled between the destruction of the Second Temple and the Islamic conquest of Iraq. During those same years, the Christian church was separating from its Jewish root. I think that both Jewish and Christian writings from this time should be seen as similar to what people say during a divorce, when anger is running highest.
The initial point of departure seems to have been during the Jewish uprising that made Rome finally ban Jews from the land. During this war, the leading rabbis declared the rebellion’s leader to be the Messiah. Although the Temple had been destroyed in 70 AD, Jewish believers in Jesus were still integrated with other Jews throughout the land. They had been part of the rebellion in many places, but they withdrew from it in protest of the new Messianic pronouncement. The rebellion failed and the Roman executed its leaders in grisly ways; many of these leaders were rabbis. The two movements, traditional Jews and Jesus-believing Jews, now separated from each other socially with mutual sense of betrayal.
So after 120 AD, we see early Christian writings that are stridently opposed to rabbinical teaching. Some Christian anti-Semites go back to these early writings to support claims that Jews are unacceptably bad. But we see the other side of the “divorce” in Jewish writing of the same time. For centuries, the two sides badmouthed each other, I supposed until the rise of Islam gave them other things to think about. My personal opinion is that the claims on both sides should be viewed with the same skepticism that we should give to the shrillest accusations between a divorcing couple in a custody fight.