(Reniew) Talmud on Trial: Interfaith Dialogue in the 13th Century

June 9, 2013
By Michael Schulson

The Trial of the Talmud: Paris, 1240
by John Friedman, Jean Connell Hoff (Translators)
PIMS , 2012

In 1240, King Louis IX of France took the unusual step of holding a trial for the Talmud. Books rarely receive judicial proceedings, but Pope Gregory IX was urging European leaders to take action against the big book of law and lore that is both central to rabbinic Judaism and, according to Gregory, potentially offensive to all of Christendom.

A group of French rabbis appeared in the book’s defense. The prosecutor, Nicholas Donin, who’d converted from Judaism to Christianity, had traveled to Rome in order to convince the Pope of the Talmud’s danger, with motives that remain unclear. Christian university scholars made up the jury, and many Parisian luminaries attended the proceedings—the king’s mother and an archbishop among them.

You already know the outcome: the Jews lost. French officials collected and burned 20 cartloads of Jewish books, each volume of which had been copied by hand in a precise, painstaking process. In a moderating twist, a group of Jewish leaders appealed their case to a new pope, who decided that, in the future, seized Talmuds should be censored, not burned. With time, the episode was relegated to an obscure corner of the long, tangled history of Jewish-Christian relations.

Two recent developments, though, give the trial of 1240 some contemporary relevance. The first of these is the election of a new pope, and the accompanying swirl of questions about how, exactly, Francis will deal with all those non-Catholics who express hurt, wariness, or outright contempt for the Holy See. Although he stopped short of indicting the Talmud, Benedict was not known for the success of his interfaith dialogue. As the Church gears up for another round of relations with a big, pluralistic world, it’s useful to revisit some past episodes of Church-and-outsider interactions.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/atheologies/7012/talmud_on_trial__interfaith_dialogue_in_the_13th_century/