The Mystery of the Toulouse Talmud Burning
Who Owned the Copies of the Talmud that Bernard Gui Burnt?
Between the 13th and 18th centuries, on several occasions, copies of the Talmud were publicly burnt. The last (excluding the Nazi burnings of Jewish books) was in Poland in 1757. The first and best known occasion was in Paris in 1242 after Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, sent a series of charges to the Pope, telling him that the Talmud contradicted the Bible, and blasphemed against God, Jesus and Mary.
Responding to Nicholas Donin’s accusations, the Pope decreed that all copies of the Talmud were to be burnt. The rulers of England, Portugal and Spain ignored him. The King of France offered the leader of French Jewry, Rabbi Yehiel of Paris, an opportunity to defend the Talmud in a public debate with Nicholas Donin. The rabbi did his best but the debate took place in front of a hostile crowd, the odds were stacked against him and the result was a foregone conclusion. The Talmud was condemned and in June 1242, 24 wagonloads of the Talmud were publicly burnt in Paris.
24 wagonloads of books is quite a quantity. This was in the days before printing, when all writing was done by hand. The Talmud, containing 1.8 million words spread across 37 volumes took a long time to write and consequently hand written copies would have been very expensive to buy. Very few people owned a set of the Talmud, most Jewish communities counted themselves lucky if there was even one complete edition in the town. Unable to buy copies, scholars would learn the Talmud by heart, occasionally borrowing a volume from a colleague, or lending one out if they were lucky enough to own a copy. Copies of the Talmud were few and far between.
Of course, it is more than likely that the 24 wagonloads did not just contain copies of the Talmud. The manuscripts were seized by officers of the King, entering Jewish homes and synagogues and wrenching them from shelves or even from the hands of their owners. It is extremely unlikely that the officers could tell the difference between one Hebrew book and another; they may not even have been able to read French, let alone Hebrew. They probably grabbed Hebrew Bibles, prayer books and legal texts along with the copies of the Talmud they had been ordered to confiscate. Nevertheless, the fact that no complete manuscript of the Talmud exists today that was written before 1242, suggests that none survived the confiscations or the subsequent burning in Paris.
And yet, this raises a question. For there were further decrees issued against the Talmud in France, on at least five occasions before the end of the 13th century. And in 1319 a public burning of the Talmud was held in Toulouse. But if all, or at least the overwhelming majority, of the Talmuds that Jews owned were burnt in 1242, and, since it took a scribe an extremely long time to write a replacement copy, where did the copies come from that were seized in 1247 and 1248? Why did the Kings of France issue further decrees against the Talmud in 1284, 1290 and 1299? And whose copies were burnt in Toulouse in 1319?
In 1306, King Philip IV of France expelled the Jews from his land. They were not allowed back until 1315. It was probably an economic ruse; the King ‘owned’ the Jews and if a Jewish money lender or financier was no longer in the country and therefore unable to collect money owed to him, the King could seize the debt for himself. In any event, the expulsion of 1306 meant that there were no Jews in the country in 1310 when the head of the Inquisition in Toulouse, a Dominican Friar named Bernard Gui, ordered the confiscation of all Jewish books in his region, especially the Talmud. His was just one of the vendettas being conducted that year against Jewish books; a month earlier three wagonloads of Jewish texts of all kinds had been burnt in Paris. There were no Jews in the country yet there still seem to have been plenty of Jewish books.
It has been suggested that after the King expelled the Jews, their books were looted or confiscated along with the rest of their property, and that they had been mouldering ever since, unused and unread, in the homes of the nobility and in monasteries.
It is not a particularly obvious suggestion. After all why would you keep a manuscript you didn’t understand, emanating from a religion you regarded as heretical, and only give it up when an order came from the Inquisition to do so? The parchment or vellum on which manuscripts were written was not cheap and it was recyclable; the writing could be scratched or washed off and the parchment reused. Keeping a Hebrew book with no intention of reading or reusing it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Unless you were keeping it as a trophy, or for some other purpose.
As an Inquisitor, Bernard Gui’s principal responsibility was to prevent the spread of heresy, particularly by keeping a careful watch on Jews who had converted to Christianity but who were suspected of being insincere in their conversion. Conversion to Christianity was the only way for a Jew to avoid persecution and many converts did so for convenience, not because they had sincerely changed their religious beliefs. The Inquisition knew this, and pursued lapsed or insincere converts relentlessly.
Yet, although detailed records have been preserved of the cases heard by Bernard Gui’s tribunal, only two concern Jews who converted to Christianity. Both were heard in 1317. One concerned a man who regretted his decision to convert; he declared that he had decided he wanted to live and died as a Jew. He must have died before the Inquisition could get their hands on him because Bernard Gui, pretty pointlessly, ordered that his body be exhumed and burned.
Bernard Gui’s second victim was less fortunate. He was a young man who had converted and lived as a Christian for three years before changing his mind. He fled to Aragon where he resumed his life as a Jew. The Inquisition caught up with him in Aragon and sent him back to Toulouse where Gui sentenced him to life imprisonment.
Bernard Gui was a prolific writer and an important figure in the history of the medieval church. Since he is only known to have conducted two prosecutions of lapsed converts himself, his personal interests must have lain elsewhere. The evidence suggests that he was less interested in prosecuting lapsed converts than he was in prosecuting Jewish books. Even though there were no Jews in France.
This brings us back to our question. If there were no Jews in France and if it made little sense for the monasteries and nobility to hang on to looted Jewish books, where did the Talmud manuscripts come from that were burnt in Toulouse in 1319? They were burnt with great relish. Two wagons full of manuscripts were rolled through the streets of Toulouse, preceded by criers reciting all the blasphemies allegedly contained within them, accompanied by a procession of royal officials. It was a big event, the whole town turned out to watch.
By then Jews had been allowed back into France but they had been expressly forbidden, in a decree issued by the new King, Louis X, to own copies of the Talmud. So the chances are that the copies of the Talmud that Bernard Gui burnt in 1319 had not been Jewish owned and the question remains, where did they come from?
Perhaps to answer this we need to return to the original complaint that Nicholas Donin sent to the Pope before the Paris burning. His implication was that the Talmud undermined Christianity by contradicting the Bible and denying the divinity of Jesus. Is it possible that the reason that people like Bernard Gui were so keen to destroy the Talmud is that they feared what it might do to the faith of Christians who read it? Perhaps the copies of the Talmud and other Jewish books that had been confiscated after the Jews were expelled were not lying unused and unread in the monasteries. Perhaps the monks were in fact reading them, or were suspected of doing so. Many monks were educated, some could read and understand Hebrew.
Perhaps Bernard Gui’s opposition to the Talmud was not because he wanted to destroy all vestiges of Jewish belief. Perhaps his fear was that the monks might be reading it, and in doing so might come to doubt their Christian faith. We will never know the answer. But it is a possibility.