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?
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