Der Talmudchud

A guide to the Talmud, the Internet's obsession with it, and the paradoxes of Jewish history

Rabbi Yirmeya raises a dilemma: If one leg of the chick was within fifty cubits of the dovecote, and one leg was beyond fifty cubits, what is the halakha? The Gemara comments: And it was for his question about this far-fetched scenario that they removed Rabbi Yirmeya from the study hall, as he was apparently wasting the Sages’ time. Bava Batra 23b

Talmudjude und Talmudchud

For most who come across it, the phenomenon of online Talmud-baiting is entirely devoid of context. I imagine it’s bewildering for the average person to be confronted with those cryptic lists of “quotes from the Jewish Talmud,” blurred from the quality loss of thousands of reuploads, especially as the mainstream conception of Judaism still seems to be like a kind of Christianity lite. Yet even those more acquainted with the religious contexts behind many such quotes are often unaware of their provenance; those actually familiar with the Talmud itself are usually oblivious to the history of the -baiting.

While many assume they’re just the recent concoctions of the terminally online, almost all of the quotes have been in circulation for at least a century. This can be seen by looking into the genealogy of any particular one—take the following:

The Akum (non-Jew) is like a dog. Yes, the scripture teaches to honor the the dog more than the non-Jew. Ereget Raschi Erod. 22 30

Most would be tempted to dismiss this as a simple fabrication, as the citation doesn’t appear to exist and certainly isn’t found in the Talmud. But in the earliest reference found on Google Books, in a German-language rebuttal pamphlet by the “Free Association for the Interests of Orthodox Judaism,” the quote actually reads “Exeget Raschi Exod. 22,30”—“x” in Fraktur font can look like an “r” to the unfamiliar. Still, the quote seems to be a vastly uncharitable reading of Rashi’s original exegesis on the phrase “ye shall cast it to the dogs” from Exodus 22:30.

From a 1936 edition of Der Stürmer

What you’ll find is that virtually all such quotes have their origins in late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany—the birthplace of anti-Semitism proper—which partly explains the peculiar transliterations of the source texts. (Kethuboth, Tospoth Jebamoth, etc.) From that heated farrago of pamphlets, polemics and counter-polemics, reproductions and translations, arrive the corruptions and misspellings that produce this confused, and confusing, modern inheritance. As Ben Zion Bosker’s “Talmudic Forgeries: A Case Study in Anti-Jewish Propaganda,” written at the start of WWII, put it,

It is not always easy to trace these quotations to their sources. The titles of the works cited are often so grossly misspelled that it is difficult to recognize them. Yalkut is cited as “Jektut;” Yad as “Jak;” Nedarim as “Nadarine.” Occasionally, the titles as cited appear altogether fictitious, such as “Gad. Shas.,” “Rabbi Ismael,” “Rabbi Chambar,” et al., “Tract Mechilla.” Frequently, the works quoted are well known but no volume, page, chapter or verse is indicated.

Most quotes originate more specifically from Der Talmudjude (1877), “The Talmud Jew,” by Dr. August Rohling, a wildly successful booklet for which there nevertheless doesn’t seem to be an accessible English translation. While Rohling’s manifold opponents would point out most of the work was itself plagiarized from Entdecktes Judenthum, “Judaism Discovered,” by the false convert Johannes Eisenmenger nearly two centuries before, it was Der Talmudjude that really enshrined the Talmud in the anti-Semitic arsenal in a way it hadn’t been since the Disputations and which, while in a different form, remains popular today.

One of the most common modern lists—recited by Nick Fuentes in his “we will make them die in a holy war” speech (~42:00+), e.g.—is the following:

You do in fact get fabrications in these things, albeit far more rarely than people assume. “Gad Shas 2:2,” for example, is a corrupted reference to “Jad. chas. 2, 2 von den Königen num. 2. 3,” that is, Yad HaChazakah, another name for Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah; Rohling’s wording actually translates to “One may abuse a woman in her state of unbelief (i.e., a non-Jewess).” The actual citation, as far as I can discern, says nothing of the sort, and he conveniently adds, “in some editions this is said to have been omitted.”

Elsewhere, the notorious “Libbre David 37”—to communicate anything to a Goy about our religious relations would be equal to the killing of all Jews…—is a corruption of the original German “Dibre David,” corresponding to דברי דוד or “words of David.” Many works by that name exist, but the quote has never actually been located in any of them by rabbis, philo-Semites, or anti-Semites alike, and its earliest appearance I could find is on the cover page of—but not actually mentioned inside—Esther: die semitische Unmoral im Kampfe wider Staat und Kirche, an anti-Semitic work of 1887; in preemptively dismissing any Jewish objections as necessarily deceptive, it does seem way too convenient. Along the same theme, “Szaaloth-Utszabot”—a Jew should and must make a false oath when the Goyim asks [sic] if our books contain anything against them—a likely Hungarian rendering of the Hebrew for “questions and answers,” is unverifiable.

An advertisement for Esther in the Illustrirte Wiener Volks-Zeitung chooses to include the catchy Motto. Even back in 1887, patently non-Talmudic works would be cited with Der Talmud sagt…

But apart from that, almost everything else has at least some basis in rabbinical writings and thus calls for some analysis. In the aforementioned speech, Fuentes speaks in familiar terms:

And then this is the best part because I know they’ll come in and clarify, a lot of them want to run interference, they say, “No, you don’t understand, that’s not what it actually means, you’re interpreting it wrong.” That’s what they always say, but this is the last one and it says this: “Jews may use lies to circumvent the gentiles.” So I don’t think you can take their word for it, really, it says so right here. That’s what is in their holy book.

The source, in Bava Kamma 113a, is Rabbi Yishmael’s belief that a Jewish judge should by default find a way to rule in favor of a Jew against a non-Jewish defendant. The passage is of course misconstrued to be a general ruling along the lines of “Libbre David,” and it leaves out Rabbi Akiva’s opinion given in the same paragraph that the Jewish judge should be impartial out of the concept of kiddush hashem, “sanctification of God’s name,” let alone the views of any religious authorities post-antiquity.

Regarding deception generally, the statement in Chullin 94a that “[i]t is prohibited to deceive people, even a gentile” has been regarded as conclusive in Jewish halakhah (Hilchot Deiot 2:6; Choshen Mishpat 228:6). As Protestant Orientalist and Rohling-detractor Hermann Strack was at pains to point out a century ago, there are in fact no jüdische Geheimgesetze—no secret Jewish laws—and virtually everything is now available online in English translation for all to scrutinize. Nothing holds den Talmudchud back from actually “reading the Talmud,” if that’s what he so desires.

Does the Talmud Even Matter?

The goal of this post is not to go through every quote in circulation; an LLM could probably do the job better at this point. But what would even be the purpose? At some point the question of applicability arises given the dubiousness of the underlying assumptions inherent in the Talmudchud narrative. Fuentes continues where we left off:

Now keep in mind, and I said this at the top of the speech, this is the weight of a 3,000 year tradition, for the people that are disproportionately represented in government, in media, in finance, in banking, in Hollywood. Do you think that’s a problem? Do you think it might be a problem that the people that are running the banks, that are making the movies your children watch, that are making the curriculum in college that the lawyers study, that the Justices on the Supreme Court study, that the politicians study, that the people in the State Department—do you think it’s a problem that they believe that all Christians must die?

I suppose once you snap out of the spell of his preternatural charisma the error seems obvious: most Jews worldwide and especially in America are if not totally secular then Reform, a denomination that explicitly teaches the Talmud is non-binding and whose members devote no study to it, and this becomes even more true the higher up the social ladder you look.

This was broadly the case back in Germany, too, where some irreligious Jews would even lend the anti-Semites the benefit of the doubt out of personal unfamiliarity:

Acculturated Jews knew more of the Talmud from Rohling’s reports than from any personal knowledge, and the Talmud Dispute offered them an alien and primitive image of themselves. The daughter of the renowned German-Jewish neurologist Moriz Benedikt recalls the despair of the prominent German and Austro-Hungarian Jews in her train compartment reading the dailies, embarrassed and disgusted by this book, if these were truly its contents. Benedikt is reported to have commented, “a professor of the University of Prague wouldn’t go and tell a lie like that in public.”¹

So many pivot to a more slippery argument: the Talmud, or “the weight of a 3,000 year tradition” to use Fuentes’ phrase borrowed from Israel Shahak,² still indirectly informs the behavior even of irreligious Jews who’ve never opened it in terms of their utter contempt for outsiders, even perhaps in terms of their social liberalism thanks in no small part to a certain Jewish TikToker’s “six genders of the Talmud” song.

But the social liberalism of most American Jews is eschewed by those who actually take their religion seriously, and a true contempt for outsiders (“they believe that all Christians must die!”) seems quite unlikely in light of an intermarriage rate approaching 75% for non-Orthodox. “Talmud quotes” are obviously irrelevant to any discussion of Jewish ethnic particularism or political behavior, and Shahak’s positions in Ch. 6 of Jewish History, Jewish Religion seem incredibly weak. It’s ultimately an argument that feels about as specious as the one made by certain reactionaries that liberal Christians or ex-Christians, many of whom also explicitly appeal to their own Scripture, are deeply influenced by the “weight of 2,000 years of Christian tradition” in their promotion of socially liberal causes. Perhaps other motivations are at work here, too, merely decorated by post hoc appeals to religion.

The Talmudic Dilemma

None of this is to argue it’d be pointless for someone to take a critical interest in Judaism, at least when properly fastened to reality. At that point it becomes more a matter of critiquing the religion insofar as its ancient roots run up against modern or non-Jewish sensibilities. And this of course happens all the time; the ancient writings of people who thought the earth was flat and slavery normal can’t be expected to align with modern ethics or beliefs. Attempts to “debunk” all the quotes as such inevitably become anachronistic and deceptive in a way common to religious apologetics, at times nearly as much as the “Talmud quote” lists themselves.

It’s easy to see where the latter side goes wrong. In the mind of the Talmudchud,

• any comment from really anywhere in the corpus of rabbinic literature is “Talmud,” a work that can be read in a matter of minutes

• any such “Talmud quote” is universally authoritative for and exclusively representative of the Jewish religion

• all this has deep implications for contemporary Jewish behavior, even among diaspora atheists with Jewish-sounding last names

People are right to object to this. One could easily point to the intentionally neglected quotes which reflect more egalitarian sentiment and demonstrate greater complexity of rabbinical opinion, for example:

• Beitzah 32b — only those who have “compassion for God’s creatures” are considered descendants of Abraham

• Sanhedrin 39b depicts God castigating the angels for celebrating the death of the Israelites’ Egyptian pursuers, which the Israelites themselves celebrate in the Torah

• Sanhedrin 37a — all humans were created from Adam and Eve “so that one person will not say to another: My father is greater than your father” and “every person is obligated to say: The world was created for me”

• Gittin 61a — non-Jews should be treated well and their poor allowed to take from Jewish charity

• Berakhot 19b, among many other places, cites the principle of human dignity which “overrides a prohibition in the Torah”

• (Yerushalmi) Peah 1:1 — non-Jews are rewarded for their righteousness

• Sanhedrin 105a — non-Jews who fear God “have a place in the world to come”

But to pass off a kind of counter-list like this as actually representative of Talmudic thought would be at least as misleading as a cherrypicked list of hostile quotes, as the overall sentiments captured in the Talmud are still in many ways suspicious of the outside world.³ The existence of actual disagreements between Sages also doesn’t mean the text is merely “a bunch of rabbis disagreeing with each other,” as some less religious Jews default to, or that passages genuinely difficult to modern ears can be summarily written off as arbitrary and having had no impact on historic Jewish beliefs; the Talmud might not be a coherent legal code like the Catechism per se, but it’s certainly at least akin to the writings of the early Church fathers, still hugely influential to Jewish practice. Granted, the Internet isn’t a medium conducive to nuance with this stuff, and the average Talmudchud is content regurgitating mistranslated quotes without stopping to make sure the source even exists. But the point should still be taken that any good faith inquiry into the subject leads one well outside the gates of the other narratives so often put forth.

Reviewing the most popular lists, objectionable Talmud quotes seem to fall into any of four camps:

1. unflattering characterizations of gentiles

2. discriminatory religious laws against gentiles

3. “absurd” or “blasphemous” passages

4. alleged insults against Christianity

I’ve addressed Christianity in the Talmud elsewhere. Other passages are occasionally cited for appearing morally or religiously questionable. A major objection in the Disputations was against depictions of God studying the Talmud or debating with the rabbis, which could plausibly be seen as just colorfully affirming the strength of God’s own laws and in any event seems to me hardly more blasphemous than what Paul writes in Galatians 1:8. The explosive claim that the Talmud encourages pedophilia is flatly incorrect, to be sure, but to my mind reflects another clash of ancient and modern sensibilities: the ancient world was much less sensitive to matters of child abuse than we are today, even the New Testament seems to say next to nothing on the matter and the contemporary pagan cultures need no elaboration.⁴ Undoubtedly the bulk of objections pertain to the first two camps: Judaism indeed clashes with the modern egalitarian ethic in certain ways that deserve a closer look, one which the rest of this essay will attempt to provide.

Jewish–Gentile Relations over Time

To some extent all Abrahamic religions discriminate against outsiders, and it can seem significant that Judaism is the only one to not condemn all non-members to eternal damnation or sadistic torture at the time of Judgment.⁵ But in a sense this really just reflects the national rather than credal nature of Judaism and by extension its greater exclusiveness, as national divisions are thought to persist even into the World to Come; one doesn’t have to be strictly Jewish to be right with God and thus an adherent to the broader faith in some sense. This is of course why, unlike Christianity or Islam, Jewish proselytism hasn’t historically existed, at least in the main, and why Judaism is usually an identity passed down ancestrally that still applies even to apostates.

The point is that the deepest root of the matter goes to the heart of the faith, not just the Talmud but the Torah as well. It can be fascinating to notice how often some traditional Christians lambaste what they theoretically hold to be God’s own commandments merely through the proxy of the Talmud, whether they even realize it or not. Fuentes for example frequently brings up⁶ how “the Talmud” allows Jews to lend on interest to non-Jews but not to fellow Jews, when in fact this just comes from passages like Deuteronomy 23:19 and Exodus 22:25. Even “Gad Shas 2:2” mentioned earlier may in fact be a mistaken reference to the controversial Biblical concept of the yefat toar, or woman captured in war, from Deuteronomy 21, commented upon by Maimonides in Melachim uMilchamot 8. Of course to most Christians the Old Covenant no longer applies, but it’s not a coincidence the culprit always seems to be “the Talmud” rather than “the Bible.”

The question of what it means to be the chosen people, closely related to the Jewish view of outsiders, is always up for negotiation, varying from more chauvinistic to the more palatable conception of chosenness as simply fulfilling some divine mission in the world like the special role of the Kohanim among Jews; Pirkei Avot (3:14) famously asserts all men are beloved by God, but Israel is especially beloved in the sense that they alone safeguard His teachings. Nevertheless something closer to the former conception was probably dominant throughout Jewish history, especially as the frequently-violent diasporic conditions have more naturally induced feelings of anxiety with respect to outsiders—the goyim, undeniably at times a pejorative akin to the Romani gadjo or the Armenian odar.

The Gentiles of Antiquity

To a large extent these attitudes depend on the non-Jewish environment, and in the pagan context in which the Talmud was composed they were predominantly suspicious. It’s not uncommon to find highly unflattering portrayals of gentiles in Jewish writings from the period:

you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds; they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart; they have become callous and have given themselves up to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of uncleanness.

Let the time that is past suffice for doing what the Gentiles like to do, living in licentiousness, passions, drunkenness, revels, carousing, and lawless idolatry. They are surprised that you do not now join them in the same wild profligacy, and they abuse you

Of course these are quotes from the Jewish writers of the New Testament (Ephesians 4:17–19; 1 Peter 4:3–4), as these kinds of negative generalities, in particular a disgust toward non-Jewish sexual habits, were common to both Jews proper and Jewish Christians; I defer to the paper “Gentiles as Impure Animals in the Writings of Early Christ Followers.”⁷ This is the context in which to interpret passages like Avodah Zarah 2:1, which instructs against keeping animals in “gentile” inns “because they are suspected of bestiality”; the Talmudchud reading—Gentiles (‘Goys’) prefer sex with cows—could use some improvement, to be sure, but isn’t actually way off the mark. Yevamot 63b discusses “the inhabitants of Barbarya and ... Martenai, who walk naked in the marketplace, as none is more despised and abominable before the Omnipresent.” Clearly sexuality was an important concern.

And it was a concern also present in the Hebrew Bible, as in Leviticus 18, or in Ezekiel 23 which portrays pagan nations as rapaciously sexual and bestial, providing the exact textual inspiration for multiple “controversial” Talmud quotes: Berachot 58a, Berachot 25b, Shabbat 150a, Yevamot 98a. One of the funniest Talmud passages, in Sanhedrin 64a, relates an anecdote of a Jew who attempted to insult a pagan idol by defecating before it, only to be praised by the priests for “this excellent form of worship,” such was their perversity. In turn, the pagans would call both Jews and early Christians “haters of mankind,”⁸ which from their perspective wasn’t totally unmerited. But the concerns were more than just about sex and impurity, centering prominently on their idol worship and, especially in the context of the disastrous Jewish-Roman wars, on basic physical safety: gentiles were “suspected of bloodshed,” and a Jew “should not bend down before” them “lest the gentile break his skull” (Avodah Zarah 25b).

The Talmud can be a very weird document for modern readers, not simply for its contents but for the ways of thinking of its authors: the sweeping generalities, wild exaggerations, strict textualism, at times quite questionable interpretations now crystallized as the sacrosanct “words of the Sages.” The notorious Soferim 15 refers to Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai’s statement, “kill the best of the gentiles,” sometimes with “in time of war” appended and apparently given in the context of a reading of Exodus (Mechilta Beshalach 2). The Talmud elsewhere records bar Yohai as a victim of Roman persecution, and the Jewish Encyclopedia at least refers to him as “preeminently the anti-Gentile teacher” as a result. His statement is an example of the most extreme attitudes rather than anything normative let alone binding, and is notably presented among other enigmatic exaggerations like “the best of physicians are destined for Hell,” “the most worthy of butchers is Amalek’s partner,” and “the most worthy of women indulges in witchcraft.” What exactly to make of statements like these is necessarily left up to the interpreter.

Legal Discrimination

The main problem here is that the statements given and the rulings made in this very specific setting were generalized with respect to “the gentiles,” leaving a complicated inheritance for future generations to work out as conditions evolved. A quick reading through the Mishnah shows just how context-specific it is: Avodah Zarah 1:5 forbids the selling of “itzterubalin, benot shuach, petotarot, frankincense, and a white rooster” to gentiles, as they’re used in their rituals; 3:8 discusses the problem of enjoying the shade of an asherah pole; etc. This is why it’s inane for people nowadays to take offense at quotes describing gentiles as, say, “suspected of bestiality”—these passages are more descriptive than pejorative, and for many centuries at this point have Jews recognized they no longer apply to their contemporary Christian and Muslim neighbors. At the very least, equal offense should be taken to such “real quotes from the Christian Bible” as “Gentiles are stupid, lustful, and greedy” (Epheser fol. IV. 17–19) or “Gentiles are drunken idolaters, never to be trusted” (I Petrus fol. IV. 3–4).

The discriminatory laws made within this context are harder to deal with. In his essay, “Jews, Gentiles, and the Modern Egalitarian Ethos,” David Berger offers some of the most striking examples:

These provisions include inter alia the exemption from returning money obtained through an error made by a gentile, the exemption from returning his or her lost object (and, according to the Rambam, even a prohibition against doing so), discrimination regarding liability for damage to property, the existence of a death penalty for killing a Jew but not for killing a gentile, the imposition of a death penalty for violation of any of the Noahide laws, and the injunction to avoid saving the life of a gentile even on a weekday. It is an understatement to assert that such laws violate the contemporary egalitarian ethic.

What’s the source of this inequality? On the topic of murder: per Sanhedrin 57a, although the theoretical death penalty would not be issued by the future Sanhedrin, murder of a gentile is nevertheless considered forbidden,⁹ and the page goes on to clarify one may not, e.g., push a gentile into a pit. Yet it then appends, “with regard to a gentile, and likewise with regard to Jewish shepherds of small livestock”—persons presumed to be criminal in another bizarre Talmudic generalization—“one may not raise them out of a pit,” i.e., may not save their life.

Partly, these kinds of rulings were a result of reciprocity: the contemporary non-Jews were generally not charitable with Jews, and so the rabbis gave the opposite the force of law. A number simply come from readings of the Bible, in which re’ehu—“your neighbor,” as in Leviticus 19:18 or even Exodus 21:35—meant strictly “Israelite.” As with the example of moneylending, the Bible does discriminate against nokhrim, transient foreigners bound by foreign legal codes, while being more favorable to Jews or gerim, non-Jewish residents bound by Israelite laws; when most Jews fled Israel, the conditions changed while the law remained binding, with nokhrim now interpreted to mean “gentiles” and gerim “converts.” Other apparently anti-gentile laws were merely attempts to preserve Jewish religious customs, reducing contact to limit the chances of intermarriage or meddling in rituals and kosher food preparation. Avodah Zarah (“foreign worship” but meaning something more like polytheism or idolatry) as a tractate is dedicated to limiting Jewish contact with or inadvertent support for the idolatry of the pagans; the first words of the book, e.g., forbid doing business with “gentiles” three days before their festivals so as not to indirectly sponsor them.

After Antiquity

Changing conditions continue to defy the intractability of the law, creating paradoxes in need of resolution. After antiquity, “the gentiles” were no longer the libertine pagans of Babylon. Jacob Katz’s Exclusiveness and Tolerance argues it was the changing economic situation which could no longer sustain limited contact that forced along corresponding changes in Jewish practice; by the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews simply couldn’t do things like forgo business before all the Christian holidays. Yet the theological justifications these changes demanded were always more difficult with Christians than with Muslims due to the greater resemblance of Christianity to avodah zarah in terms of concepts like the Trinity, the hypostatic union, icon veneration, the doctrine of the Eucharist, etc.—some of which also appear idolatrous to Muslims and even many Protestants. Christians may not have been libertine pagans but they were still often hostile and apparently in violation of the Noahide covenant.

According to Berger, the most radical theological approach to Jewish-Christian relations was that of Rabbi Menachem haMeiri shortly after the Disputation of Paris, who apparently held Christianity not to be avodah zarah at all. Europe was considered part of the “nations restricted by the ways of religion” (אוממות הגדורות בדרכי הדתות) who “believe in God’s existence, His unity, and power, although they misconceive some points according to our belief.”

It has been already stated that these things were said concerning periods when there existed nations of idolaters, and they were contaminated in their deeds and tainted in their dispositions ... but other nations, which are restricted by the ways of religion and which are free from such blemishes of character—on the contrary, they even punish such deeds—are, without doubt, exempt from this prohibition

Sometimes Rabbi Yohanan’s opinion in Chullin 13b that “[t]he status of gentiles outside of Eretz Yisrael is not that of idol worshippers” would be cited; other times it was principles like kiddush hashem that had been utilized since the Talmudic era, and occasionally the more egregious inequities would be suspended simply out of concern for provoking gentile antipathy. Most other approaches retained a belief in Christianity as idolatrous while still recognizing a distinction from the pagan nations and thus that certain discriminatory laws simply no longer apply.

Modern Judaism

Jewish history is a continuous process of religious renegotiation as a legalistic people adapts to changing circumstances. The opinions captured in the Talmud were in many ways premised on very particular ancient conditions of ethnic conflict, and the open-ended question of how to deal with that fact in modern times has formed the basis of Judaism’s reformism–fundamentalism split. It’s a dilemma strained further by the fact that the gentile societies into which modern Jews were introduced have demanded religious moderation ever since Napoleon gathered the Assembly of Notables—a body which resolved the dilemma by deceptively arguing inter alia that discriminatory laws against gentiles applied only to the seven Canaanite nations—and especially as egalitarian ethical standards have increasingly become the norm.

At the same time, the more chauvinistic view of Jewish chosenness has been carried further through and after the Middle Ages. It’s obviously wrong for trolls to mistranslate “goyim” as “cattle,” or to claim, as Fuentes often does, the Talmud asserts non-Jews are animals in human form. Frequently pointed to in this regard is Bava Metzia 114b from the above list—Gentiles (“Goys”) are not humans, they are beasts. The actual line is “[in Ezekiel 34:31] you are called ‘man’ [Adam], but gentiles are not called ‘man,’” and the full passage makes clear how narrow the exegetical context really is; opinions cited elsewhere, like Rabbi Meir’s in Sanhedrin 59a or Rabba’s in Gittin 47a, confirm that more generally the rabbis did consider gentiles to be fellow men, and so the paraphrase is misleading. Yet it would also be misleading to pretend this kind of sentiment has found no expression in historic or contemporary Jewish thought.

Take as just one illustration of this Corey Gil-Shuster’s amusing and fairly popular YouTube video in which he conducts a number of street interviews with religious Zionists and Haredim on the subject of the Talmud, a crumpled list of familiar “Talmud quotes” including “Ereget Raschi Erod” in hand. Eventually he meets a group of Hasidic Jews, insular enough to not even personally know any non-Jews, and the resulting discussion is quite candid:

It says “you are called human and the non-Jews are not called human.” That is what is written, not called human. We don’t call them human. … Human is in the image of God. Human is something that is different from animals. If a person acts like an animal, so he is like an animal. Each person needs to control himself. The Jews control themselves.

The interpretation they give voice to, then, more resembles the other wording of Bava Metzia 114b, at least in a spiritual sense. Even if it’s not the only, the best, or the most popular reading, it nevertheless does exist in the diversity of Jewish opinions; what some of the quotes then do is merely present the more radical understanding of the text as its plain meaning, often quoting an author’s paraphrase as original text. Still, the men don’t recognize the other quotes, going on to affirm things like killing or stealing from gentiles being unequivocally forbidden contra the usual anti-Talmudic narrative—in fact, Tosefta Bava Kamma 10:15 argues stealing from gentiles is even worse due to kiddush hashem.

The loftier conception of chosenness, conceiving of the Jews not as constitutionally superior but as a vessel to spread ethical monotheism, was of course also further developed in modernity, being taken up by the Reform movement in Germany as it strove to rid Judaism of its national artifacts and transform it into something akin to a private Protestant faith. This too was in many ways a reaction to the non-Jewish environment, for the first time electing assimilation rather than insularity as a response to the growing pressures of nationalism. I’ve written about some of the more extreme expressions of this tendency as well as Jewish assimilationism more broadly in my essays on Israel Zangwill, Franz Boas, and Karl Marx.

Barring momentary exceptions, it was never the mainstream Reform position to fully negate historical Judaism and, say, advocate Jewish proselytism as Zangwill and others did. But the current official stance isn’t far off: the conversion of non-Jewish spouses is encouraged to help ward off the demographic problems they, much like their mainline Christian brethren, are hopelessly afflicted with. The mainlines, who used to dominate the conversation of American Christianity, began their decline in the 1960s and now total a mere quarter of the American Protestant population with Evangelicals assuming center stage. Ineluctably this is the fate of American Judaism, too, as the less religious or ethnocentric elements intermarry and ultimately defect—leaving behind a more committed core—and as the more liberal or assimilated remain below replacement level. The question of how it will continue to adapt to changing conditions of course remains, but the future of Judaism in both Israel and the diaspora looks in many ways to be a return to the past.

Further Reading

• Gil Student’s page presents a more standard, issue-by-issue rebuttal, useful for its information and perspective

Each of the following is non- or counter-apologetic in some way, the first of course by an eminent (late) Jewish scholar, and the rest by religious Jews of various persuasions.

• Jacob Katz’s Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times

• Rabbi Reuven Hammer’s “The Status of Non-Jews in Jewish Law and Lore Today”

• David Berger’s “Jews, Gentiles, and the Modern Egalitarian Ethos: Some Tentative Thoughts”

• Dr. Menachem Kellner’s “Orthodoxy and ‘The Gentile Problem’”

• Rabbi David bar Hayim’s “The Distinction between Jews and Gentiles in Torah”¹⁰

1. From “Blood Lies: The Truth about Modern Ritual Murder Accusations and Defenses” in Spector’s Violent Sensations.

2. To distill Shahak's thesis in a sentence: “From the ethical point of view, classical [post-Second Temple] Judaism represents a process of degeneration, which is still going on; and this degeneration into a tribal collection of empty rituals and magic superstitions has very important social and political consequences.”

3. Sanhedrin 37a goes on to list another reason all humans descend from one couple: to show that taking one Jewish life is akin to taking an entire world, a nonsensical but telling interpolation into the original, more popular phrase preserved in certain manuscripts as well as the Yerushalmi (4:5) and even the Qur'an (5:32) about taking one human life.

4. Even if it's not technically permissive of the act, no one with modern sensibilities would analogize child abuse to “poking a finger into the eye” as in Ketubot 11b. Similarly Sanhedrin 54b offers a strict textualist interpretation of the Biblical injunction “man shall not lie with man,” noting it technically only applies to adult men. It’s not that the unquestionably worse act involving a boy nine years or younger is permitted, and Maimonides appends “the court [is] to subject the adult to stripes for rebellious conduct,” but the ancient rabbis here just don’t appear concerned with what today is an obvious elephant in the room, leaving the door wide open for exploitation.

5. I suppose “Simeon Haddarsen, fol. 56-D”—when the Messiah comes every Jew will have 2800 slaves—is a reference to the Yalkut Shimoni of Shimoni HaDarshan, but the figure of “slaves” is calculated in Shabbat 32b by Reish Lakish using a strict textualism on Zechariah 8:23. The Bible depicts a kind of willing servitude in the Messianic era, which in any event sounds far more pleasant than fire and brimstone or the scorpions of Revelation.

6. From one clip: “You know Jews are not allowed to charge other Jews interest, but they sure charge us interest. Is that not a feature of their beliefs? Is that not a function of their ancestral enmity against non-Jews? Think about that. The Talmud says that Jews are not permitted to charge other Jews interest, but they are permitted to charge gentiles interest. Our society is run on debt. Our society is a debt-based society, that’s what everything is based on, and it didn’t use to be like that but it is now. And can you say that that is not a product of the fact that the people running the lending institutions are Jewish?”

7. It’s interesting to note that many English Bible translations render the word for gentile—the Greek equivalent of “goy,” nation or people—as “pagan” or the like, recognizing the importance of the context for modern readings, similar to how many Talmudic redactions substitute in the word akum, the Hebrew acronym for a “worshiper of stars and planets.”

8. E.g., Tacitus’s Annals describes Christians being persecuted on account of their odium humani generis, or (probably) “hatred of the human race.” Of course Christians like Jews were also persecuted on account of rumors of ritual infanticide and, interestingly, their own forms of sexual perversity; see my essay on the origin of the blood libel.

9. Hammer explains: “a Jew is forbidden to kill a non-Jew just as he/she is forbidden to kill a fellow Jew. . . . [T]hey ‘cannot be prosecuted by law, however from a religious point of view, [they] are just as condemnable as those who can be prosecuted by law.’ It cannot be denied, however, that exempting the murder of a Gentile by a Jew from human justice is a serious matter. Obviously this was theoretical at the time it was promulgated since Jewish courts could not then decree capital punishment, but the assumption would have been that that would be the case once Jewish authority would be restored in the future.”

10. I have been told as a disclaimer that Rabbi bar Hayim is a pretty fringe figure. Nevertheless, his is a translated essay published in a Hebrew journal in 1989 that takes a counter-apologetic stance from a traditionalist perspective.