The Sick Mind & Degenerate Mentality of Eternalspirit-aka-Positive Forward

The rise of modern anti-Semitism gave fresh impetus to the attacks against the Talmud. The father of the modern calumnies upon the Talmud was the German polemicist, John Andreas Eisenmenger (1654–1704). Eisenmenger offered to suppress his work, Entdecktes Judentum (Jewry Unmasked), for a consideration of 30,000 florins, but the Jews refused to be blackmailed into paying this sum. The book has been described as "a collection of scandals" by the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliographie, an official encyclopaedia of German bibliography published by the German Imperial Academy of Science in 1876. "Some passages," the appraisal continues, "are misinterpreted; some distorted; others are insinuations based on one-sided inferences."2
The most spectacular campaign against the Talmud was led by August Rohling (1839–1931), a professor of Hebrew Antiquities at the University of Prague. His Der Talmudjude (The Talmud Jew) went through 17 editions, reaching a circulation of 200,000 copies in Austria alone. Rohling repeatedly prefaced his slanderous material with the offer of 1,000 Taler "if Judah
managed to get a verdict from the German Association of Orientalists that the quotations were fictitious and untrue." The challenge was taken up by Joseph S. Bloch, Rabbi at Florisdorf and later a member of the Austrian Parliament, who offered 3,000 Taler if Rohling could prove that he was able to read a single page of the Talmud chosen at random by Rohling himself. Accusing Rohling of ignorance and perjury, Bloch dared him to bring a libel suit. Because of his professional standing, Rohling could not evade the issue and finally charged Bloch with libel before a Vienna magistrate.
The court was anxious to make a thorough study of the subject and requested the Rector of the University of Vienna, Hofrat Zscholk, and the German Association of Orientalists, to appoint two experts. It conceded to Rohling's request that
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both these experts be "full-blooded" Christians. Professor Theodor Noeldeke of the University of Strassburg and Professor August Wuensche of Dresden, were selected. From time to time additional experts were called in. After two and a half years, the report was ready. The trial was to start November 18, 1885, but before the hearings began, Rohling, afraid of an open exposure, withdrew all his charges. The court sentenced him to pay the cost of the trial and, disgraced, he was retired from his university post. The entire story of this dramatic encounter is told by Rabbi Bloch in his Israel and the Nations.
Another such Talmud "authority" was Aaron Briman, alias Dr. Justus. He was born a Jew and had aspirations for a career as a Jewish scholar. But when he lost face with the Jewish community for deserting his wife and children, he became a Protestant. Subsequently, he became a Catholic and then a Protestant again, and finally tried to return to Judaism. Toward the end of his career he once again joined the Catholic Church. His principal work, published anonymously, was Der Judenspiegel (The Mirror of the Jew), a compilation of a hundred laws taken from the Shulhan Aruk and purporting to show the Jewish animosity toward Christians. In a book about the Cabbala, which Briman subsequently wrote under his true name, he said that the whole anti-Semitic literature, including the Judenspiegel (his own work!) had been written by stupid and ignorant men. In 1885 he was sentenced by a Vienna court to a long term in prison and expulsion from Austria for forgery of documents. Professor Franz Delitzsch, the famous Protestant theologian, pronounced the Judenspiegel "a concoction of damnable lies". Following his expulsion Briman took up medical studies in Paris. These same forgeries of Justus-Briman were later published by another adventurer, Jacob Ecker, who offered them as his own work under the title The Hundred Laws of the Jewish Catechism.
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Czarist Russia made its contribution to this gallery of literary swindlers in the person of the notorious Justin Pranaitis, a Catholic clergyman. His monograph, The Christian in the Jewish Talmud, was based on the works of Eisenmenger and Rohling. To create the impression of authenticity he cites many passages in the original Hebrew and Aramaic, but they are all lifted from Eisenmenger, errors and misprints included. By identifying as references to Christians and Christianity such epithets in the Talmud as am ha-aretz (literally, a peasant, but more generally, an illiterate person), akum (pagan or idol worshipper), apikoros (epicurean but applied to heretics generally) and kuthim (the Samaritans), he "proves" widespread prejudice on the part of the Talmud toward Christianity.
In spite of his office as a Catholic clergyman, Pranaitis became involved in the course of a checkered career in a series of financial scandals. A picture in a frame which he wanted gilded at the workshop of a certain Avanzo in Petersburg was accidentally damaged; whereupon he tried to extort 3,000 rubles from the owner of the shop on the alleged ground that the picture had been painted by the 17th century artist, Murillo, and that it was part of the collection of Cardinal Gintovt. Both allegations were later proved false. On another occasion he was charged by the board of a local Catholic welfare society in his home parish at Tashkent with misappropriating the sum of 1,500 rubles.
It was in 1912 during the trial of Beiliss on the ritual murder libel that Pranaitis drew world notoriety upon himself by offering his services as an expert for the prosecution. When confronted by the bulls of Popes Innocent IV and Clement XIV which denounced ritual murder charges against Jews as libels and slander and which called upon Christians to desist from the staging of ritual murder trials, Pranaitis denied the genuineness of the documents. Cardinal Merry del Val, the Papal Secretary of State, examined the originals at the Vatican and certified that they were genuine. Beiliss
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was, of course, acquitted, but the prosecution remunerated the star "expert" with 500 rubles.
Pranaitis died on January 29, 1917. It took more than a month for the Czarist government to issue the permit for the removal of his body from Petersburg to Tashkent. Objections had to be overcome of local officials in Tashkent who were anxious to avoid a public demonstration at his funeral and urged an inconspicuous burial in Petersburg.3
Nazi Germany produced a flood of new material vilifying the Talmud. With the pretense of scholarly objectivity which characterized the technique of all Hitler's professors, they produced impressive volumes, but all serving the cause of their master's big lie. Walter Forstat, one of the Nazi "experts" on the Talmud, unblushingly admits in the introduction to his Die Grundlagen des Talmud (The Basic Principles of the Talmud, Breslau, 1935), that in writing his book he had
really forged a political weapon. "In issuing this work," he writes, "our purpose is purely political … As a political tract it is necessarily one-sided. It therefore deals with Talmudic law only where it may prove helpful in illuminating the attitude of Germany to Jewry."
These diatribes against Talmudic literature produced a reaction, and some of the noblest works in appreciation of the Talmud were written by non-Jews. Johann von Reuchlin and his circle of Christian Hebraists carried on a staunch campaign in the sixteenth century in defense of Hebrew books. The libels of August Rohling were answered by the famous Protestant theologian, Franz Delitzsch, in his work Was D. Aug. Rohling beschworen hat and beschwoeren will (What D. Aug. Rohling Has Sworn to and Is Prepared to Swear to, Leipzig, 1883). Among the more recent statements in vindication of the Talmud is the very lucid study by Rev. A. H. Dirksen, "The Talmud and Anti-Semitism", in the January 1939 issue of the Ecclesiastical Review, a publication of the Catholic University of America, and the pamphlet, A Fact About the Jews, written by the famous Catholic
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scholar, Joseph N. Moody, and distributed by the Paulist Fathers. A more elaborate study of the Talmud was written by the Polish Catholic scholar, Thadeus Zaderecki. He began his researches in the Talmud under the inspiration of anti-Semitic libels, but what he learned made him into an admirer of this great literature. His work The Talmud in the Crucible of the Centuries is a brilliant appreciation of the moral values of Talmudic literature and a refutation of the libels against it, especially those of Rohling and Pranaitis.4
Talmudic literature went through a long and varied development. The earliest layer of the Talmud is the Mishnah, a product of Palestinian scholarship and written in a clear, lucid Hebrew. The later expository supplement, known as the Gemara, which elucidates the Mishnahic text, was developed during the third, fourth and fifth centuries, when the center of Jewish population was shifting from Palestine to Babylonia. Paralleling the Palestinian Gemara there also arose a Babylonian Gemara, produced by the newer academies of Babylonia. Both Gemaras were written in the Aramaic vernaculars then current in Babylonia and Palestine.
The Talmud has survived in both traditions, the Babylonian and the Palestinian. In their essential procedures and in their underlying doctrines the two Talmuds are similar. But there are some significant differences between them, reflecting in many instances the differing conditions under which the two communities carried on their work. Thus the Palestinians felt themselves in their own country and they regarded the Roman authorities as exercising their power without moral sanction. They therefore ruled the publicans who, as tax collectors, had collaborated with the enemy, as reprobates, and they refused to extend any credence to their testimony in a court of law. The Babylonians, on the other hand, demanded scrupulous adherence to the law of the land, and the tax collector was for them only a civil servant performing his duty, who was as honorable as any other man.