Camp Gagnon - How The Talmud Changed The World (And Why It Still Matters)

Episode Date: August 3, 2025

What is the Talmud, and why is it so important in Judaism? Today, we’ll look at this historical book and see why it’s a critical part of Judaism. We’ll talk about the creation of the Talmud, what is written in the Talmud, the difference between the Talmud and the Torah, and other interesting topics… WELCOME TO Religion CAMP! 🏕️✝️☪️✡️🕉️☦️ Religion Camp Merch: https://religion-camp.com🏕️ Get Today In History Email Here (Free): https://camp.beehiiv.com/🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets Here: https://markgagnonlive.comTimestamps:0:00 Intro0:53 What Is The Talmud Book?6:24 The Beginning 8:42 Creation of The Mishna 11:50 Roman Empire, Declining Jewish Population, and Talmud Yerushalmi12:16 Talmud Bavli Aka Babylonian Talmud14:45 The Gemara19:09 Nicholas Donin Gets Shun, Seeking Revenge23:25 Trial of Talmud in France27:20 Yeshu Being Punished in The Afterlife31:03 Talmud Gets Condemned32:50 Trial of Talmud in Barcelona35:00 Nazi's Target Jews Through Talmud36:30 Conclusion

Today, we are diving into one of the most contested topics of religion ever. It is a book known as the Talmud. People call it Satanic, anti-Christian. It's not just one book. It's filled with thousands of pages spread across multiple volumes, and every single page is packed with arguments from all sorts of different timelines. And you might be looking at more than a hundred different works composed by hundreds of different authors over a period of over 1,800 years.

Reading the Talmud can feel chaotic because it's trying to capture the back and force real-time academic debates. It's full of strange terms that require cultural context and deep references to other texts and arguments that bounce around in different directions. Over centuries, Jewish scholars wrote hundreds of commentaries to explain what is going on. So, what is the Tomlin? What's up, people, and welcome back to Religion Camp. My name is Mark Gagdon. And thank you for joining me in my tent where every single Sunday we explore the most interesting, controversial, and fascinating stories from all religions from around the world from all times. So we got a lot of stuff to cover. But as always, I'm joining my dear friend, Christos. How are you, Christos? Oh, I'm so glad you.

All right, all right, all right. We don't have time to just be jibber jabber and all day because today we are diving into one of the most contested, but also fascinating topics of religion ever. In my opinion, it is a book known as the Talmud. It has been called many things over the centuries and on Twitter nowadays. People call it satanic, anti-Christian, and, and a blueprint for world domination. But here's the thing. Most people that make these claims have never actually read it. They're just kind of repeating things that they have been told for centuries. And as a matter of fact, you can kind of track all of these crazy accusations back to one guy. This dude in medieval France who got ousted from a Jewish community decided to get

revenge by convincing the Christians that the Jewish texts were dangerous. And then later, the Nazi party was able to use these same accusations and then fuel their prophets. propaganda and thus the story goes on. But in order to understand where these accusations come from and why people feel this way, we need to first understand what the Talmud is. Now, let me just say, I'm not Jewish. I was not raised Jewish. I have not read the Talmud, but I've done a decent amount of research and I feel like I have a grasp on generally what it is and why people misunderstand it. So let me just put that out there first to say if there are any Jewish rabbis or Talmudic scholars and I miss anything of this or I get anything wrong, please feel free to correct me in the comments.

I would love to know what I mistakenly put in here. Additionally, if you've never heard of this, or this is all news to you like it was to me, I'd love to know what your thoughts are. Please drop a comment in there. Again, religion camp is a place where I explore the most interesting details of all religions because I think life is better with belief, you know? I just try to understand people and I think the best way to do that is to do it through the lens of their culture, of their food, of where they're from, and the God that's that's the God that's the way. they worship, and this is no different. And so I think to understand, you know, ancient Jews, many religious Jews nowadays, understanding generally what the Talmud is is a pretty helpful thing

to know. So the Talmud. A lot of us have heard of it. Most of us, almost certainly, all of us, definitely have not read it. And if you have read it, I mean, congrats, you're in the 0.001% of the population that read the whole thing. And if you read it, I don't even know if you read it in the original language, you know what I mean? It's originally Hebrew and Aramaic. And, I mean, the text itself looks pretty confusing, and that's because it's filled with thousands of pages spread across multiple volumes and every single page is packed with arguments from potentially dozens of different scholars from all sorts of different timelines in this super packed debate that goes back, you know, potentially even 1,800 years. And these debates, you know, cover everything from how to properly wash your hands before eating to whether or not you can tear or talk. toilet paper on the Sabbath. So what is the Talmud? It is made up of 63 track dates containing 523 chapters and roughly 2 million words spread across multiple volumes. But it's not just the size

of this text that's so overwhelming. It's how every single page looks. From the outside, Talmud might look like, oh, a book, you know, you start from the beginning, go to the end. But when you actually open it up, each page is like almost like a complicated diagram, you know, more than just like a normal book. And the main discussion is typically at the center, surrounded by layers of commentary and cross-reference and additional notes that have been added over centuries and centuries from different rabbis and Talmudic scholars.

It's basically like, and I hope this isn't blasphemous, like a hard copy of like Twitter, you know, or X. It's like, okay, here's the discussion. First thing. And then it's this person's response, and then this person's response, and then this person's response to that response, and then this person's response all the way down.

And I think that's what a lot of people miss about the Talmud is that they'll find specific little lines that they're like, oh, look at this, the Jews believe this. And you're like, okay, no, this is just like a thought experiment that a rabbi might have put out in the year 500 that he was responding and then someone disagreed with him and then no conclusion was ever found. So I think that's an important little footnote. It's kind of like the rabbi group chat over 1,800 years that the Jews, typically Jewish scholars would study. And for the most part, you know, most Jews generally were not just given the

Talmud when they were eight years old. Like, all right, read it, you know. Typically, this was something that was preserved in yeshivas that was, you know, built within the context of Judaism. You already had to have a basic understanding of what the Torah is and what the Hebrew Bible is before you even got into the Torah or into the Talmud. And then typically people that were reading and studying the Talmudic would dedicate their lives to it. And they were Talmudic scholars that were at the top of these rabbinical schools and, you know, yeshiva, things like that. So in order to understand the Talmud, you got to know it's not just one book. A typical volume of the Talmud isn't a book at all. It's more like a library. It is many different books. And you might be looking at more than

a hundred different works composed by hundreds of different authors over a period of over 1,800 years. But all of it is somehow woven together into what looks like a single text. But it is not. And to understand how this all came together, you need to go back to the very beginning of Jewish legal tradition. So when Moses received the Torah at Mount Sinai, according to Jewish belief, he received two things, the written law that became the five books of Moses and an oral tradition that explained how to actually apply those written laws to real life. Think about it this way. The Torah might be like, hey, remember to keep the Sabbath holy. All right. What does that, what does that mean? What if, you know, what constitutes work? Like, okay, you can't work on the Sabbath.

Is it work to go take my kid to, like, band practice? Like, that's kind of work. Is it work to, like, garden? Is that working? What if there's an emergency? What if I have a job? I'm a surgeon and there's a brain surgeon. I have to go in and I have to do this.

What do you do? And so this oral law was kind of like a user manual for the written law, passed down from teacher to student in an unbroken chain that stretches back centuries. And this oral tradition worked pretty well for a while. You know, these Jewish communities were relatively small and concentrated and sort of master teachers would take on students. And then those students would memorize not just the conclusions, but also the reasoning behind every legal decision of how the law would be upheld. Again, to understand this law, you have to look at, you know, how the Jews have done things for thousands of years. Even, you know, Muslims, Christians to a certain extent, these ancient laws of how even in the Bible, you know, okay, you sacrifice a goat this way, they were extremely. extremely specific. Like, you know, if you grew up Christian, you probably remember, you know, the Israelites wandering around and they had to build the Ark of the Covenant. And it was extremely specific how you built it. So if God gives you laws, they are extremely specific. And in order to uphold the law, you got to go through a lot of philosophical work to understand how do you actually do it. So they would pass this on from generation to generation. And the whole system was built on human memory and personal relationships. But by the end of the second century AD, the system started to break down. The Jewish community had been scattered across the Roman Empire after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD and the failed Bar-Kukbah revolt in 135 AD. And so teachers were dying in persecutions and communities were being displaced. And there was a danger

that these centuries of legal traditions would just be lost. But around the year 200 AD, Rabbi Judah the prince, also known as Rabbi Judah Hanasi, enters the picture. He was the head of the Sanhedron in Palestine and arguably the most influential Jewish leader of his generation. Judah realized that the oral law had to be written down, even though this went against centuries of tradition that insisted that these traditions should remain as oral teaching. So what Judah created was the Mishnah, from the Hebrew word meaning to repeat or to study. And this was the first officially transcribed record of Torah law. He took centuries of oral legal traditions and organized them into sacred.

major orders, agricultural law, laws about appointed times, which is like holidays and sabbaths and Jews, you got a lot of holidays, so you need to have a whole section on that. Laws about women and family relationships, civil and criminal law, laws about sacrifices and temple service, and then laws about ritual purity. And within each order, he created multiple tractates that cover specific topics. And the Mishnah wasn't just a collection of laws. It was a culmination of, of, you know, everything that could be thought of around the law. But here's the thing that made it both brilliant but also problematic. The Mishnah wasn't just a collection of laws.

It was a legal philosophical masterpiece. These weren't detailed legal explanations. They were more just like legal shorthand designed to trigger the memory of the students who learned the fuller explanations orally. Judah had to take hundreds of years of legal discussions and debates and decisions and create this systemic legal code that could serve Jewish communities wherever they were scattered around the world. And he preserved minority opinions alongside majority rulings included different schools of thought and created a text that was both authoritative and comprehensive. But a single line in the Mishna might represent hours of discussion and debate that students were just expected to know by heart because they had already been taught it orally.

And so this is what happened next. The moment the Mishnah was completed, Jewish scholars in academies across the Jewish world began doing what Jewish scholars do. They started arguing about what the passages actually mean. How should the laws be applied? What happens when two rules seem to contradict each other? And these discussions were happening simultaneously in the two major centers of Jewish learning. You know, in the Middle East around the Holy Lands in Jerusalem and Palestine, where the Mishna had been compiled. and Babylon, where a large and increasingly influential Jewish community had been established.

And both communities were creating their own traditions of commentary and interpretation around the time of the Mishnah text. And this is where we get a, I would say, an important distinction between two Talmuds. The word Talmud literally means study or learning. And it refers to the combination of the Mishna plus the commentary that grew up around it. And the commentary itself is called the Gamara, from. the Aramaic word meaning completion or the tradition. So the Roman Empire, as it was becoming more Christian, was causing the Jewish community to generally decline. So you have the Palestinian Talmud, also called the Jerusalem Talmud or the Talmud Yerushalmi. And that was completed around 400 AD.

But it was shorter and less comprehensive than what was being developed in Babylon. Meanwhile, in Babylon, the Jewish community was thriving. Under the Sassanid Empire, Jews pretty much just enjoyed regular life. They had their own courts, their own educational systems, they had their own political leadership under figures called the Exelark. The Babylonian academies, particularly those at Surah and Pumbadita, became the Harvard and Yale of the Jewish world, basically attracting students from across the known world that wanted to study at these Babylonian, basically proto-yashivas.

And the scholars at these Babylonian academies had something that the Jerusalem Academy, academies lacked. They had time, they had resources, and above all, they had freedom. So they could spend decades developing these complex legal arguments, preserving multiple viewpoints, and creating detailed records of all of their discussions. I mean, that's a really interesting point that they would include the majority ruling, but also the minority ruling. So oftentimes people might look at a random line and be like, whoa, that's crazy. And be like, yeah, well, they agreed. And that's why it was the minority ruling. And then the majority ruling took over and said, yeah, that's not really what we do.

But we're including that so that the scholars later can understand the entire context of where this comes from. So the Babylonian Talmud or the Talmud Bhavli wasn't completed until the beginning of like the sixth century, around 500 AD. But when it was finished, it was massive. I mean like 2,700 pages in the standard edition nearly four times the length of the Jerusalem version. It also went way deeper than the Jerusalem version, causing the Babylonian Talmud to become the go-to version for studying. Instead of just a couple opinions on an issue, it gave long, detailed debates with tons of different rabbis weighing in.

They tackle the same question from every angle and really break it down. And this process of creating the Gamara was unlike anything that had been attempted in Jewish literature. Basically, a master teacher would sit with a group of students and begin discussing a particular passage from the Mishnah. someone would ask a question, someone else would disagree, a third person would bring up a related case that they had heard about, and the discussion would branch off in all these different directions, then circle back on the original question, then split off again. And the students weren't just passive listeners. They were expected to jump in and challenge the teacher and challenge each other and bring up counter arguments.

And what made this system extraordinary was that everything was memorized. Students would sit in these discussions, absorb not just the conclusions, but the entire process. of the reasoning and really understand philosophically how these people in the past came to this conclusion, and then they would carry on with them that knowledge when they went to establish their own academies. They'd remember not just what the rabbi kind of said, but exactly how he said it, who disagreed with them, why they disagreed, what the counterarguments were, and how the discussion evolved. And then this goes on for generations. A student at the academy in Surah would traveled to Pembedita and shared the discussion from his home base and the rabbis would

correspond with each other and they would send questions and then have a detailed response and slowly this massive network of legal reasoning and debate was building up all held in the collective memory of these Jewish communities. Then eventually these scribes began the massive task of recording these oral debates and then turning them into the written text that we call the Gamara. But even when they wrote it down, they tried to preserve the feel of these original conversations. And that's why reading the Talmud can feel chaotic, because it's trying to capture the back and forth real-time academic debates. So studying the Talmud isn't just like reading a book where it opens and you have the characters and then you

have the conflict and then you have the resolution. It's full of like strange terms that require cultural context and deep references to other texts and arguments that bounce around in different directions. And so without training or some type of oversight, it's basically impossible to follow. And that's why over centuries, Jewish scholars wrote hundreds of commentaries to explain what is going on. And the most important of these came from an 11th century rabbi named Rashi. His explanations were so clear and essential that they were printed right next to the Talmudic text on basically every page. But Rashi, again, he's not the final word. His students and his descendants added their own takes, known as the Tasophot, which offered alternative views,

and they asked new questions and challenged even his ideas. So nothing that any rabbi would really put in the Talmud became doctrine. That would have to be agreed on by a much later rabbinical council. Instead, it was just putting ideas out there and other people would challenge them, literally just like a Twitter threat. So eventually, even more tools were added, cross-references, and side notes and additional debates, and it got so layered that it basically became, you know, just this paper version of the internet. You could jump between arguments and follow threads across centuries and see how ideas would evolve across centuries. And this complexity, although brilliant, also has a downside. If you don't know how to read it, then, you know,

like I said, you misunderstand it. So outsiders might quote a wild sounding opinion and assume that this is Jewish law and this is what Jews believe. And really, it was just like a side comment on a longer debate, you know? Like they would take this makeup, like this crazy scenario, like a hypothetical, and they would kind of use it in the teaching and assume that Jews were doing that in real life. You know, you can imagine, like, a hypothetical where you're trying to understand, like, you know, philosophical law. And you're like, okay, like, how come, like, should we eat animals?

Like, you can imagine if you were in a philosophy class, you'd be like, oh, yes, no. And then let's say someone was like, oh, well, can you have sex with animals? How come you can eat them, but you can't have sex with them? And it's like, okay, well, you're bringing up a philosophical point. But now imagine someone came and was like, hey, Mark, you've said in this class that you think you should have sex with animals. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I was bringing up a hypothetical to illustrate a different point. And that got written into this book that now people think that me and my whole family believes. You can see how the confusion shows up.

The language also doesn't help either. The Mishina was in Hebrew, but the rest, the Gamara, was mostly. in like old school Babylonian Aramaic and it was loaded with like abbreviations on like insider slang that you know you had to like know about to even understand and the topics were all over the place like there was no real order right like one page might talk about sunrise prayers and the next about fraud and business and the next whether god created the world in the spring or the fall there's legal stuff and spiritual stuff and ethical stuff farming medicine it's incredibly wide ranging which also made it really easy for people to

cherry pick weird bits and then rip them out of context, then use that to attack the entire thing. And this is where a guy named Nicholas Donan comes in. He knew the Talmud inside it out. He knew where it was vulnerable. He knew how to spin it for an audience that didn't speak the language and didn't understand the writing. And with a few quotes with not a ton of context, he turned centuries of legal thought into something that kind of looked threatening. And that's exactly what he did. For over 700 years, the Catholic Church didn't really pay attention to the Talmud, right? It was reserved for specific, you know, Jewish scholars and yeshivas that they would debate their own laws and, no, it's fine. But then that all changes. So Donnan was a Jewish scholar

from the LaVosheel area of France, and he knew the Talmud very well, but around 1225, he was excommunicated from his Jewish community. We don't know exactly why, but the result was basically full isolation. In Jewish life, at the time, excommunication really meant losing your identity and your community and your status. And it wasn't just being shunned. It meant that you couldn't participate in prayer or do business or even be buried alongside your own family. You were just completely cast out. You were invisible. Just a ghost in your own town. But instead of moving on quietly, he got pissed and he wanted to get revenge. So we converted to Christianity. Obviously, the largest religious order in all of France at that point. And he joined the Franciscans,

a powerful, well-connected Catholic order. And he didn't just convert. He used his knowledge of Jewish law to make the Talmud look very dangerous to the church. Donin had spent years studying Christian theology and figured out what would shock church officials. And he compiled a list of all the Talmudic passages taken out of the original context, just the lines himself, and said, hey, this is blasphemous and anti-Christian. And in 1236, Donan brought his accusation of Pope Gregory the 9th and presented his 35 specific charges against the Talmud, complete with quotes and references, and the Pope kind of believed him. I mean, he didn't speak Aramaic. He wasn't going to go and check it. So in 1239, he issued a papal bull, ordering all copies of the Talmud to be seized across Europe. But most monarchs had no interest in stirring up a religious conflict over a text that they didn't even understand. Also, the Jewish communities were often, under royal protection and filled roles within the industry through, you know, like trade and medicine and finance, but France was different. At the time, France was ruled by King Louis the ninth,

the same Louis who would later be canonized as St. Louis. He was deeply religious, and he saw this not just as an order, but a holy mission from God. So when this order arrived in France, Louis didn't just seize the text, they were going to be judged. This marked the first time in Europe that a religious text, central to Jewish life in many ways, was going to be put on trial, all because one excommunicated Jew knew how to manipulate a lot of Christians into fear. What happened next was supposed to be a debate between Donan and the Jewish rabbis, but it was kind of lopsided to start. So on March 3rd, 1240, while Jews across France were gathered in their synagogues for Sabbath services, King Louis 9th gave direct orders to French authorities

to raid Jewish communities throughout the kingdom and take every copy of the Talmud that they could find. This came just a few months after the Papal Bowl was issued. What's up, guys? I'm on the road. That's right. I'm going to Chandler, Arizona, San Diego, California, Burlington, Vermont, Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, and a bunch of other dates that I will be adding to my website,

mark agnon live.com. I would love to see you guys there. Obviously, if you don't know, I'm a stand-up comedian, and stand-up comedy is my passion. It's the thing I love to do. And seeing you guys all come out to the shows, truly makes my life. I hang out after the show and say what's up to everybody. So if you want to come through, check out the show, say what's up to me. It would mean the world. You can see me at

all these dates and more on my website, Mark Agnon Live.com. And I'll see you guys on the road. The Jewish communities were kind of stunned. For centuries, they had lived under various Christian rulers and sometimes faced restrictions on their commercial activities or where they could live. But the religious text had never really been an issue. Now suddenly one of the books so central to their, you know, yeshivas and their scholars was being taken away by these royal officials. But Louis the 9th wasn't finished. Having seized the books, he wanted to make sure his actions were justified in the eyes of God and of the church, so he arranged for something that had never been done before. He did a trial of the book. And in June of 1240, four of the most prominent rabbis

in France were summoned to appear before the royal courts. These weren't just any Jewish leaders. They were infamous intellectual figures from within French Judaism. Rabbi Yeheuhe. of Paris led the country's most prestigious yeshiva and was widely regarded as the foremost Jewish scholar in Europe and Rabbi Moses of Kusi was a respected legal authority whose writings were studied across the Jewish world and alongside them were two other rabbis, Rabbi Malun and Rabbi Samuel Ben Solomon and were both were highly accomplished scholars in their own right and had their own major Jewish learning institutions. And these four men received a rule summons. They likely thought they were going to be called to have a theological debate or something, because debates

between Jewish and Christian scholars weren't unheard of. You know, they had happened before, sometimes even in friendly circumstance where both sides kind of just wanted to understand each other's positions. But when they walked in on June 25th, 1240, this was very different. The setting was kind of intimidating. This wasn't a quiet debate at a university or a scholarly exchange at a library. It was a royal court in France under the eye of King Louis himself, seated beside. him was his mother, Queen Blanche of Castile, one of the most powerful women in Europe, and surrounding them were some of the highest-ranking Christian figures in the country, the archbishop, the bishops of Guillaume de Avignon of Paris, and Dominican and Franciscan

inquisitors and the chancellor of the University of Paris. This is a spectacle. So on the Christian side, you have Nicholas Donnan, now wearing the brown robes of the Franciscan friar with his prepared accusations and his intimate knowledge of how to make the Jewish text sound crazy. And then you have these four rabbis that kind of just walked into this assembly, essentially functioning as a defense for their entire literary tradition. But the rules of the trial made the defense really, really difficult from the get-go. First, the rabbis were forbidden from questioning any core Christian doctrine. You know, they can't challenge the divinity of Jesus. They can't dispute Mary's virgin birth, and they couldn't dispute, you know, the fundamental

premises of Christianity. And this meant that, and Donnan presented passages that he claimed insulted Christ. The rabbis couldn't point out that these passages were written by people who just didn't believe Jesus was divine and therefore they weren't intentionally blaspheming. So, I mean, you can imagine if you're having a religious debate, you know, if one person is just like, yeah, I believe Jesus is God. And other person's like, I don't. But if you say I don't, it's blasphemy. It doesn't really seem like a debate.

And again, I'm Catholic. I grew up Catholic my whole life. I'm someone that believes, you know, Jesus is divine. but, you know, if I'm going to have a debate with someone, I can understand why they would have a different position, you know, every other religion on earth. I get why they would be like, yeah, I just don't believe that. Second, the entire framework of the trial assumed that the Talmud was on equal footing with Christian scripture, which is another big confluence that is not true. The Christian authority treated rabbinical discussions as if they were official Jewish doctrine, equivalent to like the Gospels. But again, that's not how the Talmud works. The rabbis couldn't explain. that many of the passages Donnan was quoting represented arguments and different viewpoints, sometimes minority viewpoints that had been preserved for academic completeness, not because they were like mainstream Jewish dogma. And third, the language barrier was like a nightmare. The trial was conducted in French and Latin, but most of the Talmudic passages in question

were in Aramaic using specialized legal terminology. So even when the rabbis tried to explain the context or the original meaning, they were working through translations and shorthand, and slang that often missed a lot of crucial nuance. And Donan came in prepared for all of this. He had spent over a decade preparing for this moment, and he unleashed his 35 accusations with surgical precision. But of all his weapons, none was more devastating than his accusation about passages mentioning Yeshu being punished in the afterlife,

specifically that Yeshu was boiling in hot excrement. Basically, he was in shit in hell. And to Christian authorities in that courtroom, this seemed like smoking evidence that the Jews had been mocking Jesus Christ. That's who Yeshua was. And they're mocking him and they've been mocking him for centuries. And Donan presented these passages as if they were deliberate blasphemies of Jesus. And what made these accusations so harsh was that Donan knew exactly what he was doing. He understood that Yeshua was actually a common Jewish name, shortened form of Yeshua, which is a variant of Joshua. And it was one of the most

popular names of the period. But he also knew that Christians had no way to really verify this and that the mere mention of someone named Yeshua being punished would be emotionally devastating to Christians. Even more cleverly, Donnan was taking scattered references of various people named Yeshua from different times and different contexts, weaving them together to create this narrative. Many of these references describe people who lived long after Jesus of Nowthers was supposed to have died. Some even appeared in legal discussions where rabbis were using negative examples as teaching tools, not making historical claims about any specific individual. So, for example, in this case, you have a character named Yeshu who is basically going against the, you know, elders or the wise people, and they said, what's going to happen to him? And they said, oh, well, he's in hell. There's no specific mention that it's Jesus. Is it possible it's Jesus? I mean, sure, like, if that's the interpretation. But the next rabbi says, okay, well, who is this person in context of these people? And there's some evidence that suggests that this is not Jesus of Nazareth. And again, this is fiercely debated still to this. day, I'm not going to take a side here. I understand that the context is difficult, but the details didn't match what Christians knew about Jesus either. So the Talmudic Yeshu references, you know,

people with different numbers of disciples, different circumstances of death, different time periods, but he presented them as if they were all the same person, Jesus Christ. And if they represented official Jewish doctrine rather than scattered legal examples or historical references or teaching tools, then maybe people would understand it differently. Rabbi Yechel, serving as the lead Jewish representative, pushed back within the strict boundaries of the court. And when Donnan cited these passages about Yeshua, claiming that they were attacks on Jesus, Yechel delivered a rebuttal in one of the most memorable rebuttals in Jewish-Christian debate. He explained that Yeshua was a common name amongst Jews and that the text in question wasn't necessarily referring to Jesus at all. He said,

not every Louis that's born in France is the king. Yehel tried to explain that in many of these passages, Donin was quoting was either hypothetical, legal scenarios, or used as a teaching purpose. Minority opinions preserved for scholarly completeness or discussions that have been taking out of context completely. He attempted to demonstrate that the Talmudic method of preserving multiple viewpoints, even the unpopular ones, was actually a sign of intellectual honesty, not evidence of some type of malicious intent, but the rabbis were fighting an uphill battle. Because these guys kind of already made up their mind,

the Christian authority, they weren't really interested in understanding like deep-cut legal methodology or debate techniques. They were already convinced by Donin that the Talmud was dangerous and that they were looking for confirmation, not a genuine conversation. So the very existence of a negative reference

to anyone named Yeshua was enough to confirm there were suspicions. So the trial went on for three days, and each day Donnan presented more accusations that the rabbis attempted to respond to within the limitations that they faced. But each day, it became clear that this wasn't really a trial at all. And on the final day, the Christian authorities declared that Donnan's accusations had been substantiated, and that the Talman was condemned as containing blasphemies against Christianity and Jesus Christ and was declared unfit for Jews to possess it in a Christian kingdom. But even after this condemnation, the actual destruction took nearly two years to arrange. The church wanted to make sure the destruction would have the maximum impact, both as a demonstration of Christian authority, but as a warning to Jewish communities around Europe. The church wanted to make sure the destruction would have maximum impact, both as a demonstration of Christian authority and as a warning to Jewish communities around Europe.

So by June of 1242, in Paris, this is where the sentencing was supposed to be carried out. 24 cartloads of Jewish manuscripts were brought to a massive bonfire and burned while crowds watched. And most people estimate that up to 10,000 individual volumes were burned, which is a massive loss when you've remembered that every single one of these books was handwritten for months or even years at a time. I mean, the printing press still wouldn't be invented for another 200 years. And these weren't just religious texts that could be replaced. Many of these manuscripts had unique discussions that existed nowhere else, maybe added in by a contemporary rabbi of the time. and they were burned and centuries of intellectual discussion just went up in smoke. Now, you might think this is just like a medieval incident, but Donnan's accusations became a template that would be used much later, even by the Nazis.

And the approach is pretty simple. Take real passages from this Jewish book, kind of contort what they meant, and present your version of people who couldn't read the original text anyway. So within a few decades, you start seeing the same thing happening across Europe. In 1263, another Jewish convert named Pablo Cristiani convinced the king of Aragon to put the Talmud on trial in Barcelona, and he used almost the exact same accusations that were made in France. This time, the Jewish defender was a rabbi named Nahamidis, who actually did a better job defending the text than the rabbis in Paris, and the result was basically the same. Jews were told to remove anything that the Christians didn't like from their books or else. So by 1553, the Inquisition ordered Jewish books destroyed throughout all the papal states. and thousands of volumes were burned in Rome and Venice and other Italian cities followed along. And every time they used the same basic accusations that Donnan had come up with 300 years earlier.

And this kept on happening because Donnan had figured out something that made attacking Jews much easier. Before him, if church authorities wanted to go after Judaism, they had to argue theology, who was right about God, what the Bible really means, that sort of thing, right? And Jews could basically present their own theological tradition and they could just kind of present what they believe in their debates. but Donnan gave them something much simpler. He made it look like the Jews were secretly attacking Christianity in their own books. And that changed things completely. Instead of, we think your religion's wrong, it became, look at what you're saying about our religion in your secret texts.

And it was much harder for Jews to defend because most Christians couldn't read Hebrew or Aramaic, so they just had to take Donan's word for it. What's wild is how little these accusations changed over time. So a pamphlet from 1500 would quote the same Talmudic passages that Donnan had used in 1236, with the same interpretation. It was like the lies just, like, got frozen in time and just passed down from one generation to the next. And when the Protestant Reformation happened,

it actually made things worse. Martin Luther initially tried to convert Jews to his version of Christianity, and when that didn't work, he got angry. His later writings about Jews drew heavily on all these old anti-Talmud accusations. And since Luther was so influential, that meant Protestant countries

were just as likely to believe the stuff as the Catholic ones. So by the 17 and 1800s, These claims had become so common that people didn't even remember where they came from. They were just things everyone knew about this, you know, mystical Jewish text. Then came the 20th century when the Nazis picked up where the medieval church had left off. The book burnings in Germany in 1933 weren't just targeting modern Jewish writers that were going after the same text that were burned in Paris and Spain. Nazi propaganda about Jewish books used the same language that Nicholas Donnan would have recognized basically immediately. Alfred Rosenberg, one of the Nazi party's main ideologists, wrote that the Talmud used arguments that were basically medieval church propaganda with some racial theory mixed in.

So, you know, cherry-pick quote here, some out-of-context interpretation here, and some claim that these texts proved that Jews hated the non-Jews. And after Paris, studying the Talmud became dangerous in many places across Europe, owning the books get you fined, you know, imprisoned, potentially killed. and Jewish scholars had to study secret and hide their books. And the great centers of Jewish learning that had existed in medieval Europe were destroyed or forced underground. And students who, you know, could have become great scholars. Instead, just had to focus on only surviving and not letting anyone know what they were reading about. Essentially, centuries of intellectual development just lost because one guy intentionally miscommunicated what was inside the book. And what Nicholas Donnan pulled off was remarkable in kind of a bad way, right?

The most disturbing part is how he wasn't just making it up. He was taking real passes and changing what they meant. And that is why a lot of people today don't like the Talmud, right? That's how it was built, how it was understood, how it was misunderstood, and how it became the target of church accusations. I mean, to me, I would hear these random things on Twitter. It'd be like, the Talmud says this, so that means Jews believe that. Again, I'm a person that just kind of tries a view of the best in all religions of the world,

whether, you know, Islam, Judaism, Christianity. I just say, hey, I know Muslims and they're pretty good people. I know Jews and they're pretty good people. And I know Christians and they're pretty good people. And are there some bad ones? Sure. But the ones I know are pretty freaking awesome, you know. And I have a lot of respect and admiration for, you know,

spiritual and religious people, regardless of the tradition. And so I try to just see the best. And anytime I see some crazy thing where it's like the Quran says this, and that's how you know Muslims are bad. Or the Talmud says this. that's how you know Jews are bad i'm like all right can i get an actual explanation so i talked to some friends that had studied the talbot i was like what do you think of this and they're like yeah yeah yeah it's a lot of uh a lot of stuff taken out of context and so later editions of the talmud actually

have been published that remove some of these versions and some of these lines that have been taken out of context because they go yeah this isn't fundamental to our faith it's not the bible you know it's not like the gospels it's just a thing that some rabbi put in there so we'll just take it out it's not a big deal and to me i think that's one of the biggest influences that people, Christians maybe specifically, might look at the Talmud and be like, this is the gospel. You know, this is, this is literally the word of God. And it's like, it's not the word of God. This is the word of some rabbi from back in the day that's responding to a different rabbi, responding to a different rabbi, going on a tangent, but a different thing that a different

rabbi wrote. So to me, it seems like a miscommunication. And ultimately, I don't know. I'm not, I'm not afraid of the Talmud. Maybe I'm, maybe I'm, I'm naive, but I just, I see these stuff, these things on Twitter. I'm like, just seems like ancient Jews talking about ancient Jew stuff, you know? Again, I just try to see the best in people's religions and their faiths. And I know there's a lot of people that are like, no, but this is bad. I'm like, dude, I'm not the guy that's going to be here and trying to divide people. I want to bring people together regardless of what you believe, because at the end of the day, we're all human beings. And, uh, I think that, you know, like I said before, life is better with belief. So,

All that to say, I don't know, what do you guys think? If you're a Talmudic scholar, is there anything that I missed, any nuance in here that I left out? If you're someone that never has heard of the Talmud before, maybe you heard some of the stuff that, you know, people that are terrified of the Talmud will write on Twitter. What did you think of this? Did this make more sense? Did it kind of contextualize, like, what it's actually for and how it's used? I'd love to know your thoughts. And if I missed anything, let me know.

I'll do an updated video and correct and add any addems to the conversation. But anyway, this has been another episode of Religion Camp. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. We do these every single Sunday covering every religion from around the world from all times. So I will see you guys in the tent. Thank you so much and peace be with you. What's up, people? Quick announcement.

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