[55]
[55] In midsummer, 1244, twenty waggon loads of copies of the
Talmud were burnt in France. This was in consequence of,
and four years after, a public dispute between a certain
Donin (afterwards called Nicolaus), a converted Jew,
with Rabbi Yehiel, of Paris, on the contents of the
Talmud.--See _Journal of Philology_, vol. xvi, p.
133.--In the year 1569, the famous Jewish library in
Cremona was plundered, and 12,000 copies of the Talmud
and other Jewish works were committed to the
flames.--_The Talmud_, by Joseph Barclay, LL.D., London,
1875, p. 14.
The traducers of the Talmud, among other false assertions, have
represented the Rabbis as holding their own work as more important than
even the Old Testament itself, and as fostering among the Jewish people a
spirit of intolerance towards all persons outside the pale of the Hebrew
religion. In proof of the first assertion they cite the following passage
from the Talmud: "The Bible is like water, the Mishna, like wine, the
Gemara, spiced wine; the Law, like salt, the Mishna, pepper, the Gemara,
balmy spice." But surely only a very shallow mind could conceive from
these similitudes that the Rabbis rated the importance of the Bible as
less than that of the Talmud; yet an English Church clergyman, in an
article published in a popular periodical a few years since, reproduced
this passage in proof of rabbinical presumption--evidently in ignorance
of the peculiar style of Oriental metaphor.
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