Few books have been loved as extravagantly as the Talmud. Fewer still have been hated with such stamina.
Among the Jewish scholars who have given their lives to it, reverence shades into something nearer possession. They think in its cadences, quarrel in its idioms, and assume its viewpoints as personal lenses upon the world. They will spend the better half of a century relitigating a dispute that their Babylonian forebears failed to settle in the fourth century and count the time handsomely spent. The Talmud becomes the very air they breathe, and they are faintly baffled that anyone should be breathing anything else.
Its detractors exhibit precisely the same intensity, with the polarity reversed. They too obsess. They too can quote it at you, after a fashion. They have merely concluded that this particular archive of Aramaic legal wrangling is the fountainhead of every earthly wickedness, from distant wars to the outcome of national elections.
Irritatingly, for some eight centuries the Talmud's reputation has been drafted almost entirely by men who cannot read a word of it. Since roughly the age of Magna Carta, industrious clerks across Christendom have rifled its pages for ammunition, generally in translations that were partial, negligent, or frankly fraudulent, emerging in triumph with the offensive passage, the absurd legalism, the unyielding opacity that must surely conceal a nefarious plot. The findings were put to use. Manuscripts were consigned to the flames by the cartload and, in certain political climates, not a small number of Talmudists with them. The pastime enjoyed a brief and shamefaced hiatus after 1945 and is now thriving again, conducted by a confederacy of grifters and charlatans to whom I have no intention of granting further oxygen. They are not my subject, merely the nettlesome brush one must clear away in order to make out the path.
