Excerptum de Talmud: Study and Edition of a Thirteenth-Century Latin Translation by Isaac Lampurlanés Farré

Abstract

Reviewed by: Excerptum de Talmud: Study and Edition of a Thirteenth-Century Latin Translation by Isaac Lampurlanés Farré Constant Mews Lampurlanés Farré, Isaac, Excerptum de Talmud: Study and Edition of a Thirteenth-Century Latin Translation (Contact and Transmission, 1), Turnhout, Brepols, 2020; hardback; pp. 302; 44 b/w tables; R.R.P. €85.00; ISBN 97820503586908. The so-called 'trial of the Talmud' that took place in Paris in 1240 and the subsequent burning of many copies of the Talmud in the following year is not a comfortable subject. This volume—the first to appear in a new Brepols series 'Contact and Transmission'—devoted to intercultural encounters from late antiquity to the early modern period provides a study in a meticulously documented critical edition of a Latin summary of the Talmud, along with an English translation, by Isaac Lampurlanés Farré. This summary, the so-called Excerptum de Talmud, is itself based on the much larger Extractiones de Talmud, a sequentially organized collection of almost 1900 passages culled from the Talmud, critically edited by Ulisse Ceccini and Óscar de la Cruz Palma in 2018 within the Brepols series 'Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis' (CCCM, 29, Brepols, 2018). All of these authors are part of an energetic research team based at Barcelona, devoted to studying the Latin Talmud. This study, edition, and translation lives up to the high editorial standards already established by that team. The first part of this volume contains three chapters that contextualize the summary that is edited and translated in its second part. The opening chapter describes the events that led up to the Paris trial of 1240. It started in 1238, when Nicholas Donin, a convert to Christianity from Judaism (who had himself been excommunicated by the Jewish community in Paris over a decade earlier) decided to take a list of thirty-five articles based on the Talmud to Pope Gregory IX. Lampurlanés Farré is more concerned to provide the basic facts in this process than to reflect on what might have provoked this extraordinary move. While Petrus Alphonsi and Peter the Venerable had quoted briefly from the Talmud a century earlier, the idea of pursuing a campaign against this text, held in such honour by Jewish communities, was completely original. With the formal end of the Albigensian Crusade in 1229, the idea of identifying the Talmud as a Jewish heresy that targeted Christianity provided justification for launching a vicious anti-Jewish campaign. One suspects that Odo of Châteauroux, appointed by William of Auvergne as Chancellor of the University of Paris in 1238, may have encouraged Donin to go to Rome and thus initiate an official ecclesiastical campaign against the Talmud. The trial that ensued, which involved rabbi Yehiel of Paris and Rabbi [End Page 228] Judah ben David of Melun, is recorded in a detailed Jewish account, as well as a briefer Christian narrative. This in turn led to mass burning (twenty-four cartloads, it is reported) of copies of the Talmud in 1241–42. For reasons that are not fully explained in this volume, the death of Pope Gregory IX on 22 August 1141, followed by the very short papacy of Celestine IV and a vacancy of some eighteen months prior to the enthronement of Innocent IV on 25 June 1243, resulted in a relaxation of the anti-Jewish campaign. While there are no references to the Talmud in the proceedings of the 1245 Council of Lyons, Odo of Châteauroux was certainly involved in promoting a second phase in proceedings against the Talmud in the years immediately following the Council. One suspects that the resumption of the campaign against the Talmud provided an opportunity for a hard-line faction within the Church to re-assert ecclesiastical authority, at least in Paris—perhaps as a move against those Christians who were interested in learning from Jewish tradition. Lampurlanés Farré focuses more on the textual production of the massive Extractiones de Talmud in the years 1245 and 1248, in which Donin was certainly involved, as was Odo of Châteauroux, who was made a cardinal in 1244. Odo's involvement in the affair led to a second trial of the Talmud...