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New Edition of the Babylonian Talmud: Original Text Edited, Corrected, Formulated, and Translated Into English by Michael L. Rodkinson (V.9-10 )
Originally published in 1896-1903. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.
442 pages, Paperback
First published December 15, 2009
About the author
Michael Levi Rodkinson
402 books7 followersMichael Levi Rodkinson (1845–1904) was an American-Jewish publisher, known for being the first to translate the Babylonian Talmud to English.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 2, 2017
This is part of a 3 part review. Like c'mon guys, you allocate 20,000 characters for 300 page books. It just doesn't let me do justice to this 3225 page monster.
part 1
part 2
Speaking of a house of cards coming down, the Talmud encourages taking everything else with it -- destroying historical artifacts is encouraged(p2589), blasphemers, idolaters, and those who "deny the power of god" (ie dissidents) are to be stoned(p1776). Ethnic cleansing is not just a suggestion, but practically a requirement. What Dawla al Islamyya is doing is not anywhere far from what the Talmud would have all jews do, including but not limited to burning people alive. Instructions on how to burn someone alive are provided(hint: probably not how you imagine it, closer to how they do it in Nigeria with cloth around your neck p1780
Like islam which took after it in this manner, the talmudic worldview is that of a slave society. Make no mistake (p2971), no matter how much it's supporters might suggest that the slaves were well treated or had rights...it's a slave society with all the problems that came with that.
Also like Islam, the talmud is deeply anti-homosexual. For example, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour' could be done by increasing the fire by bundles of fagots so that [gays] should die quickly" At what point did stoning(p1662) or burning teh gays become unkosher in Israel? So many questions.
While we're piling on Islam/talmudic judaism...there is of course a deep, serious command to fear god (p1500, 1520). Combined with its proclivity to recommend ethnic cleansing...this is to be taken seriously to at least some extent. A book which claims hundreds of thousands of lives have been snuffed(p1875) for their god is one that you might do well to watch those who follow it as the most important guidance post for their lives. This might lead you to interesting conclusions if you take it too far though, so I'll leave it at that.
On dancing during festivals: "It is prohibited to clap with the hands/strike on the hips, and to dance on a festival" ,p2002 ....but if people do it, ignore it basically, especially if women are the ones doing it. The hebrews know which side of their bread has butter. still though. This dovetails with the saskatoon police trying to curb dancing. Then as now: good luck with that.
On fire: Fire as is treated as property - you have the right and responsibility to manage your own fire(p2884). But what if your house burns down? Suddenly it would be violating the NAP to put it out. There is a tension there that the talmud doesn't seem to diffuse.
On disease: pestilence doesn't hit one town as hard because there's an especially nice guy in it. Kind of makes you thankful we live in an age that the germ theory of disease has been discovered.
Anyway
One thing that I sometimes have struggled with, over the long haul, is that with society set up with so many competing nonsense-bearing camps willing to use any means necessary against eachother, with so much hatred, so much suffering that maybe what's needed is a good clean slate brought about by a deep thorough apocalypse. The duality of man includes darkness. Sometimes, especially after a really big defeat it's tempting to just say "Fuck it" and either embrace the darkness and become Part Of The Problem or just an hero out.
The Talmud however takes pain to remind us (p1901) that this problem you might be wrestling with has another side -- the problem that if you just destroy it all, there's no point to having been good. This thinking leads right into nihilism.
There is a way out of nihilism though.
"The reason of this difference between the Semitic laws in general, and the Jewish laws in particular, and the Roman laws on this point lies, in my judgment, in the prohibition of taking usury." (p2826) Prohibiting usury, and their belief in monotheism was foundational - there's something that caused both of those two things that strikes deep into the heart of all of us, right to our ancestral memory of those many generations. Faced with the problem of evil, the problem of death, the problems of economics we have to come up with *something*. And that was a 'good enough' solution while we were developing the tools to go beyond the production possibility frontier.
"Love all men too." That is to say, that one should love all men, and not hate them; for so we find with the men of the "generation of the division," because they loved each other, the Lord was reluctant to destroy them, but only scattered them to all four corners of the world. The men of Sodom, however, because they hated each other, were annihilated by the Lord, both in this and the world to come, as it is written [Gen. xiii. 13]: "But the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly. "And sinners" implies that they were guilty of illegal unions; "before the Lord" implies that they were guilty of desecration of the Holy name; "and exceedingly," that they sinned wilfully." (p2714)
This foreshadows the christian idea of love. The divine hope that, even though we do not, in fact, "all just get along" that some combination of love and heaven seemed to have gotten us through this far. That through world war and holocaust, through talking past eachother and crusades...but also the seeds of hatred buried within our best intentions. Man is both good and evil, to love you sometimes need to acknowledge the one you love is flawed. Help or not help afterwards. We contain within ourselves future solutions and future problems, future hatred and future peace. What designs we pull out of that will require our careful deliberation, study and practice at unfolding the consequences of simpler ideas. Ideas that are within the grasp of a bunch of bronze age rejects and weirdos wandering in the desert of the real are a good start, the ideas we have now is a better start. But it's just a start, a first draft at the long-now journey that faces us, should we choose to take further steps in that direction.
Note, as of ~250 AD / p3002: "as long as the Talmud existed there was little hope for the assimilation of the Jews with other nations"
Conservatives rail about how radical salafists will never integrate, and how multiculturalism will never work. The same brush gets used to paint non-salafists, of course. The roman empire used rhetoric practically identical to that used against muslims, in this day and age, against the jews, and for the exact same reasons. And sure, there are problems in the hebrew family of makyoists. Hatreds that will not go away within a generation. Issues that go beyond basic Ecumenism and call for measures not yet devised, or possibly yet devisable.
There was a terrorist attack in Canada, this week. One way of dealing with this attack is by sticking our head in the sand, passing more laws pushing more security theatre, a stronger executive branch, and loosening the straps on the inhumanity that sit within all people who work within large nationstate bureaucracies; to allow evil, banal or otherwise keeping good citizens from stopping it.
The other way is to take a page from those who defendeded the Talmud at the dawn of the protestant reformation. Or defended it when it was The International Jew who was the enemy. To not burn books, to not burn our future. To learn what the millions of people we cannot currently fully communicate with are thinking.
The Essential Talmud summary was right. Buried in the flawed arguments, the slave society, the roughshod relations with women, the self-serving priests, the castes, the permission culture and fear of learning the wrong material...buried in all of this is a glimpse of what humanity can be if we stop and actually think about it for a moment, and ask 'What would be fair, exactly? How would you do any different?'.
I said earlier there is a way out of nihilism.
Indeed there is. Like it's solution to the tragedy of the commons, The Talmud offers one solution. But I'd like to suggest there's more. But perhaps that kind of thing doesn't quite belong in this review, so if you're interested in such a thing, give me a follow.
part 1
part 2
Speaking of a house of cards coming down, the Talmud encourages taking everything else with it -- destroying historical artifacts is encouraged(p2589), blasphemers, idolaters, and those who "deny the power of god" (ie dissidents) are to be stoned(p1776). Ethnic cleansing is not just a suggestion, but practically a requirement. What Dawla al Islamyya is doing is not anywhere far from what the Talmud would have all jews do, including but not limited to burning people alive. Instructions on how to burn someone alive are provided(hint: probably not how you imagine it, closer to how they do it in Nigeria with cloth around your neck p1780
Like islam which took after it in this manner, the talmudic worldview is that of a slave society. Make no mistake (p2971), no matter how much it's supporters might suggest that the slaves were well treated or had rights...it's a slave society with all the problems that came with that.
Also like Islam, the talmud is deeply anti-homosexual. For example, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour' could be done by increasing the fire by bundles of fagots so that [gays] should die quickly" At what point did stoning(p1662) or burning teh gays become unkosher in Israel? So many questions.
While we're piling on Islam/talmudic judaism...there is of course a deep, serious command to fear god (p1500, 1520). Combined with its proclivity to recommend ethnic cleansing...this is to be taken seriously to at least some extent. A book which claims hundreds of thousands of lives have been snuffed(p1875) for their god is one that you might do well to watch those who follow it as the most important guidance post for their lives. This might lead you to interesting conclusions if you take it too far though, so I'll leave it at that.
On dancing during festivals: "It is prohibited to clap with the hands/strike on the hips, and to dance on a festival" ,p2002 ....but if people do it, ignore it basically, especially if women are the ones doing it. The hebrews know which side of their bread has butter. still though. This dovetails with the saskatoon police trying to curb dancing. Then as now: good luck with that.
On fire: Fire as is treated as property - you have the right and responsibility to manage your own fire(p2884). But what if your house burns down? Suddenly it would be violating the NAP to put it out. There is a tension there that the talmud doesn't seem to diffuse.
On disease: pestilence doesn't hit one town as hard because there's an especially nice guy in it. Kind of makes you thankful we live in an age that the germ theory of disease has been discovered.
Anyway
One thing that I sometimes have struggled with, over the long haul, is that with society set up with so many competing nonsense-bearing camps willing to use any means necessary against eachother, with so much hatred, so much suffering that maybe what's needed is a good clean slate brought about by a deep thorough apocalypse. The duality of man includes darkness. Sometimes, especially after a really big defeat it's tempting to just say "Fuck it" and either embrace the darkness and become Part Of The Problem or just an hero out.
The Talmud however takes pain to remind us (p1901) that this problem you might be wrestling with has another side -- the problem that if you just destroy it all, there's no point to having been good. This thinking leads right into nihilism.
There is a way out of nihilism though.
"The reason of this difference between the Semitic laws in general, and the Jewish laws in particular, and the Roman laws on this point lies, in my judgment, in the prohibition of taking usury." (p2826) Prohibiting usury, and their belief in monotheism was foundational - there's something that caused both of those two things that strikes deep into the heart of all of us, right to our ancestral memory of those many generations. Faced with the problem of evil, the problem of death, the problems of economics we have to come up with *something*. And that was a 'good enough' solution while we were developing the tools to go beyond the production possibility frontier.
"Love all men too." That is to say, that one should love all men, and not hate them; for so we find with the men of the "generation of the division," because they loved each other, the Lord was reluctant to destroy them, but only scattered them to all four corners of the world. The men of Sodom, however, because they hated each other, were annihilated by the Lord, both in this and the world to come, as it is written [Gen. xiii. 13]: "But the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly. "And sinners" implies that they were guilty of illegal unions; "before the Lord" implies that they were guilty of desecration of the Holy name; "and exceedingly," that they sinned wilfully." (p2714)
This foreshadows the christian idea of love. The divine hope that, even though we do not, in fact, "all just get along" that some combination of love and heaven seemed to have gotten us through this far. That through world war and holocaust, through talking past eachother and crusades...but also the seeds of hatred buried within our best intentions. Man is both good and evil, to love you sometimes need to acknowledge the one you love is flawed. Help or not help afterwards. We contain within ourselves future solutions and future problems, future hatred and future peace. What designs we pull out of that will require our careful deliberation, study and practice at unfolding the consequences of simpler ideas. Ideas that are within the grasp of a bunch of bronze age rejects and weirdos wandering in the desert of the real are a good start, the ideas we have now is a better start. But it's just a start, a first draft at the long-now journey that faces us, should we choose to take further steps in that direction.
Note, as of ~250 AD / p3002: "as long as the Talmud existed there was little hope for the assimilation of the Jews with other nations"
Conservatives rail about how radical salafists will never integrate, and how multiculturalism will never work. The same brush gets used to paint non-salafists, of course. The roman empire used rhetoric practically identical to that used against muslims, in this day and age, against the jews, and for the exact same reasons. And sure, there are problems in the hebrew family of makyoists. Hatreds that will not go away within a generation. Issues that go beyond basic Ecumenism and call for measures not yet devised, or possibly yet devisable.
There was a terrorist attack in Canada, this week. One way of dealing with this attack is by sticking our head in the sand, passing more laws pushing more security theatre, a stronger executive branch, and loosening the straps on the inhumanity that sit within all people who work within large nationstate bureaucracies; to allow evil, banal or otherwise keeping good citizens from stopping it.
The other way is to take a page from those who defendeded the Talmud at the dawn of the protestant reformation. Or defended it when it was The International Jew who was the enemy. To not burn books, to not burn our future. To learn what the millions of people we cannot currently fully communicate with are thinking.
The Essential Talmud summary was right. Buried in the flawed arguments, the slave society, the roughshod relations with women, the self-serving priests, the castes, the permission culture and fear of learning the wrong material...buried in all of this is a glimpse of what humanity can be if we stop and actually think about it for a moment, and ask 'What would be fair, exactly? How would you do any different?'.
I said earlier there is a way out of nihilism.
Indeed there is. Like it's solution to the tragedy of the commons, The Talmud offers one solution. But I'd like to suggest there's more. But perhaps that kind of thing doesn't quite belong in this review, so if you're interested in such a thing, give me a follow.
Displaying 1 of 1 review