Part II: How Talmudic Study Grew
In Part I of this three-part series, we looked at what is the essence of the Talmud and some of the many who have studied it. While some have rejected Talmud study, various factors have caused it to be studied more today than ever. Here, in Part II, we look at modern students of the Talmud and what contributed to the happy situation where so many today study Talmud.
Modern Students of the Talmud
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) studied some Talmud as a youth, supported Talmud study and regretted not studying more.
On December 31, 1930, The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported: Prof. Chaim Tchernowitz, noted Talmudic scholar who is a professor at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, has received a statement from Prof. Albert Einstein in which the latter praises highly the plan of Prof. Tchernowitz’s work on the Talmud. In his statement, Professor Einstein says:
“I am personally acquainted with Professor Tchernowitz, and I have the highest respect for him and his work. The scientific organization and comprehensive exposition in accessible form of the Talmud has a twofold importance for us Jews. It is important in the first place that the high cultural values of the Talmud should not be lost to modern minds among the Jewish people, nor to science, but should operate further as a living force. In the second place, the Talmud must be made an open book to the world, in order to cut the ground from under certain malevolent attacks, of anti-Semitic origin, which borrow countenance from the obscurity and inaccessibility of certain passages in the Talmud.
“To support this cultural work would thus mean an important achievement for the Jewish people.”
Rabbi Tchernowitz (1871–1949) was best known by his pen name, Rav Za’ir.
Rabbi Aaron Parry, long-time rabbi of Young Israel of Beverly Hills and author of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide To the Talmud” says that when, shortly before his death, Einstein was asked what he would do differently if he could live his life again, he replied without hesitation, “I would study the Talmud.”
Herman Wouk
Famed author Herman Wouk (1915–), the author of such classics as “The Caine Mutiny” (1951), “Marjorie Morningstar” (1955), “Youngblood Hawke” (1961), “Don’t Stop the Carnival” (1965) and “The Winds of War” (1971) among many others wrote of his love for daily study of the Talmud (more about this later):
WHY DAF YOMI?
Because by now the Talmud is in my bones. Its elegant and arcane ethical algebra, its soaked-in quintessential Jewishness, its fun, its difficulty, its accumulative virtue (“I learned a ‘blatt’ [a two-sided page] today, I’ve learned 40 ‘blatt’ this year”) all balance against the cost in time and the so-called “remoteness from reality.” Is ‘Lear’ closer to reality? I think they are about as close (‘l’havdil,’ as my rabbi would interject) in different ways, and that the Talmud is holy besides.
Anyway, I love it. That’s reason enough. My father once said to me, “If I had enough breath left in me for only one last word, I’d say to you, ‘Study the Talmud.’” I’m just beginning to understand him. I would say the same thing to my own sons.
Above and beyond all its other intellectual and cultural values, the Talmud is, for people like us, ‘identity,’ pure and ever-springing.
Herman Wouk, unpublished diary, 16 January 1972
In his book “This Is My God; the Jewish Way of Life,” serialized in the New York Herald-Tribune in 1959, he writes:
The Talmud is, to this day, the circulating heart’s blood of the Jewish religion. Whatever laws, customs or ceremonies we observe—whether we are Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or merely spasmodic sentimentalists—we follow the Talmud. It is our common law.
Elie Wiesel
Nobel Prize winner, American Jewish writer, professor, political activist and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel (1918–2016) studied Talmud since he was a young boy in Sighet, in the Carpathian Mountains. For years, he studied privately with the great Talmudist Saul Lieberman (1898–1983) as they both told me (I studied privately with Lieberman, too). As Wiesel said himself, in a 1996 interview.
“[I had] a very great teacher, a very great master. His name was Saul Lieberman, a Talmudic scholar. I’ve studied Talmud all my life. I still do, even now, every day. For 17 years we were friends, as only a real teacher and a good student can be.”
In “Elie Wiesel: Conversations with Elie Wiesel,” by Elie Wiesel and Robert Franciosi, Wiesel says about Lieberman: “I believe he was the greatest Jewish scholar of these past generations… All that I know, I owe to him.” Wiesel gratefully dedicated his 1978 book, “Messengers of God” to Lieberman. The dedication reads: For Rabbènu Saul Lieberman, my teacher, from whom I received more than, with these pages, I could ever give back.” Wiesel used to study with him on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 8 until 11 in the morning. He related that he was one of the very last people to speak to Lieberman. As he told Richard D. Heffner, in a remarkable story recounted in the 2002 book, “Elie Wiesel: Conversations,”
He [Lieberman] died five years ago. That day, he was supposed to travel to Israel to celebrate Passover. We were studying as usual, and at 11, I got up; I had to go to teach at Yale, and he had to catch his plane. We embraced, I wished him a good trip, a happy celebration. He opened the door, I exited. Yet, he said urgently, “Another hour.” We returned to the Talmud where we had left it. After one hour, I got up, we said goodbye again. He followed me out to the elevator. I stepped inside it and, suddenly, he opened the door: “Another hour.” We started studying again. At 1 in the afternoon I told him, “I cannot stay any longer. My students are waiting for me and you are going to miss your plane.” Five hours later he had died on his way to Israel.
Wiesel also had this to say about why he studies the Talmud:
“The Talmud to me is more than an accumulation of knowledge. It’s more than a way of life. It’s an opening to Judaism through the aesthetic dimension. It shows the aesthetics of Judaism, that Judaism is not only a philosophy, not only a set of ethical codes, but a thing of beauty. I study the Talmud to find the beauty in Judaism.”
Wiesel’s comments, said after a long lifetime of study, make an interesting contrast to those of Thomas Jefferson, cited in Part I.
Not Just the Jewish Elite Study Talmud
Among Jews, study of the Talmud was not limited to the elites.
Throughout Jewish history, study of the Mishna and Talmud was never restricted only to an intellectual elite. An old book saved from the millions burned by the Nazis, and now housed at the YIVO library in New York, bears the stamp of The Society Of Woodchoppers For the Study of Mishna in Berdichev. That the men who chopped wood in Berditchev (a historic city in the Zhytomyr Oblast or province of northern Ukraine), an arduous job requiring no literacy, would meet regularly to study Jewish law—even the Mishna—is proof of the ongoing pervasiveness of study of the Oral Law within the Jewish community among all of its strata.
Prof. Abraham Joshua Heschel observed,
“It was particularly Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki) who brought intellectual emancipation to the people. Without a commentary, the Hebrew Scripture and particularly the Talmud are accessible only to the enlightened few. Rashi democratized Jewish education, brought the Bible, the Talmud and the Midrash to the people. He made the Talmud a book, everyman’s book. Learning ceased to be a monopoly of the few.”
It was thanks to that worldview, according to Heschel, that learning and intellectual pursuit were the legacy of the entire people, not just the intellectuals.
The good news is that even granted the difficulties some day-school students experience with Talmud study, never in history have so many copies of the Talmud been sold, nor has it been studied anywhere near as much as today.
Importance of Daf Yomi in the Growth of Talmud Study
One factor accounting for the huge increase in Talmud study is the project of daily page study of Talmud, where people around the world uniformly study the same page, a program initiated by Rabbi Meir Shapiro of Lublin, Poland (1887–1933) in 1923 at the First World Congress of Agudath Israel in Vienna. We are now in the 13th cycle of daily daf study, 2,711 pages of the Talmud, studied one page at a time, the same page each day in every community. Its popularity grows every year by leaps and bounds. At the Siyum HaShas (completion of the entire daf yomi cycle) in 2012, at least 90,000 participated in New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium alone; parallel celebrations in the United States, Israel, Canada, Europe and Australia attracted thousands more.
Daf Yomi study even made it to the Supreme Court.
On November 5, 2002 (1 Kislev 5763), the daf yomi was taught publicly by Nathan Lewin at a formal kosher dinner held in the United States Supreme Court. The daf that day was Tractate Sanhedrin, page 56, dealing with the Noahide laws. It was taught in the court while students of Jewish law all over the world were simultaneously studying that same folio. Attendees included three justices, the late Justice Antonin Scalia and two Jewish justices, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Ginsburg, and three Jewish federal judges, Pierre Leval, Michael B. Mukasey and Loren Smith. Lewin, who has argued 28 times before the Supreme Court, told the audience, “You can go home and tell your friends and neighbors that not only did you enjoy a delicious kosher meal at the Supreme Court, but you also learned daf yomi at the Supreme Court.”
The Artscroll Talmud
Another major factor, of course, not to be underestimated, in the popularity of Talmud study today is the Artscroll Schottenstein Edition of the Talmud project, an imprint of Mesorah Publications, Ltd., a publishing company based in Brooklyn, New York. Its general editors are Rabbis Nosson Scherman and Meir Zlotowitz. Their beautiful editions, completed in 2005 and now available in English, Hebrew and French, have the classic Talmudic text with its standard commentaries and a readable translation and commentary on facing pages. It is a massive work of 35,000 pages, involving over 80 rabbinic scholars laboring intensively for more than 15 years. As Rabbis Scherman and Zlotowitz elaborate in their somewhat apologetic preface to Tractate Makkot, the very first Talmud volume they published in 1990,
It is not the purpose of this edition of the Talmud to provide a substitute for the original text or a detour around the classic manner of study. Its purpose is to help the student understand the Gemara [Talmud] itself and improve his ability to learn from the original, preferably under the guidance of a rebbe. The Talmud must be learned and not merely read. As clear as we believe the English elucidation to be, thanks to the dedicated work of an exceptional team of Torah scholars, the reader must contribute to the process by himself to think, analyze and thus to understand.
What Else Has Been Done to Make the Talmud More Accessible?
Enjoying the Blessing and Overcoming Limitations of the Page Layout
The “tzurat hadaf” (page layout) has been a blessing and a significant barrier to accessibility of the Talmud. It was introduced by Joshua Solomon Soncino, who printed the first individual tractates of the Talmud in 1483. Some 25 individual tractates were printed between 1484 and 1519 with the Talmud text in the middle of the page and the commentaries of Rashi and Tosafot surrounding it. To understand the layout in detail, see Eliezer Segal’s innovative, hyperlinked image map and explanations at http://people.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/TalmudPage.html.
Daniel Bomberg
Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer working in Venice but originally from Antwerp, adopted the Soncino format. The Bomberg Talmud was published with the approval of Pope Leo X. The project was overseen by its chief editor, Rabbi Chiya Meir b. David, a rosh yeshiva and dayan (judge) on the Venice rabbinical court.
In addition to the Rashi and the Tosafot on the page, Bomberg included other commentaries in the back, such as Rabbeinu Asher ben Yechiel (c1250–1327), known as the Rosh, Maimonides’ commentary on the Mishna and Piskei Tosafot, which Rabbi Yaakov Emden (1697–1776) ascribed to Rabbi Yaakov ben Asher (c1269–c1343) known as the Baal HaTurim) or, some say, his father, the Rosh. This edition became the standard format that all nearly later editions have followed (the 1616 Krakow edition was a rare exception).
The Bomberg edition, printed in 1521, was an important development that provided for standardized pagination and provided for the commentaries of Rashi (on the inside) and Tosafot (on the outside, toward the edges) to appear on the same page as the text of the Talmud. This was an important contribution, and it was incorporated in the standard Romm (Vilna) edition that first appeared in 1835. The Talmud text is printed as a stream of unpunctuated Hebrew/Aramaic. Fairly widely distributed at the time, only 14 complete copies remain today; many were destroyed by periodic book-burnings. One complete edition recently sold for more than $9 million.
The layout of the page in these editions is so well-known, that many try to memorize and recall not only the page of any line of Talmud text, but also where exactly it is on the standard page. Jewish mnemonists known as Shas Pollak successfully memorized the exact layout of words in the more than 5,000 pages of the 12 books of the standard edition of the Babylonian Talmud, as confirmed by George Stratton in a 1917 study published in Psychological Review, reprinted in Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts (pp. 311-314).
The tzurat hadaf on the one hand is a great blessing, but it poses a significant barrier to entry. Efforts to reduce this barrier have proven controversial. Eventually, the wide acceptance of the page layout innovations, including punctuation, vocalization and on-page explanations, have helped address some of the issues.
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz Rethinks the Page Layout
For pioneering progress in making the Talmud more accessible, we are greatly indebted to Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz. He was the first to tackle this problem. He labored for 45 years, beginning in 1965, to produce a monumental work, completed in 2010. His edition of the Talmud is punctuated and vocalized. It has a readable commentary, many pictures and explains the realia of the Talmud. Famously, in the first edition, while he referred to the traditional pagination, he entirely abandoned the tzurat hadaf, placing his own commentary in the space traditionally reserved for Rashi’s commentary, relegating standard Rashi and Tosafot commentaries to the margin. He also added new notes in place of certain Tosafot and changed the traditional layout and pagination in his translation.
For this, he was much criticized by heads of yeshivot, among them Rabbi Elazar Menachem Man Shach (1899–2001), long-time head of the Ponevezh Yeshiva in Bnei Brak, who pronounced it unfit for yeshiva study (but did not ban it). “I say without a doubt that there is heresy and apikorsut [apostasy] in all of them (all Rav Steinsaltz’s books),” he complained. Though originally produced in Hebrew, there is now a beautiful English edition, known as the Koren Talmud Bavli, after its publisher. Russian and French editions are also being produced. It is now available in two formats: one with the traditional Vilna page and one without. Bowing to pressure, the Koren edition preserves the traditional Vilna page layout and includes vowels and punctuation; the Rashi commentary, too, is punctuated. The English version is opened as an English book. This edition breaks down the Talmud text into small, thematic units and features the supplementary notes along the margins.
Rabbis of the The Beth Din of the Gur hasidic dynasty disagreed with Rav Shach. In its newspaper, Hamodia, Rav Steinsaltz is referred to as “the gaon [great scholar] who has given a boon [of Talmud study] to vast masses through his blessed works.”
As you might imagine, reasons for banning Rav Steinsaltz’s works in some ultra-Orthodox circles go well beyond the objection to page layout. One reason is Rabbi Shach’s relentless battle against Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism, to which Rav Steinsaltz adheres.
Another reason is their total rejection of “secular” learning. Rav Shach said, “A yeshiva must teach Torah only. The curriculum may not be diluted with any secular studies at all (published in “Michtavim vMamarim” Volumes 1 pg. 109, pg.128, 3 pg. 31 & 39, 4 pg. 35,107). In contrast, Rabbi Steinsaltz studied mathematics, physics and chemistry and graduated from the Hebrew University; he did not agree with Rav Schach’s opposition to general studies. His knowledge of science, mathematics and technology is evident throughout his commentary.
A third reason is that Rabbi Steinsaltz is an ardent Zionist, in stark contrast to his ultra-Orthodox opponents.
I also believe that many think that Rav Steinsaltz’s work, by making the Talmud much more approachable, provided a “crutch,” that made it “too easy” to navigate the “sea” of the Talmud; in essence, democratizing it rather than keeping it as the province of the ultra-Orthodox yeshiva elite.
In a balanced review, Rabbi Gil Student wrote of the Koren edition,
Koren Steinsaltz puts the entire original text as a continuous book on the right side of the volume and the Aramaic with English translation on the left. You can easily study from the Vilna page—with vowels added—on the right side and when you have difficulty with a word, flip to the English section (corresponding page numbers are added to the bottom of the page). And when you are done with the text and Rashi, and maybe even Tosafot, you can check what comments R. Steinsaltz added. I think this arrangement is a great improvement over all previous translations.
By David E. Y. Sarna
David E. Y. Sarna is a writer and retired entrepreneur. He has eight published books, including “Evernote For Dummies, V2,” hundreds of articles and has nearly completed his first novel, about the Jewish treasures in the Vatican’s secret archive. He is hard at work on a book about the Internet of Things and also on a book on the Talmud for general readers. He and his wife, Dr. Rachel Sarna, are long-time Teaneck residents.
