Tell me the Talmud
From The Economist print edition
How the Jewish book is reaching a wider audience
THE Talmud is the bedrock of traditional Judaism: a repository of law and lore, chaotically interwoven with biblical explanation and legend. Compiled in fifth-century Babylon (today's Iraq), it has since enticed, intrigued and exhausted generations of Jews.
For Orthodox Jews, lifelong study of the Talmud is the supreme religious precept. But for many earnest students through the ages, it has been a frustrating grind. Written in Aramaic (often described as the language of Jesus), it does not easily surrender its textual meaning or inner reasoning. In the 11th century, a French rabbi named Shlomo Yitzhaki, often known by the acronym Rashi, wrote a ground-breaking commentary to make the original text more accessible. But even he is often terse and replete with abbreviations and unelaborated allusions, as are the thousands of commentaries and books of scholarly correspondence that accrued over the ages.
Talmud students inevitably wasted time barking up wrong trees or beating paths that had been beaten before. Not any more. The traditional study is radically changing and broadening, thanks to a 20-year-old American-based project nearing completion. "The Art Scroll Talmud" has published all 72 volumes of its English-language Talmud and nearly 60 volumes of a Modern Hebrew version. A French edition is progressing more slowly, and there are plans for a Russian one.
Fifty-odd scholars in the United States and Israel, working alone but linked electronically, provide a colloquial translation of the text grounded in Rashi's commentary, plus a digest of other, often conflicting commentaries. They use electronic archives of Talmudic literature that can be reached by key words and concepts but cannot produce the creative analogies and fine distinctions that are the stuff of Talmud study.
Sales have topped 50,000 for the more popular tracts in each language. "This isn't something you can curl up and read," says Nosson Scherman, one of the project's editors. "It still needs effort."
"The Art Scroll Talmud" accounts in part for a recent splurge in Talmud classes among Jews worldwide, not only in synagogues, but in city offices, on commuter trains, in community centres and on the internet. The learners are mainly but not only Orthodox. Many follow a universal page-a-day programme: all over the world, people are studying the same text on the same day. It takes them seven years to complete the whole opus.
