Judaism for Gentiles: Lecture 2

This post is part of the Judaism for Gentiles series.

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The transcript was generated by a tool, so it may not be 100% accurate.

Welcome to lecture two. We’re going to start with some housekeeping because I think last week I put the cart in the gift horse’s mouth a little bit and jumped right into some big concepts without a lot of context.

I think everyone here knows me but I’m Evelyn. I work here in the office. I have a bachelor’s in anthropology from Arizona State University and studying for my master’s in information science at Wayne State. I specialize in cultural and religious anthropology. So this kind of subject matter is right up my alley.

I have a class website. Anything related to the class is going to be up on here. Transcripts, papers that I write for myself for preparation. Like if you have any, if there’s anything that we cover in class that you want to go deeper on, it might already be on here.

So this is my personal website, evelynpark.com. And if you go right here to Judaism class, you’ll see all the materials that we have up so far. So this here is last week’s lecture, the recording, as well as a transcript if you don’t want to listen to it and just read it instead.

It is AI transcribed. So there might be some errors. I did try to go in and clean it up manually a little bit.

And we have just various articles that go into a lot more detail than I have time to in class. So for example, we have a whole bunch of text, got some quotes and textual analyses and such.

Wow, this is longer than I remembered.

So that’s all at my website, evelynpark.com. And if anyone wants to give me money, there’s links to do that here too.

The teacher stipend, right?

Yeah. When I brought up to my rabbi that I was planning on doing this, he said, just make sure you don’t do it for free.

Okay. And on that board behind you, I have put some handy visual aids, which are also up here.

Would you be leaving this up during the week?

Yeah, it’s going to be up there for a while.

Okay, I just took a picture.

Okay, so I lied to everyone last week when I said we were going to do…

Hello!

When I said we were going to do, like, practice stuff, I think we need to take a step back and do history instead.

We’ll start with an overview of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible.

This is similar to the Christian Old Testament.

The order of the books is different.

And we generally will read it in the original Hebrew if we can.

Tanakh is an acronym for the three major divisions, the Torah, the Nevi’im, and the Ketuvim.

And that translates roughly to the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings.

In the New Testament Gospels, Jesus will refer to the scriptures as the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms.

So he’s referring to the Tanakh.

The Psalms is the first book of the Ketuvim, so it’s kind of shorthand to just call the whole collection the Psalms.

So historically, traditionally, the creation of the world was about 5,000 years ago.

You’d be hard-pressed to find people these days who still hold by that.

The first 11 chapters of Genesis deal with a sort of cosmological history.

So we have the creation of the world, we have stories like the flood, the Tower of Babel.

And then after chapter 11, it zooms in on one specific family, the family of Abraham.

The rest of Genesis covers the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.

After Joseph, we’ve got slavery in Egypt, so we have the Exodus.

Moses leads everybody out of slavery into the desert, and they wander for 40 years.

And the rest of the Torah takes place during this 40-year desert sojourn.

And Moses dies before they can enter the Promised Land.

Deuteronomy is his last speech to everybody, giving kind of a recap of everything that they had been through together.

And now we get into the Nebi’im, the Books of the Prophets.

Joshua is Moses’ successor.

He’s the one who leads them across the Jordan River into the Promised Land.

They go a-conquer in and just kill everybody and take the land for themselves.

The text is kind of funny because it says that they completely annihilate all of these groups of people.

And it’s sometimes difficult to grapple with this idea of, like, these people we’re supposed to kind of seize the heroes, exterminating the people who are already there.

The text uses the same language as the flood.

So it’s kind of like an undoing of creation, and it’s framed as a punishment for their sin.

So it’s probably not meant to be literally, we’ve destroyed every single Moabite.

There’s continuous references to them even after their occupation.

Right.

Even after that story, these people groups continue to pop up and do things.

So it’s highly unlikely that they were actually exterminated.

I feel like it’s worth mentioning that Genesis is most likely kind of a compilation of a lot of different creation and origin stories for different cultural characters.

There’s some evidence that the characters of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all existed independently of one another before being formed into a family for the creation of Bereshit or Genesis.

And then after that, the Torah kind of becomes what a lot of scholars would consider to be more political propaganda and developing the Israelite identity around these sort of shared stories that kind of are converging in this cultural center.

And we will get kind of a little more into that later on.

Modern source criticism believes that the Torah was stitched together out of four primary sources.

One of the major defining characteristics of each source is the name that they use when they refer to God.

So if you’re reading the Hebrew, you’ll see some chapters use the Tetragrammaton, Yad-Heh-Vav-Heh.

Some chapters will use Elohim.

And then there’s whole chunks that are really just about the priestly materials.

So laws for the priests.

And we think that is another source.

And we think that Deuteronomy was a fourth document all on its own.

We meaning scholarship, not the Jews.

But I think most Jews today are okay with this scholarship.

I haven’t really met any who already might take issue.

So after we take the land, we have a period of judges.

This is a time when there’s not really any centralized government.

There’s a lot of conflict both within the people of Israel and with external enemies like the Philistines.

So anytime things get really, really bad, God calls up a judge to deal with it.

One of the most famous judges is Samson, who was a terrible, horrible man.

And not all the judges were good people necessarily.

But they do serve a function of protecting Israel from her enemies and sort of trying to guide the people in the right direction.

Is the word judge that’s used here and in that context the same as we think of judge here sitting in the court?

Absolutely not.

I didn’t think so, but can you help me understand the difference?

I’m not really sure why we call them judges.

They’re more of a proto-rabbi, really.

They’re fulfilling a role of, like, sort of leader, but also spiritual conduit, almost like the prophets, but not really…

Well, their role of spiritual conduit is not often fulfilled at all.

Yeah.

I would compare the judges more to, like, tribal chieftains, less somebody who, you know, sits in a courtroom or has an established court and governs legally, and more somebody who…

Leads a clan?

Yeah.

I guess if they’re judging anyone, it’s…

Well, does that word judge translate into something…

I mean, judge then translate into something different today?

I do not know the Hebrew for that.

I’m not sure if judges is an accurate translation or not.

I was thinking it would be relevant to a lot of these stories when you mentioned Samson not being the greatest person.

It’s sort of a running theme with a lot of the characters from Genesis right on through that many of them are not morally…

Outstanding?

Yeah.

They’re not…

It’s certainly not immediately easily discernible.

Like, good guys and bad guys.

They’re not, like, moral…

What’s the word I’m looking for?

Paragons?

Yeah.

Or…

What’s the word for the stories?

Oh.

Morality tales?

Yeah, there we go.

More so, they feel a little bit more like documentations of just sort of how it is, even if the history is very sparse in terms of, like, accuracy.

Yeah, we love our moral complexity.

We like to portray our ancestors as real people.

Abraham, for example, on top of almost murdering his son, has a few very entertaining episodes where he does some strange things.

There’s a couple of times where he’ll pretend that his wife is his sister because he thinks, oh, these people will kill me so that they can steal my wife.

He has no reason to think this.

He’s just assuming the worst out of strangers because we’re aware of, you know.

Right.

Well, the text doesn’t give us any indication that he has a reason to be worried about this.

You know, the king of wherever he is decides, oh, Sarah’s pretty beautiful.

I want her as a wife.

And then God brings a plague on that kingdom.

And the king has to, you know, go to Abraham and apologize, give his wife back, send him off with a bunch of camels and stuff.

So he essentially lies to these people, brings a plague upon them, and then robs them.

The point being, the Torah offers a lot of stories that are not morally resolved by the end of the story.

It’s not attempting to teach you a lesson.

It’s just kind of there.

And the tradition, at least within Judaism, is to kind of take the story for what it is rather than invent any kind of satisfactory resolution to it.

It is to sort of understand it on its own terms, which is sort of just prevalent throughout the entirety of Tanakh.

But there’s not, in sort of subsequent history, there’s a lot of both Jewish, Christian, you know, any Abrahamic faith attempting to justify the actions that happen within a lot of these stories.

But the stories themselves are not intended to leave you with any sense of moral right or wrong.

In fact, the name Yisrael means God-wrestlers.

We are the people who wrestle with God, and a big part of that identity is wrestling with the text, struggling with the parts of it that don’t make sense or that make us feel uncomfortable.

So after the time of Judges, we get into the book of Samuel.

Samuel is a prophet.

He’s a pretty cool dude.

But the people say, we want a king so that we can be like all the other nations.

And Samuel says, this is a really bad idea, but okay.

And so they anoint King Saul.

And King Saul is fine for a while, but then he starts having some epileptic fits or something.

The text says that he is afflicted by an evil spirit from God.

We’re not really sure what to make of that, but he goes a little bit nuts.

And so they replace him with King David.

King David is a shrewd politician and a brilliant military tactician.

He unites all of the tribes into the kingdom of Israel.

So we, for the first time, have a united, consolidated nation-state-ish type of entity.

And King David is pretty much the first time in this history that we have pretty solid historical and archaeological evidence for.

So pretty much anything before this may or may not have happened and probably didn’t.

What year was that? Do we know?

I mean, what do they assign to that, I guess?

I think I have that on my timeline sheet somewhere.

It would have been around 1000 BCE.

King David does this very sketchy thing where he sees a woman bathing from his balcony and says, “I want her.”

So he has her brought to his palace and then she gets pregnant.

So he panics and says, “I have to hide what I’ve done.”

So he tries to bring her husband back from the war so that he’ll sleep with her.

And, you know, he can sort of pretend that he had nothing to do with it.

But he’s such an upstanding guy.

He refuses to enjoy his leave time while his compatriots are still fighting the war.

So David is a little bit beside himself.

He sends him back with orders for his commanding officer that say, “put this guy on the front lines and then withdraw so he’ll get killed.”

So he steals this guy’s wife and kills him.

And because of this, tradition says that pretty much all of the bad stuff that happens to the royal family from then on is a result of David’s sin.

So his sons, he has many of them.

We mostly remember Solomon, but there were others who had so much interpersonal drama and killed each other.

Eventually, Solomon is the last one standing, becomes king.

He builds the first temple.

He’s considered to be very wise, but he is also a very poor ruler.

He immediately starts breaking some of the commandments that God gave them.

Like he buys horses from Egypt.

We’re not supposed to do that for some reason.

He raises taxes by a whole bunch and institutes essentially slave labor to build storehouses.

The text uses the same language as that used to describe Pharaoh at the beginning of Exodus.

So we’re meant to see Solomon as simultaneously a very wise ruler, but also sort of a tyrant.

After Solomon dies, his son, his heir, refuses to lower taxes.

And as a result, the 10 northern kingdoms break away from the kingdom of Israel.

Israel, so we have two kingdoms, the northern kingdom, which retains the name Israel, and the southern kingdom, which is only two tribes, Judah and Benjamin, and that is the kingdom of Judah.

The text mostly follows the kingdom of Judah because they’re the good guys and they still have Jerusalem and they’re the ones who don’t go worshiping idols left and right.

But eventually, the northern kingdom is conquered by Assyria.

There is a wave of refugees from the northern to the southern kingdom.

This is the period when we get a lot of the different traditions mixing and the text sort of trying to reconcile the southern traditions with those of the incoming refugees.

The book itself wants you to believe that there is a consistent thread of tradition that’s existent within like a one unified culture and that is not true.

This is the text trying to make you believe a thing that it wants to be happening.

At the time of its writing, there’s a lot of different methods of this ancient form of Judaism.

There’s a lot of people doing different things.

There is a very problematic idol worship going on because there’s not a sort of unified idea of what they want their cultural identity to look like.

So Torah is sort of wish-fulfillment.

Do you remember the name of the guy who did the—King Josiah.

King Josiah.

There’s a lot of idol worship up until a king named Josiah.

He finds a book of the law, which we believe was probably the scroll of Deuteronomy and realizes that he’s doing everything wrong.

So he institutes major reforms, has every single worship site that’s not the temple destroyed and really tries to enforce the monotheistic ideals of Deuteronomy.

So up until then, yeah, we’ve got people like worshiping Poles and doing whatever they want.

Right.

So a few years after the Northern Kingdom is destroyed by Assyria, the Southern Kingdom is taken over by Babylon.

Babylon has an interesting foreign policy in which conquered nations in order to sort of prevent them from rebelling against Babylon.

They will take a large portion of their population and move them somewhere else and then move in people from elsewhere in the Babylonian Empire.

So this prevents any sort of unity in the conquered people so that they can’t try to fight back against Babylonian rule.

But a lot of the Babylonian exile, the Jews who are in exile in Babylon, they want to retain their identity as a people separate from Babylon.

But the temple has been destroyed and they’re away from the land.

So they have to sort of struggle to invent a new form of Judaism that can be practiced outside of the land and the temple.

And this is the beginnings of modern Judaism.

Judaism, this sort of movement will become the basis for the Pharisees, if you remember from last week.

Worth noting that this is around the time that the actual writing of Torah begins.

So a lot of what’s being discussed in the Torah are sort of cultural memories of things that would have happened about a thousand years prior, a couple hundred years prior.

It is when they’re in Babylon that the rabbis get together and start actually compiling the Torah.

That’s why a lot of the mythologicalization of the land of Israel kind of becomes more and more prevalent throughout the narrative as they’re kind of longing for this place that in their cultural memory, because it’s hundreds of years up there in Babylon, is still like, it’s representative of freedom and of peoplehood and of them as a nation.

Is it a little oral up to them?

Up to them, yeah.

That’s why there’s a lot of different inconsistencies, a lot of different narratives that are kind of all brought together.

It would be accurate to consider ancient Israel sort of a melting pot in a similar way as early America.

There’s a lot of different cultural groups coming into this very sort of hot.

There are some pieces of writing integrated into the Torah that predate this period.

For example, the book of Deuteronomy, we believe, was found by Josiah, and this was even before the Northern Kingdom fell.

So it’s kind of like a quilt.

It’s made up of a lot of different pieces.

And then, so the rest of the prophets are pretty much in the exile, and the writings are kind of just a collection of, this didn’t fit into the other categories.

So we have things like the Psalms.

The Psalms are just a bunch of poems or songs probably meant to be set to music.

There’s a lot of indications in the text that, like, this should be sung with the accompaniment of lyres and timbrels.

We have wisdom literature like Proverbs, which is a collection of sayings, do this and your life will be good.

We have Job, which says, no matter what you do, things might not go well anyways.

And how are we supposed to feel about bad things happening to good people?

Job really wrestles with that question.

We have Ecclesiastes, the last of the wisdom books, which is typically attributed to Solomon, but definitely was not written by Solomon.

The author is just called The Teacher.

And he has tried everything under the sun to try to find meaning in life.

And no matter what he does, it all feels empty.

And he’s sort of despairing about, you know, why am I here?

Why is nothing fulfilling?

And he never reaches an answer.

We also have some erotic love poetry in this collection, The Song of Songs.

And then we have a few short stories like Ruth, Esther.

These are just sort of small pastiches of non-historical, like historical fiction.

We have the scrolls of Ezra and Nehemia and Chronicles are sort of little mini histories.

So Ezra and Nehemia covers the return to Jerusalem under Cyrus II.

When the exile is over, the Neo-Assyrian, the Persians, whoever they were calling themselves at the time, defeat the Babylonians and decide that everybody should be allowed to go back to where they came from.

So Ezra and Nehemia were a prophet and a scribe who pretty much oversaw the construction of the Second Temple.

So this is their history.

And Chronicles is a very rapid-fire overview of everything that’s ever happened.

Is it in Ezra and Nehemia that it goes over the fact that there are groups of Israelites that elect to stay in Babylon?

Yeah.

So that’s, I feel like, important to note that this is sort of the beginning of the diaspora.

Judaism becomes a very predominantly diasporic religion and really thrives in that sort of context.

And there are groups of these Persian Jews that exist even today.

They’re probably the oldest surviving diaspora group of Jews in their own subculture still in existence.

And that’d be in modern-day Iraq, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What’s wrong with here was the, what did they return from exile?

It’s in here somewhere.

Around 5, 539.

They were gone for quite some time.

Ezra was a big racist.

This is just a fun fact.

He reinterpreted some older writings in this really weird way where he decided that, like, interfaith marriages were not okay.

And everyone had to divorce their foreign wives.

And they were, for some reason, like, really, really hard on the Israelites who hadn’t been carried off into exile.

Apparently, they sort of assimilated into Babylonian culture a lot more than the exiles did.

So they were really mean to them.

And they had some nasty names for them.

So here’s a timeline.

Around 1300 BCE is when we think maybe Moses, if he existed, would have been bringing the Jews out of Egypt.

And then 1000, we have King David.

So anything before 1000 BCE is pretty much myth or legend.

We have the building of the first temple in 960.

Fun fact, in the Talmud, Solomon is a sorcerer.

And he…

So the temple is really big.

There’s a picture of it, like an artist’s rendition up on the back, that top left picture.

But it’s enormous.

And very lavishly decorated.

And so the Talmudic story is that they had to cut a lot of rock to build this thing.

So Solomon actually enslaved a giant rock-eating worm demon called the Shamir.

And the Shamir cut the rocks for them.

And that’s how they were able to build it.

There’s a parallel to this story in Islam as well, which is important to note that Islam is sort of getting its very early proto-formations of religion around the same time that Judaism is also in the area.

So a lot of these stories of, like, these Talmudic stories that are sort of additions to Torah or elaborations on Torah, you will also find sort of hints or ghosts of in Muslim stories as well.

Because there’s a lot of shared interaction.

931, the Assyrians take over the Northern Kingdom.

Oh no, this is when the Northern Kingdom breaks away.

So they have a couple hundred years of fighting with each other.

Then the Assyrians take over the Northern Kingdom.

And 150 or so years later, the Southern Kingdom also falls.

They’re in exile for several decades.

For Cyrus allows them to go back to Jerusalem and they build the Second Temple.

There’s also a picture of the Second Temple right underneath the picture of the First Temple.

And as you can see, it is so small compared to the First One.

So this was an occasion that brought up some complicated feelings in the people who were there.

The younger people were very, very excited to have their own national identity again, to have a temple built.

The older people who remembered the First Temple were so disappointed by the Second Temple that they wept.

So you have cheering and weeping side by side.

322, we have the Jews’ favorite historical figure, Alexander the Great, who conquers the entire region of the Levant.

He’s very, very nice to the Jews.

According to legend, he was a big fan of the Book of Daniel, and that’s why it made its way into the Tanakh.

And it wasn’t just left out.

It’s a very strange book.

It’s kind of like the Tanakh version of Revelation.

It’s very, very dense and nothing is literal.

It’s very confusing.

Alexander’s descendants, though, are much less cool than he is.

They start trying to put idols in the temple.

This doesn’t sit well with the people, because we’re not supposed to have idols.

The culture of respectability at the time was to honor the gods of whoever is kind of occupying or conquering you at that point in time.

So the insistence on putting idols in the temple in Jerusalem is not so much a screw you to the Jewish people.

It’s just sort of policy.

And there’s a lack of cultural understanding about why that is so detrimental within the Israelite culture at the time.

Yeah, the Jews really were just a complete outlier for having an issue with this.

Nobody else would have had a problem with that.

So the Maccabees are a family who really are against the Hellenization of the Jews.

Around the same time, we have a lot of Jews really embracing Hellenistic Greek culture.

We have Jews wanting to eat non-kosher foods, wanting to go to public bathhouses.

But of course, because the Jews are circumcised and the Greeks are not, many Jews actually went so far as to have their circumcisions reversed, which is a horrifically painful process.

And they had to do this in order to, you know, go to public bathhouses, participate in Greek athletics, because everyone was naked back then.

So the Maccabees were really not fond of this assimilation.

And the idols in the temple was really the last straw for them.

So they lead an armed revolt against the Seleucids and somehow against all odds win.

And that’s the origin of Hanukkah.

They’re basically a small rebel group that overthrows the occupying government and does it exactly what a lot of very small and impromptu revolutionary movements wind up doing, which is destroy the entire country’s economy and practices.

It’s a real David and Goliath story, and as soon as they’re in power, they pretty much start doing the exact things that they were fighting against in the first place.

Do we have a sense of how big the population was?

Conservative estimates of, like, largely populated areas at that time were about 1 million people at the most.

So I’d say in the entire, like, region of Judea, 100,000, maybe a couple hundred thousand at most.

Not huge, but for the time period, definitely significant.

So the Maccabees and their descendants are who will become the Sadducees.

You remember from last week, the Pharisees, the Sadducees.

63 BCE, the Romans take over much of the known world.

And the Hasmonean dynasty, which is what the Maccabees wound up calling themselves, they decide, you know, we can maybe maintain some of our independence.

We can still be largely self-governing if we just become clients of the Roman Empire, pay them tribute in 63.

Israel becomes a Roman client kingdom.

Jesus would have been born around 6 to 4 BCE.

So we are now in the New Testament gospel period.

Jesus doesn’t have a terribly long life.

We have the development of Christianity starting up in 30 to 70 CE.

Jesus-ism was originally a largely Jewish movement, primarily popular among more Hellenized Jews.

So they pretty much break away from mainstream Judaism at this point.

And as the years go by, especially after Paul gets involved and starts writing his letters,

Christianity becomes more and more Greek or Gentile.

And very rapidly, within a generation or two, the actual percentage of Christians who are Jewish is just so, so small.

They’re insignificant.

So Christianity almost immediately becomes a Gentile movement.

This wouldn’t have been especially weird at the time to have this sort of…

Not separatist, but separate movement within Judaism itself.

This period, there’s a lot…

Not just within Judea, but in Greece, in Rome, in Egypt.

There’s a lot of sort of religious fervor going on.

A lot of different reformist movements.

A lot of…

Sort of, if you’re familiar with the Great Awakening period within American history,

where Protestantism gets this very huge upswing and a lot of creative thought behind it.

Similar threads going through here, where there’s a lot of different religious thinkers coming to the forefront at the time and spawning these new spiritual movements.

In 66 CE, the Zealots, who were a loosely organized sort of anti-Roman guerrilla group, managed to spark off a full-scale revolt, which was a terrible idea.

Rome immediately crushes the rebellion.

Over a million people die in this conflict.

The second temple is destroyed.

And a lot of people are captured, enslaved.

200 CE, we have the redaction of the Mishnah, which is…

I should back up a bit.

So the second temple is destroyed, which means the conflict between the Pharisees and the Sadducees is essentially over.

Because the Pharisees were carrying on the legacy of the Babylonian exile.

They were emphasizing obeying the law, personal practice.

Whereas the Sadducees were very much focused on the temple, since they had a temple again.

Well, now we again don’t have a temple.

So the Pharisees, by default, win that argument.

And so 70 CE is the birth of modern rabbinic Judaism.

And in 200 CE, we take pretty much everything that the rabbis have said over the last 130 years and write it down.

So that’s the Mishnah.

Modern rabbinic Judaism didn’t really start to crystallize until this time, 200 CE.

So this is part of why some Jews will object to Christians being a little bit too excited to sort of co-opt Jewish practices.

Yes, Jesus was a Jew, but he certainly wasn’t a Jew in the same sense that today’s Jews are Jews.

And Christianity and modern Judaism were really developing side by side.

So it’s not like modern Judaism existed before Christianity did.

There are more sibling religions than parent-child.

Does that make sense?

Basically, ancient Judaism does not look like what modern Judaism looks like today.

So a lot of the traditions within Christianity that have roots within Judaism have these roots within this very ancient form of Judaism that is no longer practiced.

So modern Judaism doesn’t really have a lot to do with that sort of cross-religious relationship.

So, I mean, you just mentioned about co-optic, whether it comes to my mind.

So what you’re saying, I think, is that it’s not making the church stuff in the way your grandmother did.

So, I have to think about how I feel about my cousin.

Well, in this case, there’s a couple thousand years of history with our cousin, and it’s pretty complicated.

Okay, the famous Council of Nicaea happens in 325 CE, and this is when a bunch of old men invent Christianity.

I’m just kidding.

That is a common story, but it’s absolutely not true.

Nicaea was basically just a meeting of all of the leaders of different Christian communities coming together so that they could agree on what everybody thought Christianity was.

There’s some misconceptions that, like, the Christian Bible was just sort of invented wholesale during this period, or at least, like, the standardization of what books were accepted.

The entire list of books in the Christian Bible was already pretty much crystallized by this time and was widely accepted by Christians all over the world.

What they did do was decide that they really didn’t like certain doctrines that didn’t agree with sort of the majority and started hunting down people who held those beliefs and burning them at the stake.

And this council was convened by Constantine, who was the first Christian emperor and really wanted a not-so-messy religion with so many, you know, different competing beliefs so that he could more effectively govern his new religious population.

And finally, 450 to 550 CE, this is when we have the Talmud coming into shape.

So the Talmud is the Mishnah, which is a collection of the works of the rabbis from 70 to 200.

And the Talmud is 250 or so years of commentaries on that oral law.

It is super important to understand what the Talmud is.

The Talmud is often cited as sort of a justification for anti-Semitic thought, as there’s a lot of rabbi commentary in there that does not reflect well on us.

There’s often rabbis who are hateful, there are rabbis who are spiteful of oppressive forces at that point in time, and there are rabbis who are sort of just Jewish supremacists in their own way.

However, the Talmud is not official doctrine.

It’s more like a Reddit thread of rabbis arguing with one another about what should or shouldn’t be thought, except it’s all recorded.

Even dissenting opinions that we don’t agree with, they’re all still there without a stamp on it that says, this guy’s correct or this guy’s wrong.

It’s meant for that interpretation, it’s meant for documentation rather than to be thought.

If you think of, like, court transcripts, the stenographer is recording everything.

Both sides of every issue are recorded in the Talmud.

So if you ever see somebody saying, hey, I’ve read the Talmud, and I know that Jews think that…

You can say, well, that was just one guy that said that.

I don’t know if that was in there, was it?

That’s just an example.

Okay, now, I’m seeing the word redacted, and does it mean here, what I understand it to me today, like you get a freedom of information document and all the stuff blacked out that you can’t see?

Oh, different redaction.

Okay.

In this context, redaction means you have your source documents, so, you know, let’s say thousands of pages of court transcripts, and so the redaction process would be putting them all together in a way that is sort of cohesive and readable.

So someone trying to verbalize it, there would have been these recordings through all these years, and then they would have happened in different places.

It’s not like it’s all with one court reporter doing it, so you’d have to try to make sense chronologically and geographically of what they put things together.

Yeah, figure out how to put all of these different documents into one continuous document.

That tells a story from beginning to end instead of jumping here and there and all over.

Yes.

Okay.

All right, 912 to 1013 CE is the golden age of Spanish Jewry.

Jews enjoy a period of relative tolerance in Spain during this time.

We see a massive explosion of Jewish art and literature and scholarship, and you will see a lot of very important Jewish texts coming out of Spain during this time, including the works of Rashi, who is the most famous commentator of Jewish texts.

If you look at a copy of the Talmud or the Hebrew Bible today, you’ll have the regular text, and then usually on the other page or maybe in the margins, you’ll have Rashi’s commentaries.

So he’s pretty ubiquitous.

We’ve also got Maimonides around this time, 1135 to 1204.

Maimonides was pretty much the top dog rabbi in Spain.

He was a physician and did some rabbying on the side.

Pretty much everybody, I mean, nobody could really just be a full-time clergy person during this period.

Even Paul was a tent maker.

His most important work was the Mishnah Torah, which is a, well, the Talmud is enormous and covers many, many volumes.

I could probably find something here that demonstrates the absolute absurdity of…

That’s also, if you ever have seen somebody claim to have read the Talmud, they’re lying, unless they’re a scholar.

It takes about three years, I think, to read through the whole thing.

Yeah, so this is an Amazon listing, if it loads.

For one edition of the Talmud, it’s 73 volumes.

It’s on sale right now, but it’ll still run you almost $3,000.

So Maimonides took this enormous body of work and made the Mishnah Torah out of it.

So it’s pretty much an abridgment of the entire Jewish oral law in one to maybe three volumes.

I’m not sure how long the Mishnah Torah is, but it is so much shorter than the Talmud.

And this makes the law a lot more accessible to the everyday Jew and very important work.

And people will still refer to it today when, you know, when rabbis are in court and having arguments about things and making rulings.

A lot of those arguments will refer to the Mishnah Torah rather than going all the way back to the Talmud.

Do rabbis have to read the whole 73 volumes to become a rabbi?

Yeah, I’m pretty sure.

The Talmud is also the basis of practice and faith for a lot of more Orthodox Jews.

So we attend a Reform synagogue.

We’re kind of in flux in terms of what our actual practice is.

But Reform and, to a certain extent, Conservative Jews will largely follow Torah law.

Whereas, sort of the more Orthodox you go, the more Talmud-focused a lot of the practice becomes.

So they believe that the Talmud is not just a compilation of the thoughts of the rabbis, but it’s also a compilation of the oral history of the Torah.

So, sort of, the idea is that the Talmud might have been written down later, but the actual stories within it are older than the writing of Torah.

Right.

The traditional belief is that the Revelation at Sinai, when God revealed the law to Moses, included both the written Torah and the oral Torah.

So the entirety of the Talmud traditionally is thought to have been said to Moses on the mountain and just written down very, very much later.

That belief is newer.

In 1253, we have the English Statute of Jewry.

And this is when the English decide that they should tear down most of the synagogues and make Jews wear little yellow stars.

And this is also the time when England has this brilliant idea that, you know, let’s make usury, the practice of lending money for interest, illegal for Christians to practice, because it’s against Christian belief to practice usury.

And we have this handy group of people who are not Christians, so let’s force them to be the finance people.

And this is how Jews wound up controlling the financial industry at the time, even though usury is just as illegal under Jewish law as it is under Christian law.

Basically designated sinners.

Yes.

Yes.

1250 to 1300, we have one of my favorite Jews, Moses of Leon.

He was a Spanish Kabbalist.

Kabbalism is Jewish mysticism.

You may have heard of it because it kind of got really popular a few years back.

Madonna became a Kabbalist or something.

So Moshe de Leon claimed to have found some ancient writings by a legendary rabbi named Shimon Bar Yochai, and he would sell fragments of this ancient writing to make some profit.

This was basically how he made his living.

And these complex, opaque, mystical scrolls that he was selling are the Zohar.

This is the foundational text of Kabbalah.

It’s 11 volumes long, and it’s so very difficult to read that it takes years and years of study to make sense of any of it.

Traditionally, you’re not intended to study Kabbalah until you’re 40.

That’s sort of a more folksy tradition than a strictly enforced one.

But the idea is that it is a very dense subject matter, philosophically, spiritually.

It takes a lot of prior understanding.

And it is very easily misunderstood.

So there’s a story that three rabbis enter paradise.

And this is a metaphor for studying Kabbalah.

Maybe it’s four.

One of them goes insane.

One of them commits suicide.

One of them is so horrified that he leaves Judaism.

He becomes an apostate.

And only one of them comes back better for the experience.

So that’s why traditionally there are a lot of sort of barriers to studying Kabbalah.

And it’s written in a sort of like fake old-timey Aramaic that Moshe de Leon invented.

So it’s the only book in the entire world that uses this particular dialect of Aramaic.

So you pretty much have to learn an entirely new language just to read this book.

But it’s very popular.

In 1304 to 1394, the French repeatedly expel and readmit the Jews.

Every time they, you know, the Jews get kicked out, they take all their stuff.

And every time they let the Jews back in, they charge for readmission.

And this very fun practice is preserved in this video game called Crusader Kings 2.

Where you kind of, you play as like a European monarch.

And if you want to make some really easy money, you just expel the Jews and take their stuff.

And then after like 50 years, you let them back in.

And then you can immediately expel them again and take all their stuff.

So yeah, if you ever run a country and your treasury is empty, I guess you could just kick out the Jews.

In 1349, we have the Strasbourg Massacre.

I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that right.

Strasbourg.

Strasbourg.

So this is the time of the Black Death.

And of course, people don’t understand what is happening.

And the Jews take the blame for sort of using their evil magics to curse the Christians.

And so there’s a series of pogroms, which are violent attacks on the Jewish people,

culminating in the Strasbourg Massacre, at which thousands of Jews are burned.

The Black Death.

I’m poor with history.

What was that?

The plague.

The Black Death.

The bubonic plague.

That’s what I was thinking.

The disease that wiped out, what, a third of the population of Europe.

And that was the Jews’ fault.

Yes.

Obviously, it was the Jews’ fault.

I mean, nobody knew about bacteria.

1488 to 1575 is the lifetime of one Joseph Carroll.

He is another very important thinker and writer and wrote a competing sort of Jewish law compilation to the Mishneh Torah called the Shulchan Aruch, the set table.

Whether you prefer the Mishneh Torah or the Shulchan Aruch is largely dependent on where you are in the world.

Here, most people prefer the Shulchan Aruch.

Is it called the Torah also?

Or is it called the other thing?

It’s not called the Torah, people here.

You follow the Torah, or you follow the Shulchan Aruch?

All Jewish people follow the Torah.

All of these would be considered supplemental to the Torah.

They’re not attempts at revision.

They’re attempts at sort of explaining how the Torah should be interpreted.

So it’s not like a replacement.

No.

No.

It’s like a different version of the Bible.

Well, it’s more like, so the Torah is very narrative.

And it doesn’t necessarily just have a list of, if you’re in this situation, you should do this thing.

We have the Levitical laws, which give a lot of specific laws, but it doesn’t give you case-by-case studies.

Which is more of what the Shulchan Aruch or the Mishra Torah would be.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In 1492, the Spanish kicked out all the Jews.

They had been doing the Spanish Inquisition since 1478.

So a lot of Jews had already fled the country before this point.

But 1492 is when the Jews were officially expelled from Spain, completely ending the Spanish Golden Age.

And most of the refugees wind up in Poland.

And Poland remained the sort of most concentrated gathering of Jews in the world.

A significant portion also wound up in Turkey, because this is around the same time of the official fall of Constantinople, turning it into Istanbul.

And the sultan that took over was not just friendly, but actively sought out and sent ships for the Spanish Jews to transport them to Istanbul.

He was very cosmopolitan.

But that would be the origins of a lot of what would today be considered Mizrahi Jews or Eastern Jews.

In 1534 to 1572, we have the lifetime of Isaac Luria.

Isaac Luria was a teacher of Kabbalah.

And his thoughts on Jewish mysticism were so, so, so popular that the entirety of world Jewry immediately accepted Lurianic Kabbalah.

Which is an extremely rare thing for all Jews everywhere to agree on something.

Isaac Luria is the foundation of modern Kabbalah, and everybody loves him, except for me.

You and Dr. Justin Sledge.

I have some personal issues with Lurianic Kabbalah.

And I think that Cordovero did it better.

But that’s neither here nor there.

And, yay!

In 1626, we have Shabbatai Zvi, who is extremely famous amongst the Jews.

He was a false messiah.

His teachings drew heavily on Lurianic Kabbalah.

And because Luria was so popular, it was very easy for many Jews throughout the world to immediately accept Shabbatai as well.

He instituted some very shocking reforms.

His whole shtick was pretty much everything that you thought was forbidden is now to be encouraged.

So he turned a lot of things upside down on their heads.

I think Shabbatai was probably the first person to allow women on the bimah, which is sort of like the pulpit.

There was some gender weirdness with Shabbatai himself.

There are a lot of poems that will describe Shabbatai as a woman.

But in the end, he converted to Islam.

Yep.

There are still some Shabbatians today who believe that Shabbatai converted to Islam in order to sort of raise the mystical sparks within Islam.

And, you know, try to bring the, um, I’m blanking on words.

Sort of bring out the origins of Judaism within Islam itself.

Or sort of, uh, yeah, this is hard to explain.

It is hard to explain without going deep into Kabbalah.

Right.

But, yeah.

I guess you could essentially think of him as a secret agent.

That’s what his followers who stuck with him believed.

That he’s sort of, infiltrating is such an aggressive word, but infiltrating Islam in order to, you know, raise them up.

And, uh, yeah.

Shabbatai is hugely important and was essentially the turning point for a huge amount of Jewish thought.

And the ripple effects of Shabbatai’s apostasy are very much still felt today.