The burning of the Talmud in Italy

It began with a printers' quarrel. In 1550 two Christian printers of Venice, Marco Antonio Giustiniani and Alvise Bragadini, each issued an edition of the Mishneh Torah; Giustiniani engaged converts — Vittorio Eliano, grandson of Elijah Levita, among them — to denounce to the papal authorities the rabbinic annotations of his rival's edition as containing blasphemy against Christianity. Both sides appealed to Rome, and Julius III referred the case to the Congregation of the Inquisition, run by Cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa. There the question quickly grew from "these annotations" into "the Talmud as such."

On 12 August 1553 the Congregation of the Holy Office decreed the condemnation of the Talmud. On 9 September of that year by the Julian calendar — that is, 1 Tishrei 5314, the first day of Rosh Hashanah, which fell on a Sabbath — the books were burned on the Campo de' Fiori. On 12 September the order went out to every Italian ruler, bishop and inquisitor. On 21 October the Council of Ten ordered the Jews of Venice to surrender their books within ten days and burned them in the Piazza San Marco. By early 1554 there had been burnings at Bologna, Ravenna, Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, Pesaro, Padua, Ancona, Florence and Candia.

The reckoning: at Venice, by a contemporary report, over a thousand complete sets of the Talmud and five hundred copies of Alfasi were burned; R. Judah Lerma recorded losing fifteen hundred copies of his own Lehem Yehudah.

In 1559 at Cremona, by then in the Spanish Duchy of Milan and on the order of the Habsburg governor, another ten to twelve thousand volumes were burned.

Three things are worth keeping distinct. First, 9 September was not a bull but a decree of the Congregation; Julius III's actual bull, Cum sicut nuper of 29 May 1554, came later and softened the policy — substituting censorship for destruction, and so saving the non-talmudic Hebrew literature. Second, the ban was not perpetual: from 1564 the Tridentine Index permitted an expurgated Talmud without the word "Talmud" on the title-page, and it was under that licence that the Basel Talmud was printed in 1578–81 — the Talmud Italian Jews actually used. Third, the printers' quarrel supplied the occasion and the informers but not the motive: Carafa's Inquisition had a conversionary programme of its own in which the Talmud was the chief obstacle.

What was lost for good was Italian printing of the Talmud. The most valuable product of the Hebrew book trade went to Lublin, Basel, Cracow and at last to Amsterdam.