The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion

Oxford University Press 1997

The burning of the Talmud occurs every two or three centuries

The Burning of the Talmud.   In the year 1240, the apostate Nicholas Donin laid a charge before the authorities in Northern France that the Talmud contained blasphemies against Jesus.  The Jews were compelled to surrender their copies of the Talmud pending clarification of the charge;  this took the form  of the Disputation of Paris, at the end of which Louis IX ordered that all copies of the Talmud be confiscated and burned.   Twenty-four cartloads were consigned to the flames in 1242.  The occasion was commemorated in R. Me'ir ben Barukh of Rothernburg's dirge Sha'ali Serufah be-'Esh, which was subsequently included in the dirge of the Ashkenazi rite recited on 9 Av.  The precedent of 1242 was followed in later centuries; instances of Talmud burning are recorded in Italy, Poland, and elsewhere.  After 1242 the popes continued to advocate burning the Talmud. In general, although censored, the Talmud was not burned on a large scale until a renewed order in 1552 by Pope Julius III led to a big bonfire in Rome (commemorated thereafter by an annual fast among the Jews of Rome), followed by many others in Italy under the instructions of the Inquisition.  It was reported that in Venice over a thousand copies of the Talmud and other sacred literature were burned.   The last such public burning was held in Kamieniec-Podolski in Poland in 1757, when a thousand copies were put into a pit and burned following a disputation between the Jews and the Frankists (see Frank, Ya'aqov), who played a leading role in hunting down copies of the Talmud for incineration.

*Salo W. Barojn, "The Burning of the Talmud in 1553, in Light of Sixteenth-Century Catholic Attitudes toward the Talmud,", in Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict; From Late Antiquity to the Reformation (New York, 1991).  Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century (New York, 1966).

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