Judaism and Censorship

Definition: A religion developed among the ancient Hebrews before the rise of Christianity; its modern adherents are known as Jews

Significance: The persecution of Jews has usually involved censorship, and Jews have censored other Jews

Censorship of Jewish works has taken various forms: erasure or revision of objectional expressions from manuscripts; suppressing circulation of scriptural books written in the vernacular; incineration, confiscation, or mutilation of individual books and libraries; excommunication of authors; injunction against reading printed texts; cessation of printing press privileges; punishment of booksellers; and expulsion or extermination of authors and readers.

Gentile Censorship

Toward the end of the twelfth century, physician and Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides (also known as Moses ben Maimon) produced a code of Jewish law, The Code of Maimonides (1168), and a work on the philosophic principles of Judaism, Guide of the Perplexed (1190). Some of his coreligionists, inflamed by Maimonides’s scientific approach to religious issues, views on immortality of the soul, explication of Haggadah (homiletic passages), and focus on study beyond the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud, turned to the Roman Catholic church for inspiration and support.

Solomon ben Abraham of Montpelier, with the aid of Joshua ben Abraham Ferundi and David ben Saul, issued a ban against those who read Maimonides. As the struggle between Maimonists and anti-Maimonists escalated in the early years of the thirteenth century, ben Abraham asked the Dominican and Franciscan friars for help against those led astray by the Jewish heretic. The zealous defenders of the Church searched Jewish homes in Montepelier for Maimonist writings, confiscated found copies, and in December of 1233, engaged in the first public and official burning of Hebrew books, setting the standard for subsequent search and destroy missions throughout France. In the aftermath, less than a month after the initial fires, other Hebrew books became the targets of the Church and any incensed mob.

About this time, the French rabbis excommunicated a Talmudic scholar named Donin who had expressed doubts about the authority and teachings of the Talmud. Unlike Maimonides, who had protested against accusations that he was trying to alienate Jews from tradition and who had anguished about the schism that his ideas generated, Donin converted to Catholicism and decided to punish the Jews for his perceived mistreatment. As the newly baptized Nicholas de Rupella, Donin met with Pope Gregory IX and maintained that the Talmud subordinated the Bible, distorted biblical passages, used derogatory language in speaking of Jesus and Mary, and kept the Jews resolute about their religion. Gregory, incited by these and other inflammatory complaints by de Rupella, confiscated and gave all copies of the Talmud to the Dominicans and Franciscans for evaluation, sanctioned death threats against those who preserved their copies, and proclaimed a public burning in 1239 if de Rupella’s attacks were proven to be true.

France collected Talmudic tomes and formed a tribunal to study the works and to question several rabbis on the indictments. The commission, consisting of men who could not read or understand Hebrew or Aramaic (the primary languages of the Talmud), found the Talmud guilty on all counts and condemned all copies to the flames. For about the next eighty years, while subsequent popes—at the behest of tribunals who found the Talmud to be anti-Christian and antimorality—continued to order the destruction of the Talmud, Jews bribed Church officials, prayed, asked for stays, concealed editions of the Talmud in wells, buried volumes under trees, and snatched them from bonfires.

In Spain, King James invited Rabbi Moses ben Nachman to hold a disputation about the messiahship of Jesus with Dominican Brother Paul Christian. The July 1263 debate ended with the king honoring the rabbi. Unhappy with the results, Brother Paul appeared before Pope Clement IV, reciting the same charges de Rupella had used in France. In August of that same year, the king—at the behest of the pope—ordered the Jews of Aragon to submit their books for examination, authorized the removal of objectionable passages by blackening the words with ink, and returned the expurgated books to their owners.

In England, King Edward, faced with the expensive annoyance of adhering to Pope Honorius IV’s decree of preventing anyone from reading the Talmud, simply rid himself of the problem by expelling the Jews from England in 1290. In 1516 Pope Leo X issued a bull that all books before publication had to be submitted to censors for examination; following his lead, the General Synod of Italian Jewish Congregations in 1554 required three ordained rabbis to examine before publication all subsequent Hebrew books and to sign their names at the beginning of each book.

In the 1559 edition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, Pope Paul IV subjected the Talmud to continued disputations, charges, and burnings. In 1595 a list (Sefer ha-Zikkuk) appeared that contained the names of Hebrew books that could not be read unless certain passages or terms were deleted, clipped, or altered before publication. The list included a prayer book by a famous mystical scholar, Rabbi Isaac Luria; a cabalistic work; haggadic collections; Latin books written or translated by Jews; books about the immortality of the soul and resurrection; books by apostate Jews and Jewish renegades; histories of the Jewish people; occasional anti-Semitic diatribes; some books about the life of Jesus; and a book on the trial of Jesus from a Jewish perspective.

Occasionally, revisers (also known as expurgators or cleansers), often apostate Jews appointed by the Church, tore out whole pages in their zeal to do a good job. The Church was fearful of moral lapses, so Hebrew books went through successive revisions. Objectionable terms included the words “Talmud” and “goy.” The last edition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, published in 1948, still included works produced by and about Jews. Contemporary scholars assert that many textual errors seen in current editions of the Talmud and Hebrew Bible are a result of revisers’ modifications and repeated editing.

In addition to the Index Liborum Prohibitorum and other lists and acts by the Church to censor Judaica, the Inquisitions of Spain and Portugal produced indices of their own. Hebrew books not listed on any of these lists still faced repression by the Church. By the 1800s, Jewish censorship extended to political and economic arenas. Poland burned or destroyed Hasidic literature. Polish censors would not permit Hebrew books to be read unless they were printed in Poland, and government examiners made rounds to enforce this regulation.

In Prague, for about two hundred years a special decree enabled the Jesuits to revise all Hebrew books brought to the city. At the end of the eighteenth century, censorship authority transferred to the state government known as the Landesgubernium who hired a Jewish Vorcensor, a preliminary censor who was usually a rabbi, to read a book before the official censor examined it with the assistance of Jews or apostates who understood Hebrew. The state, however, added restrictions: It did not permit the printing or reprinting of books dealing with superstition; it refused to permit epitaphs on tombstones without permission of a censor; and it proscribed importing books from outside Prague.

In 1781 Austrian censors marked printed works with admittitur (may be printed without reservations), permittitur (may be printed if some references to moral, politics, and religion were edited), and toleratur (may be printed despite some harsh expressions about religion and the state). Reprints required the correction of the offensive passages. By 1810 the classifications changed: admittitur (may be sold in public and advertised in newspapers), transeat (may not be advertised), erga schedam (may be owned only by scholarly people), and damnatur (may be used with permission of the police). As the century progressed, because censors suppressed all writings and Jewish writings in particular, Jewish playwrights, poets, and authors who feared prison either fled the country or converted to Christianity.

In 1919 amid growing anti-Semitism, Hungary created its own list of undesirable authors and deprived writers and scientists of the freedom of speech. Hungary banned the works of Jews and of those who objected to fascism or to the law limiting the number of Jewish students in universities. On February 28, 1933, Paul von Hindenburg’s Verordnung des Reichspresidenten zum Schutze von Volk und Staat was published, listing the works of more than 2,293 authors who were considered poison to Germany. The Gestapo’s Polizeiindex and the Ministry of Propaganda’s Staatindex together listed more than 12,000 book titles deemed unsafe. The Nazi’s Verzeichnis jüdischer Authoren listed further items dangerous to the German people. Listed prominently on all of these lists were Jewish playwrights, poets, journalists, artists, and scholars. Germans students, ordered by the government to liberate their cultural life from Jewish intellectualism, began cleaning libraries and bookstores of works by Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Sholom Asch, Karl Marx, and other Jews. For the glory of Germany, these students threw books into large public bonfires in cities across the nation.

The Nazis banned works by Jewish writers and persecuted or murdered Jews and their protectors. They confiscated from Jews, and transferred to German hands, valuable works of art, including those created by Jewish artists such as Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani. After Hungarian Jews had been sent to concentration camps to be exterminated, more than 500,000 of their works, written in various European languages, were collected and ground to pulp in mills.

In exile during this period, Jewish German poet Heinrich Heine, a convert to Christianity, mocked religion (even his adopted one) and insulted the German monarchy. In Prussia, Bavaria, and Denmark he faced repercussions. His works were banned, confiscated, and forbidden to be published or sold; his patriotic songs became forbidden to be sung.

Jewish Censorship

After the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek was completed, the rabbis who had permitted whole passages of Greek literature to be cited in the Talmud insisted that the Septuagint be kept in storage places, hidden from the general public; some rabbis imposed a ban on it.

In the years following 150 c.e., rabbis opposed Jews owning any Roman emperors’ statues or fragments from them, statuary of any kind, flags, engraved images, or any artistic object that were seen by the public as cult objects. In this era, rabbis also prohibited the illumination in gold ink of the five books of Moses because it made the Bible accessible only to the wealthy.

A millennium later, while some rabbis opposed wall paintings and stained glass windows in synagogues, Maimonides and others permitted Jewish ornamentation largely in the form of birds, fish, and floral depictions. As guilds developed in Europe, Jewish and Catholic clergy forbade Jews to manufacture or trade sacramental objects with the name of Jesus or Mary on it.

Rabbi Akiva and Maimonides, among others, mocked or criticized apocryphal writings (books not in the biblical canon and sectarian works) but did not impose sanctions against them. Some argued that apocryphal works could be read only in private, not in public. Rabbis criticized and sometimes banned books by authors who—such as Rabbi Ephraim Solomon ben Aaron of Luntschits—neglected to cite their sources. Rabbi Samson of Sens even found fault with Maimonides for this lapse. Rabbi Raphael Cohen’s eighteenth century code of laws, published in Berlin, was banned and publicly burned in the courtyard of a synagogue for egregious errors. Other legal books were condemned because authors promoted changes in tradition, printers were apostates, or Jewish producers were not Sabbath observers.

In the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, while rabbis permitted verbal parodies of people, institutions, and sacred texts on the festive holiday Purim, some rabbis banned, burned, or hid written parodies. From the twelfth through the eighteenth centuries, Jewish authorities either expurgated offensive passages or prohibited the printing (although permitting the manuscript form to survive) of books containing questions and critiques by Jewish authors about Christian beliefs.

To protect the economic welfare of authors, the Council of the Four Lands (the supreme communal authority for Jews in Western Europe from 1594 to 1764) threatened a ban or excommunicated plagiarists and forgers. In 1745 Jewish leaders in Amsterdam asked printers not to commemorate or publicize the rescinding of orders against Jews. Throughout the next 150 years, because of fear of reprisals within and without their communities, Zionistic and politically motivated Jewish writers published their works under pen names, in limited runs, or in cities other than their own. Often, found copies were burned, torn to pieces, or trampled upon.

In the twentieth century, Maimonides’s works came to be considered mainstream; art was no longer affiliated with idolatry or worship of foreign deities; the vernacular became critical for transmission of traditional ideas; an explosion of religious and secular works—old and new, serious and frivolous, printed and calligraphed, challenging and embracing—lined walls of Jewish homes. In the world at large, now that Jewish authors are part of the intelligentsia, religious authority no longer retains the same control on creative works, and democracy affords freedom of speech, the history of Jewish censorship offers insight into the anxiety and terrors that change engenders.

In the early years of the twenty-first century, Israel remained one of the few democratic countries that still required journalists to submit any articles pertaining to security or military matters to a military censor for approval before publication. The requirement is based on an emergency statute that was put into effect before Israel gained its independence but has remained in place.

Bibliography

Carmilly-Weinsberger, Moshe. Censorship and Freedom of Expression in Jewish History. New York: Sepher, 1977. Print.

Carmilly-Weinsberger, Moshe. Fear of Art: Censorship and Freedom of Expression in Art. New York: Bowker, 1986. Print.

Carmilly-Weinsberger, Moshe. Sepher va-sayif. New York: Sura Inst., 1966. Print.

Popper, William. The Censorship of Hebrew Books. New York: Ktav, 1969. Print.

Rudoren, Jodi. "Military Censorship in Israel." New York Times. New York Times, 4 Aug. 2014. Web. 30 Nov. 2015.