📄 The Babylonian Talmud, the Jerusalem Talmud, and the “Quebec Talmud”: A response to the anti-Jewish attack in a “pious” Quebec newspaper”

Summary

This is not an NLP paper. It is an English translation, by Yosef D. Robinson, of a Yiddish article that Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung published in Montreal's Keneder Adler on 2 October 1942. Canadian Jewish Studies republished it in 2019. Hirschprung was replying to articles by Rev. Père Bonaventure Péloquin in l'Action Catholique, which claimed to quote the Talmud as proof that Jewish law is hostile to Christians.

Hirschprung sorts the priest's quotations into two kinds: some do not exist in the Talmud at all, and others were bent in translation until they meant something else. He answers with a dense set of precisely located counter-passages from the Talmud, Midrash, Tosefta and later codes. These cover brotherhood with gentiles, honouring non-Jewish sages and kings, a ban on robbing non-Jews, and charity to the gentile poor and sick. He then explains the rare harsh statements as reactions to Roman persecution, and he argues that the term minim means slanderers and enemies, not Christians.

The piece matters as wartime documentation of how a scholar answered antisemitic misquotation by going back to the sources.

Key points

• The original appeared on 2 Oct 1942 in The Keneder Adler (Montreal), during the war and the Vichy deportations. B.G. Sack's articles and editor Israel Rabinovitch's column prompted it.
• The author describes the priest's citations as a "Quebec Talmud": partly invented, partly distorted by translation.
• His counter-evidence includes:
  • Berakhot 17a: keeping peace with gentiles.
  • Pesahim 94b: gentile astronomy judged more accurate.
  • Sanhedrin 59a: a non-Jew engaged in Torah study is likened to a High Priest.
  • Gittin 61a: supporting the gentile poor and visiting the gentile sick.
  • Tosefta Bava Kamma 10: robbing a non-Jew is worse than robbing a Jew.
  • Sukkah 55b: 70 oxen offered for the 70 nations.
• Harsh passages are set against persecution, for example the Roman decree in Gittin 55b and the Hadrian story in Lamentations Rabbah.
• The translator built the English renderings of the Hebrew and Aramaic texts on the Soncino Talmud, Sefaria.org, the Artscroll editions and the Koren prayer book.

Interesting ideas

• I1. Two kinds of false quotation. The author separates quotes that are absent from the source from quotes that exist but were distorted in translation, because each needs a different rebuttal. — For Mova (answer): A QA reader checking a claimed quote could return one of two verdicts, "not in source" or "in source but meaning changed", each backed by an explicit pointer into the text.
• I2. Exact source locations. Every claim is anchored to a precise reference (tractate, folio, chapter), so any reader can check it independently. — For Mova (world): Each entity or state in the text world could carry a span-level provenance link, so an explanation always points back to the exact sentence that licensed it.
• I3. One word changes the reading. The Berakhot 10a reading turns on whether the verse wishes the end of sinners or of sins. — For Mova (frames): Frame extraction should keep the exact lexical filler of a role (agent versus abstract act), since swapping a person for an action reverses who is targeted.
• I4. Term sense in context. Hirschprung argues that minim refers to slanderers and enemies, not Christians in general. — For Mova (world): Mapping a term to WordNet or Wikidata should use the term's period and context before linking it, rather than defaulting to the most common modern sense.
• I5. Statements read against their circumstances. Harsh remarks are interpreted in light of the oppression their speakers were living through, not as general rules. — For Mova (frames): Pragmatic analysis could attach speaker situation and stance to an utterance, so a reaction to a specific event is not promoted to a universal claim in the world model.