Though I intend to blog mainly on political issues, I reserve the right to blog on anything.  So here:

Months ago, I was looking for a quote by an Israeli official that was too anti-American to be believed.  I think it was something Jimmy Carter had reported.  In any case, I stumbled on a website which claimed to show what a horrible book the Talmud is.  It listed a number of horrible quotes from the Talmud to make its case.  I am not Talmudic scholar, but one of the portions that they quoted was something that I had read.  I went to my bookshelf and took down the large volume.  I looked up the portion in question and realized what the problem was.  Of course the website itself had no attribution.  It was anonymous, and it listed no way to contact, comment or reply to the writer.

Now that I have created a blog, I can finally post what would have been my reply to that misconception.  I went back to google to try to find it and I could not.  Strangely enough, I found many sites that repeat that misconception.  You can check some yourself here,  here and here.

Interestingly enough, all of these sites seem to be making the exact same points.  I don't pretend that any author of those websites will read this and be persuaded.  Nor do I believe that anyone reading this (is there anyone?) would believe any of these sites are true.  But I think it is an interesting lesson on how things can get distorted and how distortions can be propagated throughout cyberspace.  To save you from looking at those sites, here is the morsel of anti-semitism that these people attribute to the Talmud:

Jews May Steal from Non-Jews
- Baba Mezia 24a

The Talmud, of course, is Judaism's "Oral Law."  A collection of commentaries and discussions that collectively make up what is now Jewish tradition.  It is an inexact description, but I said I was not a Talmudic scholar.

This portion spends a great deal of time discussing when one must search for the owner of a lost article (to return it) and when it is permissible to not return it.  Many factors are considered such as whether it is identifiable (a twenty dollar bill would not be, but a twenty dollar bill wrapped in a red ribbon might), how easy it would be to pick up and carry (a bag of rice would be easy, the contents of the bag, if it had spilt on the ground would not), and so forth.

It is important to note that the issue is not whether it should be returned, but rather how much effort are you required to expend in order to find its owner.  Go around asking people if they lost a twenty dollar bill and you might get a number of positive responses.  Ask them to identify how it was wrapped and you may be able to find the right owner.

So where do these people get the idea that it is fine to steal from non-Jews?  If one of the premises of the discussion is that you do not know who the owner is, how can the Talmud tell you not to return it if you know it belongs to a non-Jew.  You don't know who the owner is.  How could you know that he is not Jewish?  One of the criteria discussed to determine whether or not to try to find the owner is whether or not the owner will be looking for whatever he lost.  Certainly, it will be easier to return the article if the owner himself is actually looking for it.  And one of the factors that may determine whether or not the owner is looking for it is whether or not it was found in a place frequented by Jews.

So the Rabbis were under the impression that anything lost in a place frequented by non-Jews would be found by non-Jews, figure the finder would not be Jewish and be on his way.  On the other hand, if it was frequented by Jews, it would be found by Jews and Jews are subject to this "oral law" that requires the finder to try to find out who the owner is, greatly increasing the chances that the lost object would be returned.

The issue, then, is not whether the OWNER is Jewish or not, but whether the owner thinks the FINDER would be Jewish or not.  Presumably, an owner who is not Jewish who knows about this part of Jewish law would still benefit from it if he ever lost something in a place frequented by Jews.

You might think this still reflects a bit of anti-gentile sentiment from the Rabbis.  After all, they think people will figure that an object is more likely to be returned if it is found by a Jew than a non-Jew.  This bit of prejudice is benign pride at best, and at worst, an overly important view of their marvelous little book.

But we are all subject to this little bit of prejudice today, if in a slightly different form.  How many of us are more likely to think a lost object will be returned if we lost it in a Church than if we lost it in, say, a train station?

Isn't it amazing how this nice little lesson gets twisted and distorted and how the distortion travels far and wide.  The moral of this story is to not blindly repeat things we read or hear without doing at least some fact-checking.