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Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz: "The Talmud is one of the few holy books that do not demand being studied without believing it."

The Marketing Of The Talmud

Rabbi Adin
Steinsaltz and
Random House hope
to appeal to a wide
audience with a new
English translation
of the authoritative
body of Jewish law.

ARTHUR J. MAGIDA

Special to The Jewish News

26

FRIDAY, JANUARY 19, 1990

An itinerant Jewish scholar.knocked on
the door of the home of a rabbi seeking a
meal and shelter.
"What do you do?" asked the rabbi.
"I am a student of the Talmud," said
the scholar.
"Prove it," challenged the rabbi.
"Say something," responded the schol-
ar, "and I will refute you."

The refutations came, as was probably
inevitable in any class on the Talmud.
But they came much sooner — and much
more vehemently — than anyone had ex-
pected. And they came last week in a
makeshift bet hamidrash [a house of
Jewish study] on the 11th floor of Random
House's main headquarters on East 50th
Street in New York.
There, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, consid-
ered by some to be the most gifted com-
mentator of the Talmud since Rashi in
the 12th century, gave a class on the

Talmud to a small group of Jewish au-
thors. The occasion was the publication
of the first volume of the English transla-
tion of Rabbi Steinsaltz's Hebrew render-
ing of the Talmud.
This was not the first time that the
Talmud had been translated into English.
The first complete English translation of
the Talmud had been done by Isidor Eps-
tein for England's Soncino Press in the 17
years between 1935 and 1952. But the
Steinsaltz edition of the Talmud has par-
ticular import for two major reasons:
• One, Rabbi Steinsaltz, 52, has been
called the Jewish genius not only of this
era, but of many. He has spent the past two
decades translating the entire Talmud from
Aramaic to Hebrew. He is half way through
the text.
• And two, this was the first time that
the Talmud had come out of a major,
mainstream publishing house, one with
the resources to produce an edition more
graphically attractive than many that