[akyu]

Why does it make you tense up?

[boole1854]

Gentile here, but even I tense up when I see discussions about the Talmud show up in "Gentile spaces". Some reasons:

1) Conspiracies. There's a millennia-long history of conspiracy theories involving the Talmud, and talk about the Talmud often see conspiracy theorists surface which sidetracks any rational discussion.

2) Religion. To this day, there is a significant group of religion Jews who take the Talmud extremely seriously as Scripture or at least as Scripture-adjacent. This annoys some people and tends to cause aggressive conversations.

3) Politics. Anything that can be connected to politics turns into a political argument. The Talmud seems to serve as easy fodder.

4) Misunderstandings. The Talmud is a complicated set of documents written for a very specific in-group and isn't easy to understand without a lot of help. There are various misunderstandings of it which often someone decides they need to share as though they were facts. Trying to correct or nuance these misunderstandings often then quickly devolves into a discussion of conspiracies, religion, or politics.

[akyu]

Thanks. I learned something new.

[TchoBeer]

There's a lot of prejudgements based off of very little knowledge that goes on. I remember a comment section in a YouTube video about the eruv in New York where all the comments were either like "interesting do you know [innocent question]" and all the replies would be like "not a Jew but [patently wrong information]" or else were just pointing at the othered minority and their silly ways. I'm not Orthodox anymore, but my otherness from the Orthodox community is different from someone who didn't grow up in it and judges it or its teachings or trappings nonetheless.

In this case, the comments are pretty neutral to positive, but I was rather worried there would be a lot of "Jews study this silly ancient text full of nonsense" going about.

[akyu]

I see. Thanks. The context matters quite a bit I suppose.

[rfrey]

Probably due to a pattern of Very Confident Statements from people who know a little bit about the subject. There may be things you are expert in that are similar.

[dylan604]

>from people who know a little bit about the subject

I think you just summed up a large portion of the internet.

[recuter]

On occasion through out history people misquote, misunderstand or misrepresent stuff about Jews and their writings for a variety of reasons, sometimes with rather negative consequences. Innocuous discussions can turn into Happy Tree Friends real quick.

[mynameishere]

It's pretty racist. I mean, yeah, no doubt if you read and understand the whole thing like a regular scholar, every word, all that racism disappears. But a casual reader will tend to get the wrong idea.

[bradrn]

Upon searching for a few words here, this list appears to have been copy-pasted between a bunch of antisemitic sites. It looks like ‘Hadarine’ isn’t even a real book — the only results are for very similar lists on the aforementioned antisemitic sites. There are also problems in translation: e.g. ‘filth’ is a highly misleading translation of niddah. Besides, this cherry-picked list leaves out any relevant context, which is supremely important in understanding or translating the Talmud. I wouldn’t give this post any credence as to what Judaism is actually about.