The Shulchan Aruch

I would hazard to say, with no exaggeration, that the Shulchan Aruch is the most important book that no one has ever heard of – no one, that is, who is not Jewish. This book, which is so vital to the ethos and worldview of Jews everywhere, is almost literally unknown in the non-Jewish world, even among the highly educated. Astonishingly, not even the title is known. This is a remarkable situation, one that demands an explanation; hence the importance of the present volume.

The author, Erich Bischoff, has performed a remarkable service to all of humanity with his clear, thorough, and honest assessment of the Shulchan Aruch, a book that defines so much of what it means to be a Jew. Judaism has long been shrouded in mystery, with its strange customs, bizarre dress, and inscrutable and seemingly antagonist moral code. As such, Gentiles everywhere have never really known with whom they are dealing, and thus how to respond to the Jewish presence and Jewish actions. Bischoff’s book offers, for the first time – and still today, some 90 years after its original publication – the only concise and complete analysis of the Shulchan Aruch. This is doubly valuable given that he was a non-Jewish German, a renowned scholar, and someone who was able to dig deeply into the massive corpus of Jewish writing to extract the most interesting and most relevant material. Today, the few books on the Shulchan Aruch are written by Jews, and thus we never get an objective and unbiased assessment of the moral precepts of this oriental religion. Bischoff has remedied this shortcoming, and we can be eternally grateful that he has.

Let me begin with a few words about the author. It will be brief because little is known of his life. He was born in Germany in 1867 and progressed rapidly through his schooling, eventually gaining a deep academic training in biblical history, Hebrew, and the history of Judaism. Already by 1890, at the age of 23, he had published his first book, Prolegomena zu Dionysius Cato. This was followed by another book the next year, Die Juden und das Christenblut (The Jews and the Blood of Christians). Knowledge of his expertise spread in German society, and by 1900, he was serving as an expert witness in various legal trials, most involving charges of anti-Semitism by local Jewish groups against other writers or speakers.

All the while, he continued to publish important works: Kabbalah (1903), The Koran (1904), Jesus and the Rabbis (1905), Elements of Kabbalah (1913), Babylonian Astrology (1907), Rabbinical Fables (1922), Blood in Jewish Literature (1929) – and the present work, Das Buch vom Schulchan Aruch (The Book of the Shulchan Aruch), also originally in 1929. Bischoff died in 1936 at the age of 69.

Apart from this short biography, we get a better understanding of this man from his writing, especially The Book of the Shulchan Aruch, which contains many personal reflections and asides. Here we find someone with both academic insight and moral courage, a man who understands deeply his subject matter, and also sees that it has an important role to play in contemporary European society. Bischoff was clearly concerned that the public had little understanding of the basic tenets of Judaism, and he felt it his duty to enlighten his fellow citizens regarding the (mostly) negative aspects of Jewish morality. Then as now, isolated passages from older Jewish writings – mostly the Talmud – were extracted and deployed by enemies of the Jews to great effect, though often without the necessary context. As it turned out, this context, in many cases, made for an even harsher critique than the anti-Semites could have imagined. Suffice it to say that German Jews were less than pleased when Bischoff’s authoritative, contextualized, and learned critique appeared in print.

Judaism in Context

Bischoff does an excellent job of explaining the relevant aspects of the Shulchan Aruch, but the Talmud, for example, is only of peripheral interest for him, as is the larger contextual history of Judaism. Here, I want to lay some of the groundwork for the reader to make it easier to follow Bisch­off’s line of thinking, and to more easily absorb the import of what he writes.

The history of the Jews goes back to very ancient times in the Middle East; as early as 1200 BC, we have a relic, the Merneptah Stele, which mentions “Israel” by name. Even earlier, circa 1350 BC, we have letters to Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten that refer to a people called “Habiru,” which some believe are Hebrews. And another stone engraving of 850 BC refers to “the House of David.” All these suggest a distinct and identifiable Jewish people in the region around present-day Palestine since at least 1000 BC.

It was likely in these early days that the Jews formulated and circulated amongst themselves stories about the origins of their people, of the Earth, and of their god, Yahweh. Allegorical figures such as Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Esau, Jacob, Isaac, Joseph and Moses came to be formalized in Jewish myth, and their various stories came to embody certain key elements of Jewish thinking and the Jewish worldview. Eventually around 500 BC, scholars believe that the first five books of the Old Testament were first written down, as a collection of writings known as the “Torah” or the “Five Books of Moses.” Over the next few hundred years, assorted other stories of Jewish prophets and kings came to be codified in the other 35 (or so) books of the Old Testament. Thus, the entire OT – called the “Tanakh” by Jews – was likely complete by around 200 BC. The oldest physical remains, incidentally, are the Dead Sea Scrolls, which contain parts of much of the OT, and were apparently written between 200 and 100 BC.

The entire OT is not a large amount of text; in current form, and depending on which books are included and how it is formatted, the full OT runs about 1,000 pages of English text. This was sufficient to docu-ment the stories and the prophets, but not enough to address the many complexities of everyday life – especially for a people who wanted to live according to “God’s law.” Much was there, but much more was left out, or only implied. Thus, it fell to the Jewish learned men – equivalent to the present-day “rabbi,” even though that title did not exist until around 0 AD – to comment on, and flesh out, the “intended meaning” of the OT for all the various issues, problems and questions of daily life. Therefore, likely from the earliest days, there came to be an “oral Torah,” handed down orally through the generations, as a guide to everyday life and as a supplement to the “written Torah” of the first five books of the OT, and indeed to all of it.

The “oral Torah” survived “orally” for hundreds of years, until the Roman invasion of Judea in 63 BC and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 AD. Jewry was dispersed to the many nations surrounding Judea, and as far as Europe, Asia, and Africa. Soon thereafter, and in the face of this diaspora, some Jews felt the need to write down the “oral To-rah” for the benefit of a dispersed Jewish people. The first was apparently Rabbi HaNasi, around 200 AD; his work came to be known as the Mish-nah (“the study”). As soon as that was completed, other rabbis began to document their own reaction and commentaries on it; these writings were called the Gemara (“the completion’”. By 350 AD, there were so many commentaries to the already extensive Mishnah that Jewish scholars in Palestine pulled them all together into a single document called the Talmud (“the teaching”). This first collection – now called the “Palestine Talmud” – was expanded even further in 500 AD in a document called the “Babylonian Talmud.” This latter document remains, to this day, “the” Talmud of Judaism; it is the most complete documentation of the ethics, morals and daily requirements of the Jewish people.

Needless to say, the Talmud is a vast set of writings, far larger than any encyclopedia. Today, one can buy an English translation of the entire document, but it runs to some 50 volumes, covering almost 9 linear feet of shelf space. Dual English-Hebrew editions can be found, running from 73 to an astounding 146 volumes. One could spend years reading the Talmud and only ever grasp a fraction of the whole.

All this set the stage for another prominent Jewish rabbi by the name of Joseph Karo. Born in Toledo, Spain in 1488, he was forced by political circumstances to move to Portugal, Morocco and Istanbul, eventually settling in Safed (present-day Israel) around 1535, at the age of 47. By this time, he saw the need to address the vastness and complexity of the Talmud by simplifying and condensing its most important points, eliminating much that was no longer relevant. Thus, he wrote a set of books called Beit Yosef (or Beth Yosef), which took him some 20 years to complete. Evidently believing that even this was too unwieldly, Karo then undertook to write another, even more condensed version; this he called the “Set Table” or Shulchan Aruch.

The Shulchan Aruch

Karo began the Shulchan Aruch around 1545, and worked on it for 10 years, eventually completing the new book in 1555 when he was 67. It was not published for another 10 years, in 1565. Karo died in 1575 at the age of 87.

Meanwhile, up in Poland, another important rabbi was born in 1530: Moses Isserles. Unlike Karo, who was raised in the Sephardic-Jewish tradition, Isserles was an Ashkenazi Jew; I can’t elaborate here, but there are a number of (relatively) minor differences in theology and custom between these two major sects of Judaism. In his mid-30s, Isserles became acquainted with Karo’s work as soon as it was published in 1565. Concerned that Karo’s book lacked the Ashkenazic perspective, Isserles began to write his own commentary and corrections to Karo, which came to be known as the Mappah or “the tablecloth,” to accompany Karo’s “set table.”

So important was Isserles’ commentary that, from 1578 onward, all editions of the Shulchan Aruch have included it, in the form of a sequence of Hagah (glosses) or remarks that follow each entry by Karo. Thus today, the joint work by Karo and Isserles is what has come to be known as “the” Shulchan Aruch.

Over the centuries, the Shulchan Aruch, rooted in Talmudic ideas, has come to be the dominant practical guide to Judaism around the world. It has been called “the most widely accepted compilation of Jewish law ever written” and a document “accepted by all of Jewry.” Despite being a “condensation of a condensation,” it is still extensive, running between 10 and 17 volumes, depending on format and translation. (It was this still-considerable length that caused another rabbi, Shlomo Ganzfried, to publish an even shorter version – the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch – in 1864. This one runs to a mere five volumes!). Again, we need to keep in mind that the Shulchan Aruch represents far more than just the thinking of the two men, Karo and Isserles; the work includes the comments, ideas and opinions of hundreds of rabbis over literally two thousand years. It is a true distillation of Jewish thinking on a huge variety of practical, day-to-day matters. It is the essence of Judaism.

The Shulchan Aruch is organized in four main parts:

1. Orach Chayim (“way of life”)
2. Yoreh De”ah (“understanding”)
3. Choshen Mishpat (“shield of judgment”)
4. Even Ha”ezer (“the stone of aid”)

All are written in the form of “laws” of what a Jew may or must do, or not do, with respect to a whole range of daily matters: prayer, the Sab-bath, holidays, finances, marriage, mourning, diet and the like. For someone who is non-Jewish, these laws often seem strange, bizarre, silly, contorted or downright outrageous. And yet they are, nonetheless, the “law of the land” for Jews everywhere.

Of special interest here – and especially to Bischoff – are the laws that refer to the non-Jews (or Gentiles, or goyim). Given that Jews were, and are, a small minority in every place that they inhabit (save Israel), these laws are of particular interest to both parties. Jews cannot avoid interacting with Gentiles, even if most Gentiles spend much or all of their lives never meeting a Jew in person. And yet, even those Gentiles who never personally interact with Jews are still affected by Jewish thinking and Jewish action on a daily basis. Gentiles living in the US, Canada, Europe or Australia are directly affected, given that the governments in all these lands are heavily dominated by Jewish lobbies and Jewish financing. Gentiles who trade with these nations – people in China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, India and so on – are affected by Jewish trade policies and values. And Gentiles who are deemed “enemies of Israel” (Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Russia) continually feel the brunt of Jewish enmity via American financial and military might. Thus, one could say that virtually the entire planet is affected by Jewish thought and action; in this sense, all of humanity needs to understand Jewish attitudes toward Gentiles. Only in this way can the Gentiles of the world devise appropriate responses.

The Present Edition

Bischoff’s book was originally published in 1929 – a time when Germany was still struggling to recover from a loss in World War One, and also attempting to deal with a heavily-Jewish Weimar government that seemed more interested in promoting Jewish interests than in restoring the German nation. Hitler’s National-Socialist party was gaining strength, emerging from its Bavarian origins to become a major national party. Mein Kampf had been in circulation for over three years, with its fundamental critique of Jewry, and other anti-Semitic publications (such as the Nuremberg-based weekly Der Stürmer) were steadily increasing circulation. Critics of the Jews routinely used lines from the Talmud to justify their views, but these were often ripped out of context or poorly translated, and in some cases simply wrong. Jewish groups were busy, as always, suing their critics for defamation, but lawyers and judges were in little position to determine the pros and cons of the arguments. All these considerations led Bischoff to publish his book.

Unfortunately, the editing of the original book leaves much to be desired. Apart from the usual German tendency toward long, rambling sentences and long, rambling paragraphs, the structure of the book is very complex and confusing. There are section numbers (letters, numbers and Roman numerals), “main parts,” two appendices (with multiple parts) containing, separately, textual notes and (often lengthy) endnotes. All in all: scholarly, but not reader-friendly. Here, I have attempted to untangle the many parts, trim out the irrelevant tangents, and tighten up the text. Notes and endnotes are now either integrated into the text itself or included as footnotes on the relevant page. (Most footnotes are Bischoff’s, but some – marked as “Ed.:” – are my own, added for elaboration or clarification.) Portions of the appendix on the Talmud have been deleted because they had no apparent relevance to the topic of the book. And Bischoff’s large “Fifth Main Part,” with all the interesting passages from the Shulchan Aruch, has been divided into three units, one for each of the three areas Orach Chayim, Yoreh De’ah, and Choshen Mishpat (the fourth, Even Ha’ezer, was not addressed by Bischoff). In the end, my goal was to remove extraneous material, and ensure that the central passages were clear and lucid.

After its initial publication in 1929, Bischoff released a second edition of his book in 1936, the year he died. Due to strong demand – in part, thanks to the resurgent National Socialist government – the publisher issued a 3rd edition in 1941 and then a final, 4th edition in 1942. It is from this last edition that I have taken the present translation.

As Bischoff himself admits, the first few parts of the book are somewhat “dry”: preliminary material on history, structure and contents of the Shulchan Aruch, along with summaries of current editions and recent critiques of it (through 1929). Not that this is unimportant; Bischoff includes many important and insightful remarks along the way, and the reader is strongly recommended to read through the full text. But the “meat” comes in the (now) last three chapters, which contain extended passages directly from the Shulchan Aruch along with Bischoff’s commentary, as appropriate. For most readers, these will comprise the most interesting portions of the book. But not to be missed is the appendix, with some – quite literally – shocking statements taken directly from the Talmud regarding child sexuality. Suffice it to say here that Jews accept as permissible and moral things that most non-Jews would consider reprehensible and criminal.

Relevance for Today

All this raises the question of how relevant this is, in today’s world in the 21st Century. The answer is: extremely relevant.

If I may summarize the primary lessons to be learned from the following, it is that Jews – in the past and today – view themselves as separate, different and more special than the rest of humanity. They are, in their view, the “chosen of God,” and God has given to them alone his laws. God is their God, the Jewish God, the God of the Jews – and no one else. Since their laws come from God, they obviously trump any man-made civil laws of the sort that ordinary people live by, and that form the basis of civilized societies. Jews will try to follow civil law, but only when it is convenient and only when it is not superseded by any Jewish law.

All other people, the Gentiles, are non-believers and thus are here-tics, infidels, the “godless.” They have crosses in their churches and thus are “idolators.” They foolishly follow civil laws instead of the laws in the Talmud and the Shulchan Aruch. Gentiles are unworthy of respect; and in some opinions, they are scarcely human at all – little better than animals. Just as one may own, use, abuse and kill animals (for food, fur etc.), so too many Jews believe that they can – and indeed, should – use, abuse and, yes, even kill Gentiles if it serves Jewish purposes. After all, look what it says in the Bible itself:

• Isaac says to his son Jacob, “Let peoples serve you, and nations bow down to you” (Gen 27:29);
• Moses tells his fellow Israelites, “you shall rule over many nations… [T]hey shall be afraid of you” (Deut 15:6);
• In Deuteronomy, God promises Jews “houses full of all good things, which [they] did not fill, and cisterns hewn out, which [they] did not hew, and vineyards and olive trees, which [they] did not plant” (6:11);
• We read in Isaiah, “foreigners shall build up your walls, and the kings shall minister to you… that men may bring you the wealth of nations” (60:10-11);
• And, ominously, “you [Jews] shall eat the wealth of nations” (61:6).

But what about all those passages that implore one to be kind to your “neighbor” and to aid your “brother”? Sadly for the Gentiles of the world, the “neighbor” and the “brother” only apply to the Jews – the Jewish neighbor, the Jewish brother. As we will see, Gentiles are explicitly excluded from the more-benign sentiments of the OT. Time after time, Jews are encouraged to exploit, trick, deceive or otherwise take advantage of non-Jews whenever they can get away with it.

Also distressing in the present day, with so many suffering from financial hardship, is the Jewish proclivity for cheating, exploiting and even stealing from Gentiles for financial gain. Jews can charge non-Jews exploitive rates of interest; they can profit from Gentile errors; they need not repay loans; and they are not even compelled, in many cases, to pay taxes. Even in courts of law, Jews are “permitted” to lie, mislead and deceive if it leads to them winning. As a general rule, Jews go by civil law if it benefits them; but if not, then they go by Jewish law. It’s rather like a child who goes first to one parent, and then the other, looking for “the best deal.” In the end, the only true rule is: Is it best for the Jews?

At this point, the apologist for the Jews may say: “But those laws are hundreds of years old. Things change, people change, values change. Even if Jews believed those things long ago, surely they don’t anymore.” That would be true for civil laws, but that’s not what we have here. Here, we are dealing with the laws of God, and those don’t change – ever. It doesn’t matter how archaic such things sound to us, Jews don’t care; they have an “eternal law,” and they have no intention of changing it. Hence, there is no progression, no evolution, no modernization in Jewish thinking. Their law is etched in stone, and it won’t change.

Another apologist might raise a different issue: “All this only applies to strictly religious Jews, orthodox Jews; reform Jews and secular Jews don’t hold to the Talmud or the Shulchan Aruch, and thus do not adhere to such moral obscenities.” It’s true that many Jews are non-orthodox, but it’s not true that they do not adhere to those policies. As Bischoff explains, the Shulchan Aruch represents the ethos of all Jews everywhere, religious or otherwise. It embodies the essence of what it means to be a Jew. The whole mindset, the value system, and the worldview here are built into the Jewish psyche – pounded in, as it were, over thousands of years. A secular Jew can no more avoid Jewish arrogance and Jewish supremacy than he can stop breathing. Some are better at hiding it than others, but the same attitudes seem to be there, deep down, in all Jews. And when push comes to shove, these attitudes show their ugly face.

Yes, Jews are individuals. Yes, Jews disagree among themselves about many things. Yes, Jews range from conservative to liberal, from capitalist to communist to anarchist. But all these disagreements are disputes about tactics, not strategy. The strategy for all Jews is the same: Is it good for the Jew? The liberal tactic is not the same as the conservative tactic, and the Marxist tactic is not the same as the capitalist tactic. But the end goal is the same: increases in Jewish wealth and power, no matter the cost to others.

Before Bischoff, many people had recognized these malicious tendencies, but they lacked the knowledge – of the Hebrew language, of the massive Talmud and of the less-massive Shulchan Aruch – to justify such things. In the present day, more and more people are recognizing troubling “patterns” among wealthy and prominent Jews: as financial swindlers, as con artists, as liars, as parasites, as sexual predators, as dealers in pornography and drugs, as promoters of the basest and vilest “popular culture.” These patterns are not figments of someone’s imagination. They are very real, and are based in millennia-old Jewish precepts documented in, among other places, the Shulchan Aruch.

Now, after Bischoff’s work – which resonates even more today than it did 90 years ago – people may begin to appreciate the “challenge” of the modern-day Jewish Question: What should we do about these Jews? Their deeply-embedded misanthropy, combined with their evident wealth and power, make for an extremely serious social problem – arguably the greatest problem faced by humanity today. We can be grateful that Erich Bischoff chose to compile this text; it may yet serve a greater purpose than he could ever have imagined.

* * *

Wherever possible, I have attempted to verify the passages cited by Bischoff, to correct any errors, and to adjust and clarify the English translations as appropriate. The reader is encouraged to verify these passages himself, rather than simply taking Bischoff’s word for it. Today, with the Internet, there are online versions of both the Talmud and the Shulchan Aruch, though not all is in English. The website www.sefaria.org contains a useful English translation of many passages, as does www.en.wikisource.org. A simple web search of a given passage (for example, “Choshen Mishpat 156”) will usually find useful text.

But there is also much obfuscation and confusing material on the Internet, so caution is advised. As a few minutes of searching will show, little is clear about these Jewish laws. It is almost as if… someone would rather have us not know the truth. But now, with the aid of Erich Bischoff and his excellent book, the path has become a little bit clearer for all.