discussions"
and has throughout attempted to tone down "the brutality of certain
expressions which offend our ears." This of course affords him infinite
latitude, so that all passages likely to prove displeasing to the
"Hebraisants," to whom his work is particularly dedicated, are
discreetly expunged. Jean de Pauly's translation of the Cabala appears,
however, to be complete.[78] But a fair and honest rendering of the
whole Talmud into English or French still remains to be made.

Moreover, even the Hebrew scholar is obliged to exercise some
discrimination if he desires to consult the Talmud in its original
form. For by the sixteenth century, when the study of Hebrew became
general amongst Christians, the antisocial and anti-Christian tendencies
of the Talmud attracted the attention of the Censor, and in the Bale
Talmud of 1581 the most obnoxious passages and the entire treatise
Abodah Zara were suppressed.[79]

In the Cracow edition of 1604 that followed, these passages were
restored by the Jews, a proceeding which aroused so much indignation
amongst Christian students of Hebrew that the Jews became alarmed.
Accordingly a Jewish synod, assembled in Poland in 1631, ordered the
offending passages to be expunged again, but--according to Drach--to be
replaced by circles which the Rabbis were to fill in orally when giving
instruction to young Jews.[80] After that date the Talmud was for a time
carefully bowdlerized, so that in order to discover its original form it
is advisable to go back to the Venetian Talmud of 1520 before any
omissions were made, or to consult a modern edition. For now that the
Jews no longer fear the Christians, these passages are all said to have
been replaced and no attempt is made, as in the Middle Ages, to prove
that they do not refer to the Founder of Christianity.[81]

Thus the _Jewish Encyclopaedia_ admits that Jewish legends concerning
Jesus are found in the Talmud and Midrash and in "the life of Jesus
(Toledot Yeshu) that originated in the Middle Ages. It is the tendency
of all these sources to belittle the person of Jesus by ascribing to Him
illegitimate birth, magic, and a shameful death."[82]

The last work mentioned, the _Toledot Yeshu_, or the _Sepher Toldos
Jeschu_, described here as originating in the Middle Ages, probably
belongs in reality to a much earlier period. Eliphas Levi asserts that
"the Sepher Toldos, to which the Jews attribute a great antiquity and
which they hid from t