Talk:The Talmud Unmasked

Introduction to be improved
Published in Latin under the title Christianus in Talmud Iudaeorum - sive Ribbinicae doctrinae secreta of Christianity in 1892 with the imprimatur of the Metropolitan Archbishop of Mogilev Szymon Marcin Kozlowski, the book was written in order to reveal the nature of the supposedly Talmud deleterious and anti-Christian. Despite the discrediting of its author following the "Beiliss affair", the book has remained very popular in the media decrying the Jews for political reasons, religious or others. The book was translated into English by Wesley Swift in 1939 under the title "The Talmud Unmasked", the English version is available on of Amazon. The French version, of the book, called "Le Talmud démasqué" on which is based the presention the talmudunmesked.com in its website as quoted in its homepage. was published in 1990 under the title "The Biggest Secret, The book that will transform the world, David Icke 1990." Part of the alleged quotes from the Talmud presented by the Rev. Justin Bonaventure Pranaitis are listed and analyzed in an article on the website of the Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon, entitled "Falsifiers of the Talmud".

Presentation of the book
Enterprising to briefly explain what is the Talmud, (the word Lamud - " "he has taught ", the author states that the Jews holds Moses as its first author and that he transmitted the Oral Law until 'that it became impossible to retain it orally in its entirety. "Sacred literature was at the time of Jesus, taught at several schools, each school noting his comments as an aide-memoire to form the premise of the Jewish Talmud".

The "Talmud Unmasked" is actually a fake, containing false quotes from the Talmud, intended among others to convince that Jews would not consider non-Jews as human beings and that it contained blasphemous passages to Jesus Christ and insulting to Christians. This is a book comparable to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which was published a few years earlier. This text is one of the most emblematic of anti-Semitism on the Internet and even today is regularly translated, republished, and put online by anti-Semitic, revisionists, islamists  , altermondialists , on December 18, 2009, the Court of Appeal of Colmar had confirmed a sentence of four months suspended sentence imposed at first instance to the editor of the website alterinfo.net, Zeynel Cekic, for incitement to racial hatred and disputes crimes against humanity ), neo-nazis , Catholic fundamentalists , . Excerpts from the book or the whole book are available online format on theses websites or similar ones.

If small, merge into J. Pranaitis article
Haneelam: If this article will stay small, it should probably just be merged into the Pranaitis article. But if it gets big, it can stay by itself. If you need help with the English, I can help a little: if you put in some English text, I will fix it. --Noleander (talk) 17:53, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

More precise word than "forgery"?
I looked thru some sources that discuss this book, and none use the word "forgery". They do use words like antisemitic, or inaccurate, or plagiarized (from Rohling or Eisenmenger) or misleading, .. but I don't see the word "forgery". The word "forgery" implies he was deceptively suggesting that someone else authored the work (c.f. the Protocols, which are a forgery). I think Pranaitis was presenting this as his own work. --Noleander (talk) 06:13, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
 * If there are are no sources that use the word "forgery" I propose to change that word to something the sources do use. Thoughts? --Noleander (talk) 15:19, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Auto translation of original French article
User Haneelam asked about translating the French article to Enlgish. I speak a bit of French, but not well enough to translate with sufficient quality for WP. So I ran it thru the Google auto translator, and put the results here Talk:The Talmud Unmasked/GoogleXlationOfOriginalFrench. There are some odd formatting problems, but nothing insurmountable. I'll try to make some time to improve it, and compare it to the original French to make sure the meanings are carried over. But if others have time: go right ahead. --Noleander (talk) 06:29, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
 * I started to improve the English translation in Talk:The Talmud Unmasked/GoogleXlationOfOriginalFrench, but I ran into a problem: Virtually all of the sentences do not have sources ... they do have footnotes, but most of the footnotes simply refer to Pranaitis' book itself, and relying only on Pranaitis' book is a violation of WP:Original research.  I know there are quite a few secondary sources that discuss P's book, I'll look at them and see if I can find some better citations.  However, they probably treat the book at a more cursory level, so many of  the sentences in this article may have to be deleted. --Noleander (talk) 15:01, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Need summary of contents
The article needs a summary of the contents, in one form or another. It doesn't have to be bulletized, but it is important information. See, for example, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which does include a prominent summary of that book's table of contents. I agree that the content summary should not be presented in such a way as to imply its truthfulness. Perhaps the best solution is to add wording before the content summary explaining something like "all authorities have concluded that Pranaitis' interpretations of the Talmud are completely erroneous ..." etc.  --Noleander (talk) 14:53, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Need footnotes for important assertions
Haneelam: Could you supply some footnotes for the line:   "The Talmud unmasked, is actually a misleading and inaccurate book, presenting false quotations of the Talmud, intended inter alia making believe that the Jews would not regard the not-Jews as human beings and that it would conceal blasphemous towards Jesus-Christ and offensive passages towards the Christians. This work is comparable with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he precedes by a few years. This text is one of most emblematic of the antisemitism on Internet and it regularly is translated,". This line needs some citations (sources) to support words like "comparable" or "emblamatic" or "false" - those are words that editors themselves cannot supply:  a source must be used to supply them (see WP:Verifiability and WP:No original research). I know all that material is accurate and correct, but could you put in footnotes (citations) that use those words (or words similar to that)? --Noleander (talk) 14:56, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Noleander: what I did in the French version in order to support the first part of your remarks was a comprehensive, one by one, analysis and refutation of each of Pranaitis  claimed interpretation of his  Talmud’s extracts while presenting the original of the passage in question drawn from the online version of Talmud (example). concerning your second remark the list  of the websites given in reference and their undeniable antisemitic orientation is not  sufficient to demonstrate the sentence: “one of most emblematic of the antisemitism one Internet”?

--&#91;&#91;Haneelam&#93;&#93; (talk) 15:20, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Haneelam: (1) Regarding the  refutation of Pranatis' interpretations;  the way it works in the English language WP is that editors (you and me) cannot do the refutation ourselves; we have to find a "source" (that is, a book written by a scholar; or another authoritative author) that does the refutation.  Then we summarize what that source says about Pranaitis, and identify the source in the footnote.   To see an example of how a source is used that way, look at the sections "Use by apocalyptic cults" or "Talmud and Zohar" in this article.   (2) No, the rule used in the English language WP is that editors cannot draw conclusions such as "the book is emblematic ...".   Even if the conclusions are obvious, we cannot do that.  We have to find a source that draws the conclusion, and use the source's wording, and identify the source in a footnote.  There are some older WP arcticles written before 1996 that do not follow that rule; and also there are some newer articles on very simple subjects that do not follow the rule.  But for complex topics of religion/politics/bigotry the rule has to be followed.   The rules are defined in WP:Verifiability and WP:No original research.    --Noleander (talk) 22:48, 21 February 2011 (UTC)


 * Noleander,I have deleted the words "the book is emblematic ..." and replace them by "This text is widely used for....." according to your relevant remarks. Concerning the refutation of Pranaitis misleading interpretation of his quotes from the Talmud, as your remarks on this point are also accurate, maybe the work of Gil Student, The real truth about the Talmud, could be useful. Maybe you can summarize them for the article as my english has not the level required to meet Wikipedia's writing quality standards ?  --&#91;&#91;Haneelam&#93;&#93;  (talk) 05:26, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, Gil Student is a good source for the refutation.  A lot of his refutation material is already documented in the article Criticism of the Talmud, which is already mentioned in this article in the "See also" section.  It is okay to have some duplication.  Let me think about how to best incorporate that into this article.  A problem is that Gil Student does not talk about Pranaitis.  He talks about refutations in general, but he does not mention Pranaitis or the Unmasked book, and unless he does that it cannot be in this article.   I'll look some more and see what I can find. --Noleander (talk) 05:40, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Repetition
One point is made three times over, that Pranaitis did not know Hebrew or Aramaic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.148.93.177 (talk) 15:04, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

comparable with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Who says? In what way? The overall structure and content of the two books is quite different. At a minimum this needs a source. Zerotalk 06:11, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Zohar mistake
I am removing "Pranaitis presents the Zohar as if it were part of the Talmud. However the Zohar is a thirteenth-century Kabbalistic work and is not part of the Talmud." It is cited to Kaplan's book, but that book does not actually state that Pranaitis makes this mistake. In fact Pranaitis states explicitly that the Zohar is not part of the Talmud, see for yourself. I'm also removing the next sentence "It is also written in a significantly different form of Aramaic from the Talmud and there are no sources supporting that Pranaitis knew it", which seems to be part of the same error, but I'm not sure so put it back (with a citation!) if it still belongs. Zerotalk 07:08, 10 November 2013 (UTC)


 * From a cursory look, the number of mistakes are legion. I was just checking an anti-semitic reference and came upon this. ::http://www.talmudunmasked.com/chapter15.htm "X. NO FESTIVAL, NO MATTER HOW SOLEMN, MUST PREVENT THE BEHEADING OF A CHRISTIAN


 * In Pesachim (49b) it says:


 * 'Rabbi Eliezer said: It is permitted to cut off the head of an 'idiot' [one of the People of the Earth] on the feast of the Atonement when it falls on the Sabbath.(6) His disciples said to him: Rabbi, you should rather say to sacrifice. But he replied: By no means, for it is necessary to pray while sacrificing, and there is no need of prayers when you behead someone.'


 * (6) No day more holy than this could be imagined."
 * The word עם הארץ refers exclusively to Jews. Of course, all this would be primary research so no good. But taking the time to document his mistakes would be far more than he deserves. 66.87.66.196 (talk) 23:13, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Aramaic
It always annoys me when refutation of charlatans is carried out with hardly more rigor than what is being refuted. Bruce Afran's words on Pranaitis are unfortunately a good example. First Afran quotes from someone else Pranaitis' questioning from the trial:
 * Q: When did Baba Batra live and what was her activity?
 * A: I don't know.

It was of course a trick question, since Baba Batra is the name of a Talmudic tractate. Pranaitis knew that—his book claims to cite it repeatedly and correctly translates it as "the last gate"—but he was successfully tricked by the question. From this amusing anecdote, Afran infers: "Clearly Pranaitis had simply taken the Aramaic word baba ("gate") to be the Russian appellation for a grandmother or elderly woman." Really, from the answer "I don't know" so much can be inferred? Then "Katz had recognized Pranaitis as a quack who knew only the smallest amount of Hebrew and nothing at all of Aramaic". Pranaitis was a quack for sure, a rabid racist quack, but he had been a professional teacher of Hebrew for 5 years so he certainly didn't know "only the smallest amount of Hebrew". As for Aramaic, the questioning showed that Pranaitis was ignorant of several basic Talmudic concepts, not that he was ignorant of Aramaic. I'm not going to change anything, since that is what the source says. But I sure wish we had some proper scholarship to cite. Zerotalk 11:23, 11 November 2013 (UTC)