Document 3. A responsum by Isaac de Lattes, Heb. MS 24, …sterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, fol. 72b–73b.

A Ruling against Rabbis who have Sought to Delay the Printing of the Zohar on the Grounds of the Government Edicts [ordering] Burning of the Talmud

"Whoever is for the Lord, come here! And all the Levites rallied to him,"¹ as well as all the sons [i.e. adherents] of Simeon, sons of the divine Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai. For I am moved by zeal against those who pretend to be pious, who dress themselves in alien [gentile] dress to prevent [the people from receiving its needed] nourishment,² sealing and obstructing the mouths of those who seek the Lord, saying that it it is bitterly evil to print the Book of the Zohar and [other] kabbalistic works. Their only motive is hatred and envy.³

Let us be as little children. Let us go to school and recite our lessons: "Envy among intellectuals increases wisdom."⁴ But I have seen the opposite. Their hatred and competition is extinguishing [the fire of] wisdom. If [the rabbis] of blessed memory were correct in saying "Multiplying books increases wisdom," it must also without doubt be true that limiting [the number of books] will cause knowledge to decrease. What is even a greater shame and disgrace, those who rise up against the Lord and His Torah previously agreed that [the printing] was permissible, but now they reverse themselves—claiming to be pious but [in fact] hypocritical, blind, ignorant, foolish, and without any comprehensive understanding [hashkafa] of the words of the Sages of blessed memory.  They have not mastered the craft of the sainted forefathers, for these blind Jews [ha-ivrim ha-ivrim], foolish and with weak ideas, say that since we live in the time of the government's decree of burning the Talmud they had found a valley and erected a fence in it.⁵

Woe to the ears that hear this. Ahab served the Baal only a little but these serve him a lot. [The Sages] have ruled concerning improvements: "Be careful not to add too much." How much more does this apply concerning problems. In order to to ruin 'the moist as well as the dry'⁶ they are making the punishment worse, forbidding that which has not been forbidden, about matters which the hand of the wisely governing rulers have never concerned themselves. For [the government] never had anything but good in mind [in burning the Talmud], wishing to remove what they considered thorns and irritants that lead to quarrels between the Aramean and the Israelite. Now these rabbis come to uproot everything; they are annihilators and destroyers of the world.

If they had lived during the time of Rabbi Akiva, would they have done as he did to hand themselves and their lives over for the sanctification of God against the edict? As in the following:

Our Rabbis taught: Once the wicked government  issued a decree forbidding the Jews to occupy themselves with the Torah. Pappus b. Judah came and found R. Akiba publicly bringing gatherings together and occupying himself with the Torah. He said to him: Akiba, are you not afraid of this nation? He replied: I will explain it to you with a parable. A fox was once walking on the path on the bank of a river, and he saw fishes darting from one place to another. He said to them: From what are you running? They replied: From the nets cast for us by men. He said to them: Would you like to come up on to the dry land so that you and I can live together in the way that my ancestors lived with your ancestors? They replied: Art thou the one that they call the cleverest of animals? You are nothing but foolish. If we are afraid in the place in which we live, how much more in the element in which we would die! So it is with us. If we are afraid while we occupy ourselves with the Torah of which it is written, 'For that is thy life and the length of thy days,'⁷  how much more so when we cease [studying] the words of the Torah.⁸

Note that R. Akiba did not restrict and set up an edict not to study Torah. Rather he fulfilled that which is obligatory for all Israel to do, for in a time of religious persecution one must [allow oneself] to be killed rather than transgress even over [an apparently trivial matter just as the customary Jewish manner of tying] a shoe lace as is written in the chapter Ben Sorer U-Moreh [of tractate Sanhedrin]. And this is [fol. 73a] what every Jewish man should and must do, to be willing to die over anything during a time of religious persecution [shmad], and not to restrict access to the Torah, God forbid.

Note what R. Judah ben Baba did, as is written in tractate Sanhedrin, chapter 1. This is the language of the Gemara if I have not forgotten what I learned as a child.

'May this man indeed be remembered for blessing—his name is R. Judah b. Baba; were it not for him, the laws of kenasot [fines] would have been forgotten in Israel.' Forgotten? Then they could have been learned! But [folio 14a] these laws might have lapsed [since without properly ordained judges they could not have been applied]. For once the government⁹ decreed as an act of religious persecution (shmad) that whoever ordained should be put to death...the city in which the ordination took place demolished, and the boundaries¹⁰ within which it had been performed, uprooted. What did R. Judah b. Baba do? He went and sat between two great mountains, ... and between two Sabbath boundaries, [that is] between [the cities of] Usha and Shefaram  and there ordained five elders: namely, R. Meir,  R. Judah, R. Simeon, R. Yossi, and R. Eliezer b. Simeon¹¹.... As soon as their enemies discovered them, they came to kill them. [R.Judah ben Baba] urged [his pupils]: 'My children, flee.' They said to him, 'What will become of you, Rabbi?' He told them: 'I lie before them like a stone which none [is concerned to] overturn.'¹² It was said that they [i.e., the enemies] did not stir from the spot until they had driven three hundred iron spear-heads into his body, making it like a sieve.

This is the sort of limit [gader] which they imposed out of religious conviction [li-shema'] at a time of  religious persecution which, in order to defeat,  [Rabbi Judah ben Baba] gave himself up to death. That is why he is remembered for a blessing.

  These [opponents of publishing the Zohar, on the other hand], whose intent is to make the religious persecution even worse should be remembered for a curse as is written: "The people curse those who hold back grain [at a time of famine], but a blessing is on the head of those who sell it."¹³ Moreover, may the curse of God fall upon these evil ones: may they who stretch out the fishermen's nets be trapped in them themselves, and be repaid by the work of their own hands. "May [the curse] fall upon the heads of the evil ones."¹⁴

They go beyond R. Yossi ben Kisma who neither wished, nor ever considered, issuing an edict against R. Haninah ben Tradion or R. Akiva¹⁵ when the latter were violating the government's persecutory anti-religious edict [gezerat ha-malkhut bi-shemad] and endangered their lives, even though there is a well known principle that "that which is phsyically dangerous should be treated more stringently than matters which are forbidden [merely] on religious grounds."¹⁶ Rather, he allowed R. Hanina ben Tradion to do [what he wished] because there was no halakhic basis on which to stop someone who wishes to martyr himself. Instead, [R. Yossi] spoke to [R. Hanina] as a form of friendly advice. And R. Akiva (who was present when R. Yossi ben Kisma lectured R. Hanina) did not take this advice.¹⁷ [Note that] R. Yossi did not say [to R. Hanina]: "This is the law according to the Torah." Rather he told him: "I am telling you something reasonable." But these rabbis take it upon themselves to issue an edict and to excommunicate over something which was not demanded by the government. Quite to the contrary, the government allowed [printing] the Zohar and [other] kabbalistic works. Here is the text of the Gemara:

Our Rabbis taught: When R.Yossi ben Kisma was ill, R. Hanina ben Teradion went to visit him. He said to him: 'My brother, don't you know that it is Heaven  that has ordained this [Roman] nation to reign? For though it destroyed His House, burnt His Temple, slew His pious ones, and caused His best ones to perish, it still continues! And yet, I have heard about you that you sit and occupy yourself with the Torah, and gather public assemblies, and keep a scroll of the Law in your bosom!'  He [Hanina ben Tradion] replied, 'Heaven will show mercy.' [To which R. Yossi] replied: 'I am telling you something rational, and [all] you [can] say is "Heaven will show mercy"? It would surprise me if they don't burn both you and the scroll of the Law with fire.' 'Rabbi,' said R. Akiva, 'How do I stand with regard to the world to come?' .... Just a few days later R. Yossi ben Kisma died and all the great men of the city¹⁸ gave a great eulogy over him. On their return, they found R. Hanina ben Teradion sitting and occupying himself with the Torah, publicly gathering assemblies, and keeping a scroll of the Law in his bosom. 

Note how they reacted to the words of R. Yossi ben Kisma, [even though] he was obviously close to the government as we can see from the eulogy [the gentiles offered] for him and this is why he said what he did. But R. Hanina ben Tradion and R. Akiva did the opposite of what he suggested, because they wanted to fulfill the interpretation of the verse '[You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and] all your soul' as meaning 'even if it is at the cost of your life.' And even so, R. Yossi—who was a Sage—did not wish to issue an edict against them or excommunicate them, for their is neither a law [on which to base that] nor a judge [who has the power] to do that. But these "lay judges" (for we are all lay judges [as opposed to judges with the official authority derived from ancient ordination]) are so brazen as to illegally excommunicate. Woe unto them. The [decree of excommunication] applies rather to them.¹⁹

Some of them have even done worse and stated that studying the Zohar leads to heresy and that therefore [the book] should be hidden away [ta'un genizah] or burned, a process of eliminating the holy.²⁰ "Hush! So that no one may utter the name of the Lord."²¹ Woe! What has happened to us! Now I shall respond: "Whoever shall seek to avenge the shaming of Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai should also seek to avenge the shame of the printers [of this book] from those who insult angels of the Lord. How can they say [such things] about R. Simeon bar Yohai, all of whose words are holy of holies? And so what if a fool or too-hasty [reader]²² errs in them? Think rather about what the Torah said: "And you shall walk in His ways."²³ [In a case where] people wouldn't [dare to] say a certain thing as when the Creator, may He be exalted, says "Let us make man"²⁴ and at this point they were told "Learn from your creator."²⁵ Thus [our Sages] of blessed memory said in the Midrash:²⁶ "R. Samuel bar Nahman says in the name of R. Jonathan. When Moses was writing the Torah, he would write out each event, day by day. When he came to the verse, "And the Lord said, 'Let us make man in our image,'" he said to [God], "Master of the universe. Why are you giving an opening to heretics, I wonder." [God] replied to him: "Just write. Whoever wants to make a mistake will do so."

 Based on this midrash, Maimonides (of blessed memory) wrote in the introductin to The Guide [to the Perplexed], and I quote:

God knows that I did not deviate and was very worried to compose the things that I wanted to compose in this tract because they are hidden matter. No member of our nation has composed a book about them, other than this one, during this period of exile. How then can I initiate now and compose a book about them? But I relied on two principles. First is what [the Sages] said concerning a like matter: "It is time to act on behalf of the Lord. They have repealed your Torah." And second, their saying: "Let all your deeds be for the sake of heaven." And I relied on these two principles [fol. 73a] in composing some of my chapters in this tract. In the end, I am the sort of man who, when matters trouble him and the way seems narrow and he cannot find a ploy to teach that truth which is determinable by logical proof except by a method which is appropriate to one excellent individual yet inappropriate to ten thousand fools, I choose to say it for itself, and I am not sensitive to the mockery of the many. I choose to save the one excellent individual from [the mire] into which he has sunk, and I shall cast light upon his confusion until he is perfected and healed.

Note that this scholar, the brilliant [Maimonides] of blessed memory, understood from the knowledge he had of his creator that He created the entire world in order to produce a single righteous man, and he did not worry about how many evil and animals there would be in it, as the Rabbis of blessed memory said: "'This is all of man.' All of the world was created for nothing but to accompany man."

And now, [let us move on] to our issue. R. Simeon bar Yohai of blessed memory, when he wrote his book, did not worry about those who might err [in studying] his words. He did what was proper to do, and the fools who made mistakes would have to pay the price in the future.

They [the opponents of publishing the Zohar] have argued that holy names [of God] are thrown into the trash in the process of printing. That craft "casts the truth on the ground and tramples it underfoot." To this I reply: "Are there any names holier than those written in the Torah? So why didn't our predecessors, the great scholars of all time, worry about this when they saw the craft of printing? It is obvious, therefore, that these [printed words] are not considered holy. That it why it was the custom not to treat them as holy, for they are "written" by gentiles with no intent nor for the purpose of being holy. They are not produced in sacred purity. It is [in fact] better to use these [printed] books than to used the manuscripts written by the hand of a Jewish man which have greater holiness and yet it is impossible to properly guard their sacredness.

To sum up, I see nothing but meanness and great stupidity in this [objection to printing the Zohar]. The printers are blessed of the Lord and need not fear the empty curse; these [opponents] curse, but God blesses [the publishers]. The [opponents] shall don shame, but the servants of the Lord shall rejoice. And you, heroes of Israel, skilled in the war of the Torah, grab up your shield and rise to help the Lord as heroes, each man with his sword on his hip and the sword of the Torah from the fear at night, the fear of hell less we walk in darkness without light in the dim, without, God forbid, great illumination [Zohar]. In the illumination they will shine like the light of the heavens and those who bring benefit to the many shall be as the stars for all time.

Here Pesaro, in the year [5]318 [ישב"ו ישרים את פניך], 14 Tamuz.

The youthful Isaac son of my master, Rabbi Immanuel, may his memory be for the life of the world to come, de Lattes.

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