Myth: The Talmud commands Jews to hate and kill non-Jews.

“The Talmud commands Jews to hate and kill non-Jews.”

What the Talmud actually is

The Talmud is not a single book of doctrine but a sprawling, argument-by-argument legal commentary: the Mishnah, a code of Jewish law compiled around 200 CE, plus centuries of rabbinic debate recorded around it, the Gemara. Two versions exist, the Jerusalem Talmud, compiled in Tiberias around 400 CE, and the larger Babylonian Talmud, finished around 500 CE. It records dissenting opinions side by side and rarely issues a single flat command on anything, which is exactly why a bad-faith reader can mine it for an isolated line and present that line as “the” Talmudic position.

Origin of the claim: a 13th-century show trial and a 19th-century forger

The charge that the Talmud is a manual for hating and killing non-Jews is not new, and it did not start as scholarship. In 1240, Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, brought 35 charges against the Talmud before Pope Gregory IX, leading to the Disputation of Paris: a tribunal before King Louis IX where four rabbis, including Yechiel of Paris, were permitted only to defend the text, not to argue its merits. The tribunal ruled against the Talmud, and in 1242, some 24 wagonloads of handwritten Talmudic manuscripts were publicly burned in Paris, a loss that crippled French Jewish scholarship for a generation.

The modern version of the libel comes from the 1871 tract “Der Talmudjude” by August Rohling, a Catholic professor whose claims were later demolished in an Austrian courtroom. Rohling’s material was recycled by Justinas Pranaitis, a Lithuanian Catholic priest who could not read Aramaic, the Talmud’s primary language, in his 1892 pamphlet “The Talmud Unmasked.” Pranaitis reappeared as the prosecution’s star witness in the 1913 Beilis trial in Kiev, where Mendel Beilis, a Jewish factory clerk, was tried for the ritual murder of a Christian boy, a blood libel with no evidence behind it. Under cross-examination, defense attorneys asked Pranaitis about “Baba Batra,” a Talmudic tractate, phrased as if it were a person’s name; Pranaitis answered “I don’t know,” exposing that he had no real command of the texts he claimed to be unmasking. The jury acquitted Beilis. Pranaitis’s pamphlet, discredited at trial, still supplies most of the quotes that circulate today.

The evidence: the strongest version, and the documented record against it

The most-cited line is “Kill the best of the gentiles,” attributed to Soferim 15 or a Yalkut Shimoni. Those words do not appear in the Talmud in that form. The line traces to a midrashic comment, in the name of Shimon bar Yochai, about Egyptian soldiers who chased the fleeing Israelites at the Red Sea after having appeared to show mercy during the plagues; the point is that even seemingly righteous men who join an army of pursuit forfeit protection in that specific wartime moment, not a general license to kill non-Jews. A second common fabrication, “goyim are not human, they are beasts” attributed to Baba Metzia 114b, does not exist there at all; scholars who have traced the citation find no such comparison in the actual text. A third widely shared line inventing a supposed legal text, “Gad Shas,” permitting sexual assault of non-Jewish girls, is a total fabrication: neither the quote nor the source it names exists in any rabbinic canon.

Against this, the Talmud’s actual, checkable content runs the other way. It teaches that all humanity descends from a single Adam so that no person can claim “my father was greater than yours” (Sanhedrin 37a), and Jewish law as codified from the Talmud forbids killing a non-Jew as murder. The Noahide Laws, the Talmud’s own framework for gentile ethics, hold righteous non-Jews to a shared universal moral code and promise them a place in the world to come, the opposite of the dehumanization the myth claims. Words like goy and gentile are, in their technical Talmudic use, neutral legal categories for purity and ritual law, not slurs; propagandists routinely substitute a harsher gloss for the plain sense of the word to manufacture shock.

Who pushes it today

The claim is a staple of neo-Nazi and white-nationalist forums and has jumped repeatedly into mainstream social media. In 2023, an image compiling fabricated and mistranslated “Talmud quotes” was shared by public figures including Dan Bilzerian, to his roughly 1.6 million followers on X, and Candace Owens; the post reached nearly 6 million views before rabbis and researchers traced each line back to Rohling and Pranaitis and posted the actual sources. The same material, sometimes cut-and-pasted verbatim from Pranaitis’s 1892 pamphlet, also circulates in antisemitic Islamist propaganda and in Protocols of the Elders of Zion-adjacent conspiracy content, which frequently pairs it with claims about Jews secretly controlling banks, media and governments.

What’s genuinely harsh in the text, and why it doesn’t prove the myth

The Talmud does contain harsh and particularist passages: debates about gentile testimony, property law that once distinguished Jew from non-Jew, and rhetoric shaped by centuries of Jews living as a persecuted minority under Rome, the Church and Islamic empires. Serious critics, not only propagandists, have argued some of that law reflects its era rather than eternal ethics.

None of that is the claim the myth makes. Not every line is comfortable to a modern reader, but the specific “kill the gentiles” quotations built into a genocidal case against Jews are demonstrably forged or ripped from context, and the text’s own governing principle, one shared Adam, one shared dignity, is the passage the propagandists never quote.