Libels about the Talmud are almost as old as the Talmud itself, and have been used as a justification for centuries of Jew-hate. Misquoting Talmudic texts or taking them out of context is an age-old method used to incite antisemitism.
In fact, most people do not even know what the Talmud is: the textual record of generations of rabbinic debate about law, philosophy, and biblical interpretation, compiled between the 3rd and 8th centuries and structured as commentary on the Mishnah with stories interwoven.
The libels continue to this very day and are being disseminated online by the worst of the worst.
The supposed quotes and meaning behind them that we are seeing these days come from a Third Reich book: Unmoral im Talmud (translation: Immorality In The Talmud) By Nazi Alfred Rosenberg.
I have decided to publish this new series as an online, easy-to-find record for fighting these libels. The responses are primarily based on those given by Rabbi Yisrael M. Eliashiv, who goes by the name Shevereshtus on Twtter/X, but in some cases also other sources. Each post will deal with one of the libels.
Baba Mezia 24a: If a Jew finds an object lost by a Gentile “Goy” it does not have to be returned
This is another mistranslation and taken wildly out of context.
We start by discussing a case where a man saves a lost object from a wild animal, at sea, the flooding of a river, or finds it in a public place.
There’s a debate: did the owner despair of finding the object and, as a result, it is considered ownerless so the person who saved it is permitted to keep it, or does it still belong to his original owner who still hopes to retrieve it eventually?
“Is the item owned or ownerless?” is the basic gist of the debate, and the answer is that if you find it in a place where the majority of its inhabitants are non-Jewish, it is considered ownerless (even if it belonged to a Jew in the first place) because it is not the way of people to try to get their lost objects back.
So Baba Mezia 24a has nothing to do whether the owner of the object isn’t Jewish so you can keep it, and if he was Jewish, you need to give it back. It has to do with whether the majority in the place are likely to give back such lost items or not, and it simply was not the case in those societies at the time of the Talmud.
Furthermore, it is unequivocally forbidden by Jewish law to steal from a Gentile.
