Tractatus de imposturis et ceremoniis Iudaeorum nostri temporis

but have shamefully retreated from their ancestral religion. A specific kingdom of the Jews was occupied by Kings from the tribe of Judah who sat at the helm of the Commonwealth. Sacred rites were administered by the Levites and were celebrated according to the ancestral rite instituted by the Lord. But with the Messiah exhibited, the shadows ceased; the earthly kingdom having been overturned, a celestial and spiritual one arose. Since, therefore, Jerusalem has been stormed and taken, the temple destroyed, and the Levitical and ceremonial cult abolished, while they themselves were partly cruelly killed and partly scattered to all the corners of the world, who could be so impudent as to dare to assert that these Thalmudists followers of the Talmud are descended from Judah, especially since they have nothing else by which they can boast of the law of Moses, for they have bound themselves to far graver crimes and wickednesses than the Mahometists themselves. If, as they do not fear to affirm, they were Abrahamites, they would at least inhabit their ancestral soil and the temple of the Lord, or at the very least, they would not be destitute of prophets who might interpret divine oracles and raise up their minds, afflicted and dismayed by a harsh storm, with the consolation of the Spirit, as we read happened in the Babylonian captivity. Indeed, the saying of the prophet Isaiah found a happy catastrophe for them when, in the fifth chapter of his prophecy, predicting the devastation and overturning of the kingdom, he says: "I will remove the hedge of my vineyard (says the Lord) and it will be for feeding: I will tear down its wall, and it will be for trampling: I will set it in desolation: it will not be pruned nor dug, and briar and thorn will ascend: I will also command the clouds not to rain rain upon it." Do not the walls of the city of Jerusalem lie overturned before our eyes? Has the empire not been lifted and the temple prostrated? In place of a purer and sounder doctrine:

The thistle and the paliurus rising with sharp thorns,
Unhappy darnel and sterile oats hold sway.

All hope of pardon and grace seems to be cut off from them, since the Lord says He will command the clouds not to rain upon it. For the divine clemency and mercy, with which the Lord pursues us in Christ Jesus His only son, is not placed before their eyes, since they seem to themselves sufficiently and more than learned if they grasp the mysteries of the Talmud and the explanations of the Schemhāphore the Shem HaMephorash, or explicit name of God. These books teem with so many impostures, most putrid lies, and horrible blasphemies that they seem to exceed even human belief. They are graphically depicted by Isaiah, who compares them to a crushed piece of pottery, the fragments of which are not suitable to contain water, fire, or anything similar. Hosea, chapter 1, agrees with this, when by the command of the Lord he gives a name to his son, bearing the type of the Israelite people, Loami not my people. "For," he says, "it is not my people, nor am I their God." That false and empty little glory, therefore, with which they boast of being born of Abraham, falls away; they to whom the Lord deigned to grant the law, circumcision, and the land blessed with flowing milk and honey. Since they have long since been deprived of these, they bear only some likeness and appearance of Jews, being in fact worse than the Saracens. By what name, then, you will ask, do I judge them to be distinguished, by what proper and certain word are they to be called? I do not hesitate to call them Thalmudists, Kabbalists, Mahometists, and finally, the mercenary soldiers who are the advance guard of the lies of Satan. For they are depicted by these colors in Matthew 3, John 8, and by the Lord in Revelation 2. The reason for these names is this: the Hebrew doctors and Rabbis, having infected and corrupted the true and genuine sense of the sacred books, have invented a special book for themselves, which is named the Talmud. What dire and horrible blasphemies and insults it contains against Christ is not easy to say. For, like the poison of a bloated dragon, they vomit and pour out all the venom of their bitterness into one against the Lord, and, rivals of the Koran and the Mahometists, they introduce the observances of so many feasts and ceremonies that they value their own invention far more and greater than the very law of Moses, which they impiously violate in this manner. Therefore, let them be called Thalmudists, from the name of the book transferred to its students, who attribute more faith to traditions produced by the instinct of Satan than to the eternal and inviolable truth of God promulgated through Moses, the Prophets, and the Apostles.