Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 110
110 Mohamed Arshad Ahmedi Christendom from the Turks (in 1529). . the Pope ordered the burning of the Arabic text of the Qur’an immediately after its publication in Venice, which was known at the time as ‘the whore of the Turks. ’. . . . . . Adrian Reland’s De religione mohammedica (1705), the first reasonably objective work on Islam after Ross’s Pansebeia, was promptly placed on the Roman Index of prohibited books;’ ( p. 20). The Jews also suffered greatly at the hands of the Christians whose conspiracy of book burning was part of the church’s cam- paign against Jewish blasphemies. The church took the matter with the utmost seriousness, and the Jews lamented the loss or desecra- tion of their holy books. Professor Leonard Levy writes in great detail in his book Treason Against God : ‘Gregory IX ordered the Talmud to be burned throughout Christendom for its alleged blasphemies against Christ and Mary. . . . Louis IX delighted in burning the Talmud. In 1248 another huge batch went up in flames in Paris. . . In Aragon, where the Talmud was not burned, it was confiscated and censored. Jews were required to turn in all their writings under sentence of death of blasphemy if they failed to comply. . . . In the 1550s Jewish books as well as rare rabbinic manuscripts were burned by the hundred thousand in Italian cities. . . . As late as 1629 an Italian cardinal boasted of having collected ten thousand outlawed Jewish books for destruction. ’ (pp. 116/117). Similar narrations are noted by Rev. I. B. Pranaitis in The Talmud Unmasked, which is a book about the secret rabbinical teachings concerning Christians : ‘In 553, the Emperor Justinian forbade the spread of the Talmudic books throughout the Roman Empire. In the 13th century ‘Popes Gregory IX and Innocent IV condemned the books of the Talmud as containing every kind of vileness and blasphemy against Christian truth, and ordered them to be burned because they spread many horrible heresies. ’ (p. 21).