The censorship of Hebrew books צנזורה על ספרי ישראל

It began in 1553, when the Talmud was burned on the Campo de' Fiori in Rome, and a few years later it was decided that correcting was more profitable than burning. From 1554 a Hebrew book could be printed in Italy only by licence, and the licence came after deletions.

The deletions followed two marks. The first was anything read as said about Christianity: names, passages in Sanhedrin and Avodah Zarah, the word min—and thence come the blank squares on the page and the "Tzeduki", "Epikoros", "Kuti" written in where names had stood. The second was the word goy and all that stood near it: it was replaced by "akum", short for "servants of stars and constellations", that is, by the pagan of antiquity, who had nothing to do with the Christian neighbour. That replacement stands in printed editions to this day.

The best-known work of the kind is the Basel Talmud of 1578–1581: it was corrected by a baptised Jew, and corrected thoroughly. The tractate Avodah Zarah dropped out of that edition entirely. Later censors served in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and in the Russian Empire, where until the 1860s the Hebrew presses were kept at Vilna and Zhitomir under special supervision.

What follows for reading. A variant in the printed Gemara is not always a copyist's slip: sometimes it is the censor's work, and then the old manuscripts and the first, pre-censorship editions read otherwise. This must be looked at every time the passage concerns gentiles—and we try to note such places.