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August 20, 2024

The "Great Tradition of the West" is Burning Books?

Tyrants take away your books "for your own good." That's what's happening at New College Florida right now.

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Modern Medieval

by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele

Just a quick one to let you all know that we have a new piece up, now live on MSNBC about the right-wing takeover of New College Florida.

Last week, before students and faculty had returned to campus, the university put entire library of the Gender and Diversity Center into the dumpster. All those books, destroyed.

screenshot of the MSNBC article
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The parallel we see is to something we talk about in The Bright Ages, the burning of books in Paris in 1241 CE. As we write:

In 1240, King Louis IX of France (also known as St. Louis) decided, without consulting the Jewish community, that the Talmud — the primary text of Jewish law — was “dangerous.” He decided that, in fact, this sacred book that had been used for nearly a millennium was heretical and that the Jews had strayed from “Biblical Judaism” and into error with their newfangled medieval Rabbinic Jewish practice. Louis IX, he told himself, was just the guy to help them out.

The Talmud was put on trial, the book literally prosecuted by the chancellor of the University of Paris, the bishop of Paris, the archbishop of Sens and other Christian clerics, with the “case” presided over by Louis’ mother. But the outcome was predetermined. Even as the Jewish community protested, the king seized all the manuscript copies of the Talmud he could lay his hands on. Then, in June 1241, in a square in Paris just across the river from Notre-Dame, he burned those cartloads of books…

But there was another path. In the 13th century, just across the River Seine from the pyre of burning books, students at the University of Paris (including luminaries like St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas) were studying Jewish and Islamic philosophy with such relish that they were dismissed by outsiders as ideologues. History doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it echoes. 

Read the full article on MSNBC here.

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