Talmud / Mishna · Shelomo ben Shaul Albagali (scribe) · 13th c. · Ubeda · Codex · Talmud · Uncensored · Pre-Expulsion Spain

תלמוד בבלי מסכת עבודה זרה — היחיד שלא צונזר

Talmud Bavli, Tractate Avodah Zarah — the only known uncensored copy

Ubeda, Spain, 1290 (11 Kislev 5051) · The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary

The only surviving manuscript of Tractate Avodah Zarah — the Talmud's tractate on idolatry — that has never been touched by a censor's hand. Copied in the Andalusian town of Ubeda, Spain, on 11 Kislev 5051 (1290) by the scribe Shelomo ben Shaul Albagali, the codex preserves passages that Christian church authorities later cut, blackened out, or rewrote in nearly every other Talmud manuscript and printed edition — especially passages they read as referring to Jesus or Christianity. Because this copy was already complete two and a half centuries before the systematic 16th-century censorship campaigns began (and somehow escaped them ever after), it shows the masekhet as Spanish Jewish scholars knew it on the eve of the 1492 expulsion. (66 leaves, paper and parchment, 26.8 × 21 cm; one page is missing between folios 24 and 25.) A downloadable PDF facsimile is also available.