The Censored Execution

A recent daf, Sanhedrin 43a, is famous among censored Talmudic texts. This is either self-censored for self-protection or the result of Christian censors. Given the story is about Jesus, who may (or may well not) be the same as founder of Christianity, and given that it has negative things to say (that he was found guilty of sorcery and seduction towards idolatry), it could well be externally imposed.

Here is the page in the Vilna Shas,

where you can see the largish gap at the bottom. This has Rabbenu Chananel wrapped around the bottom, but we would certainly have expected the printed portion to run longer.

Meanwhile, the much earlier Venice printing, which runs with approximately the same first and last words on each page — because that printing set the standard pagination — but will differ in first and last word on each line, has the following:

This fills out the full page.

Finally, here is the Munich 95 manuscript on that portion:

Usually the text is rather clear, but in this instance, the text was written, and then someone rubbed out most of the passage. If you look at Hachi Garsinan, they reconstruct it partly. That is, they certainly can guess what most of the letters should be, but some rubbed-out letters are sufficiently present that they can say that this is an aleph, corresponding to an aleph that they know should be there. I don’t know at what point the censorship of this passage occurred in Munich 95 occurred.