| Summary: | In Germany, Jewish opposition against anti-talmudic literature was always noteworthy and sometimes even successful — but only towards the end of the nineteenth century were the Jews able to petition for their rights of religious literature before several courts of law. These courts, naturally, faced a serious dilemma, because the delicate question at the very heart of the cases was: Is slandering the Talmud equivalent to slandering Judaism? Being entirely unable to deal with this problem, the judges asked for Jewish expert witnesses, in general public figures of some scholarly caliber. The paper examines several Jewish expert opinions in their historical and theological context and pays special attention to the first of such testimonies delivered in 1877 by Dr. Manuel Joel, the liberal rabbi of the Breslau Jewish Community and a well-known scholar of medieval philosophy. It will be shown how those liberal rabbis and scholars defended the authority of the Talmud and how Orthodox circles reacted to their views, arriving finally at a deeper understanding of both the internal Jewish debates of the time and the Jewish struggle against religious antisemitism.
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