Avodah Zarah 26b

CLAIM:

Avodah Zarah 26b says Jews should not save gentiles or help gentile women give birth, proving Judaism teaches that non-Jewish lives are disposable.

STATUS:

Misleading — ripped from tractate context, internal qualifications omitted, and the most cited hostile phrase does not even appear on this page.

KEY COUNTERPOINTS:

1. The most common hostile citation attached to this page, “even the best of the gentiles should be killed,” does not appear in Avodah Zarah 26b. The phrase originates in the minor tractate Soferim 15:10, not in Avodah Zarah at all. Tosafot on Avodah Zarah 26b, quoting Yerushalmi Kiddushin 4:11, explains that even that passage refers to Egyptian soldiers during wartime against Israel, specifically the 600 chosen chariots of Pharaoh, and not to gentiles generally. Maimonides codifies this restriction in Hilchot Rotze’ach 4:11 as applying only to active military enemies. Attributing this phrase to Avodah Zarah 26b is a citation error that exposes the source chain, which runs from Pranaitis’s Talmud Unmasked (1892) through Elizabeth Dilling rather than from the text itself.

2. The hostile rules on this page apply to idolaters in an idolatry tractate during a specific period of Roman pagan pressure, not to non-Jews as a universal category. The tractate is called Avodah Zarah, which means foreign worship. Every rule in this sugya is framed by that context. The Mishnah states its own reason explicitly: “because she would be delivering a child for idolatry.” This is a religious-boundary ruling about participation in pagan religious reproduction, not a theological verdict on gentile personhood. Lifting a ruling about idolaters from an idolatry tractate and converting it into a general doctrine about all non-Jewish lives is a category substitution the text does not authorize.

3. The same page contains leniencies that hostile presentations always omit. The very sugya that contains the harsh material also rules that a Jewish woman may assist a gentile woman in childbirth for payment, explicitly to prevent enmity (mishum eivah). Rav Yosef states this directly. The pit-rescue discussion does not impose a flat rule against helping any non-Jew; it distinguishes between idolaters, heretics (minim), and informers (mosrim) across a graded spectrum, and it explicitly prohibits actively harming even those one is not obligated to rescue. Presenting half a sugya as if it were the whole page is not analysis; it is selection.

5. The codified Jewish law that governs actual practice goes in the opposite direction. Maimonides in Hilchot Melachim 10:12 rules that Jews must support poor gentiles alongside poor Jews, visit sick gentiles alongside sick Jews, and bury gentile dead alongside Jewish dead, grounding this in “the ways of peace.” The Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh De’ah 151 and 158, builds on the same principle. These are the operative rulings that governed how Jewish communities actually behaved. A single disputed sugya in a fourth-order tractate about idolatry cannot override the codified Rambam or the Shulchan Aruch as a statement of what Judaism teaches.

EVIDENCE:

• The Mishnah’s own stated reason for the midwifery restriction is religious, not racial: “because she would be delivering a child for idolatry.” The rule is about contributing to pagan worship, not about assigning lesser value to gentile lives.

• Rav Yosef explicitly permits a Jewish midwife to assist a gentile woman for payment, invoking mishum eivah (to prevent enmity) as a recognized halakhic justification. This appears on the same folio as the restriction.

• The pit-rescue discussion grades categories: ordinary idolaters need not be actively rescued but may not be actively harmed; minim, apostates, and informers are discussed under a separate, harsher category. The Talmud is drawing internal distinctions, not issuing a universal rule.

• Tosafot on Avodah Zarah 26b (s.v. velo moridin) cites the Yerushalmi Kiddushin 4:11 to restrict the harshest possible reading of the “best of gentiles” phrase to active wartime enemies, specifically Pharaoh’s soldiers.

• Maimonides, Hilchot Rotze’ach 4:11, codifies that the wartime restriction applies only to enemies in active military conflict against Israel.

• Maimonides, Hilchot Melachim 10:12, mandates care for gentile sick, poor, and dead as positive obligations grounded in the ways of peace.

• Sanhedrin 37a establishes that destroying or saving any single soul is treated by the Torah as destroying or saving an entire world, a principle applied across Jewish ethical literature without ethnic restriction.

PRIMARY SOURCES:

Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah 26a to 26b
https://www.sefaria.org/Avodah_Zarah.26a
Primary rabbinic source under dispute. Contains the harsh Mishnah restricting a Jewish midwife from delivering the child of a gentile/idolatrous woman, followed by Gemara discussion that qualifies the rule by allowing paid delivery because refusal could create enmity. Best used to show that viral clipped quotations are incomplete, not to claim the passage is morally clean on its own.

“A Jewish woman may not deliver the child of a gentile woman, because in doing so she is delivering a child who will engage in idol worship.”

“A Jewish woman may deliver the child of an Aramean woman in exchange for payment, but not for free.”

“Rav Yosef said in response: It is permitted in exchange for payment due to the enmity…”

↑↑↑ primary source under dispute, not best moral-defense source

Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Melachim 10:12 https://www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Kings_and_Wars.10.12
The operative codified law. Maimonides rules that Jews are obligated to support gentile poor, visit gentile sick, and bury gentile dead alongside Jews. This is the law that governed actual Jewish conduct and directly refutes the claim that Judaism treats non-Jews as disposable.

“our Sages commanded us to visit the gentiles when ill, to bury their dead in addition to the Jewish dead, and support their poor in addition to the Jewish poor for the sake of peace..”

↑↑↑ best source!

Tosafot on Avodah Zarah 26b, s.v. velo moridin
https://www.sefaria.org/Avodah_Zarah.26b
Tosafot’s commentary on this folio cites the Yerushalmi Kiddushin 4:11 to restrict the harshest possible reading to active wartime enemies, specifically the Egyptian soldiers of Pharaoh’s army: “from whose animals were they taken? From the God-fearers among the Egyptians. Thus ‘the best of gentiles’ who participated in war against Israel are meant.” This is the operative medieval interpretation of the passage, not the hostile polemicist’s version.

↑↑↑ best source!

Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Rotze’ach 4:11 https://www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Laws_of_Murder_and_the_Preservation_of_Life.4.11
Codifies the wartime-only restriction on Tosafot’s reading. Not a general license against helping gentiles; a narrow ruling about active military enemies. Provides the authoritative halakhic resolution of the ambiguous aggadic material on the same topic.

↑↑↑ best source!

Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 37a
https://www.sefaria.org/Sanhedrin.37a
Primary rabbinic source containing the famous “single soul” passage. The printed/Sefaria wording specifies “from the Jewish people,” so it should not be used as a clean universal quote. Its value is stronger as a counterweight to selective hostile readings of rabbinic texts, because the passage grounds the value of life in Adam being created alone and compares destroying one person to destroying an entire world.

“anyone who destroys one soul from the Jewish people… as if he destroyed an entire world”
“anyone who sustains one soul from the Jewish people… as if he sustained an entire world.”

↑↑↑ mid source

Avodah Zarah 27b–28a, Three Tales of Gentile Healing
Avodah Zarah 27b-28a, Three Tales of Gentile Healing.pdf
Three narratives from the tractate itself in which rabbis accept healing from gentile healers and permit medical care across Jewish-gentile lines. These appear in the same tractate as the disputed passage and demonstrate that the tractate’s stance toward gentiles is not uniformly hostile.

↑↑↑ mid source

TALMUDIC FORGERIES, A CASE STUDY IN ANTI-JEWISH PROPAGANDA
TALMUDIC FORGERIES, A CASE STUDY IN ANTI-JEWISH PROPAGANDA.pdf
Documents the forgery pipeline from Johann Eisenmenger (1700) through August Rohling (1871) and I. B. Pranaitis (1892). Directly addresses how misattributed Talmud citations were compiled and mass-distributed. Rohling was forced to withdraw his libel suit in Vienna in 1885 after academic experts demolished his credentials; Pranaitis was destroyed on cross-examination at the Beilis trial in 1913.

↑↑↑ mid source

STRONGEST COUNTER ARGUMENTS WORTH KNOWING:

• A critic is correct that the midwifery restriction and the pit-rescue gradations are real halakhic material with actual legal standing, not theoretical curiosities. Dismissing them as purely abstract would be dishonest.

• A critic can reasonably argue that the leniency of “to prevent enmity” is pragmatic rather than principled, which implies the default assumption is non-obligation toward gentiles rather than positive obligation.

• A critic pointing to the broader Talmudic corpus can cite additional passages in Bava Kamma, Sanhedrin, and Yevamot that contain similarly graded distinctions. Analyzing Avodah Zarah 26b in isolation does not resolve all of those. The honest answer is that the Talmud records debate across centuries and contains views ranging from hostile to generous toward gentiles; selecting only the hostile passages and presenting them as unified doctrine is the same methodological error as selecting only the generous ones.

• The strongest version of the accusation does not rely on the forged misattribution at all. It simply asks: why does a legal corpus contain these gradations in the first place? That question deserves an answer grounded in the historical context of Roman persecution and Jewish communal survival, not just a citation of Maimonides.

NOTES:

The accusation has two layers that need to be separated before responding.

The first layer is the forged citation: “even the best of the gentiles should be killed” does not appear in Avodah Zarah 26b. Identifying the actual source (Soferim 15:10, itself a minor tractate with limited authority) and the forgery chain (Pranaitis 1892, Rohling 1871, Eisenmenger 1700) reframes the debate from a textual argument to a documented propaganda operation. Rohling losing his academic chair and his libel suit in Vienna in 1885, and Pranaitis being exposed at the Beilis trial in 1913, are facts that belong in the response.

The second layer is the real material on the page. Concede it upfront, then force the opponent to defend the leap from “this page contains rules about idolaters in a Roman-period tractate on idol worship” to “this proves Judaism teaches non-Jewish lives are disposable.” That leap requires ignoring the stated reason in the Mishnah itself, the leniencies on the same folio, Tosafot’s restriction, Maimonides’ codified law, and Sanhedrin 37a. Ask the opponent to account for all of those before accepting their conclusion.

Clean one-line response: “The phrase most often quoted in connection with this page is not in Avodah Zarah 26b. What is on that page contains the restriction, its stated reason, and the same-page leniency for payment. Maimonides codifies the opposite conclusion in the operative law. That is not a religion that teaches non-Jews are disposable.”

Do not let the conversation migrate into a general defense of every uncomfortable Talmud passage. Keep it anchored: does this specific page prove the specific doctrine being claimed? No, and here is exactly why not.

**See more:

Avodah Zarah 27b-28a, Three Tales of Gentile Healing.pdf
Different But Equal, The Paradox of Chosenness.pdf
Jews, Gentiles, and the Modern Egalitarian Ethos, Some Tentative Thoughts.pdf
Loving-Kindness towards Gentiles according to the Early Jewish Sages.pdf
TALMUDIC FORGERIES, A CASE STUDY IN ANTI-JEWISH PROPAGANDA.pdf
The Status of Non-Jews in Jewish Law and Lore Today.pdf
The Trial of the Talmud, Paris 1240.pdf

Babylonian Talmud, Soncino Translation (Complete).pdf

**Related claims:

Avodah Zarah 36b
Bava Kamma 113a
The Talmud is a hateful or immoral book