INTRODUCTION During the Middle Ages the Talmud was the exclusive property of the Jews. Tragically it was not even allowed to be their property, for the persecutions of the Jewish “heretics” (and later of the Protestant heretics too) extended also to their sacred books. As a consequence, very few manuscripts of the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds survive. With the revival of Hebrew and the study of the Hebrew Bible that came with the Reformation, there came also an interest in other Jewish works.