Steinsaltz Talmud French Translation Completed Worldwide

In a festive event held this week at the residence of Israeli President Isaac Herzog, the completion of the French translation of all volumes of the Babylonian Talmud with the commentary of the late Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz zt"l was celebrated, with the support of the Patrick and Lina Drahi Foundation under the management of Amalia Zarqa.

Rabbi Steinsaltz's son and president of the Steinsaltz Institutions in Israel, Rabbi Meni Even-Israel, shared the unique family connection between his father's lifelong Torah enterprise and the French language in a special interview with JFeed: "French is the third most spoken language in the world and is considered the language of intellectuals, and on a personal note, France is also the birthplace of my late mother," revealed Rabbi Even-Israel.

A Date That Says Everything

The date chosen for this special event was no accident. The 9th of Tammuz marks 782 years since the burning of the Talmud in Paris in the year 1242, when thousands of Talmud volumes were set ablaze by order of King Louis IX.

The launching of the late Rabbi Steinsaltz's elucidated Babylonian Talmud specifically in French on this day serves as a definitive answer and a living testament to the fire of Torah burning within the souls of Jews studying all over the world, despite persecution and antisemitism throughout the generations.

Rabbi Even-Israel described the workflow behind translating his father's lifelong work, the unique method of reviving the Talmudic debate and its sages in the commentary, noting that his father "saw the Talmudic sages Abaye and Rava alive in his mind's eye." He also revealed the next major initiative of the Steinsaltz Institutions: translating Rabbi Steinsaltz's books on the world of Hasidism into English and other languages.

The French translation of the Steinsaltz Babylonian Talmud marks another significant milestone in spreading the light of Torah to the entire world.

Rabbi Meni Even-Israel (Photo: Srugim Studio )

How Rabbi Steinsaltz Changed the Way Jews Learn Gemara

For centuries, studying the Babylonian Talmud, known as Gemara, required years of yeshiva training and a teacher to guide you through its dense Aramaic text, cryptic abbreviations, and compressed legal debate. Most Jews never accessed it directly at all.

Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz changed that.

His landmark elucidated edition of the Talmud, decades in the making, did something revolutionary: it restored the vowels to the Aramaic text, added punctuation, translated difficult words inline, and provided running commentary in plain modern Hebrew, making the page readable for the first time to anyone with basic Jewish literacy. He famously said he wanted the Talmud to be as accessible as a newspaper.

The impact was seismic. Learners who had been locked out of the primary text of Jewish law and thought could now open a page of Gemara and begin. Study groups multiplied. Ba'alei teshuva, Jews returning to observance, found an entry point. Daf Yomi participants, who complete the entire Talmud on a seven-and-a-half-year daily study cycle, increasingly turned to the Steinsaltz edition as their primary text.

When the Steinsaltz Talmud was completed in English in 2020, it marked the first time the full Babylonian Talmud had been translated into English with such depth of commentary. The French translation, now complete, carries that same mission into a new language, and a new generation.