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It was a task to confiscate from a nation of readers a beloved ocean of a book that takes a lifetime to read, but the King of France and his monastic henchmen in their black cowls managed to haul twenty-four cartloads of manuscripts of the Talmud to the square outside Notre Dame de Paris. It was in what the Christians call “the year of grace” 1242 that they burned them all. It is estimated that there were ten thousand volumes. That is about the size of my personal library; but back then a library of a few hundred volumes was considered vast. True, it was not the worst atrocity against books: only a few decades before the Crusaders, a ragtag army of mainly French and German scum, had burnt the great library of Constantinople. It is because of that act of barbarism, far more than the destruction of the library at Alexandria, that so many works of the Classical tradition are lost.

Tetouan , Tanger-téuan , Morocco , Germany , New-york , United-states , Constantinople , Istanbul , Turkey , Jerusalem , Israel-general , Israel