There is nothing new about the censorship and burning of books. Rev. Terry Jones, the Florida minister who drew international attention recently with his threatened burning of the Qur’an, has a lot of company.

Consider the Qur’an. Muslims believe that it was revealed by God to the Prophet Muhammad, transmitted over time by the Angel Gabriel, beginning in 610 CE until the Prophet’s death in 632 CE.

The Qu’ran preaches the oneness of God. He is the creator of Heaven and Earth, of life and death. It also emphasizes God’s divine mercy and compassion. As his omnipotence is tempered with justice, he is forgiving to the sinner who repents.

This hallowed book provides the basic rules of conduct fundamental to the Muslim way of life. This religion took on the title of Islam because Allah decreed in the Qur’an, “Lo the religion with Allah is al-Islam [the surrender] to his will and guidance.”

When the Arabic text of the Qu’ran was first published in Europe in 1530, Pope Clement VII ordered it burned. Latin translations of the Qu’ran were prohibited by the Spanish Inquisition, a ban that remained in effect until 1790.

The Talmud is a multi-volume collection of teachings, laws and debates that were set down by Jewish sages in Palestine and Iraq over a period of 700 years, ending in 500 CE. Its importance to Judaism is second only to the Torah.

In 1244, Pope Innocent IV ordered Louis IX of France to burn all copies of the Talmud. This order was repeated in 1248, when 20 wagon loads of books were burned in Paris, and again in 1254.

In 1490 in Spain, the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada burned scores of Hebrew books by order of Ferdinand and Isabella; he later conducted at Salmanca an auto-da-fé, or burning, of more than 6,000 volumes. Active suppression of the Talmud by the Catholic Church lasted through the 18th century.

Soon after Moses Maimonides’ death in 1204, his Guide of the Perplexed sparked furious controversy. Orthodox Jewish opponents objected to Maimonides’ sympathy for Aristotelian thought, which was considered fundamentally incompatible with Hebrew tradition. They stressed the impossibility of being both a believer and a philosopher, contending that religion proscribed theoretical inquiry.

In 1232, in Montpellier, France, the learned talmudist Solomon ben Abraham led an attack on The Guide of the Perplexed and obtained the support of the rabbis of France and some of the important scholars of Spain. The work was banned from Jewish homes under penalty of excommunication.

In 1233, Dominican friars burned The Guide at the request of Jewish leaders. Three hundred years later, The Guide was again condemned by the influential yeshiva of Lublin, Poland. The work still faced bans as late as the 19th century.

In 1933, in the first of the infamous Nazi bonfires, students from the University of Berlin gathered 25,000 volumes by Jewish and other denounced authors that were consigned to the flames. Similar demonstrations took place in other German universities.

As a fitting conclusion to this essay, I offer a number of brief quotations. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “If the book be false in its facts, disprove them; if false in its reasoning, debate it. But for God’s sake, let’s hear freely from all sides.”

The German poet Heinrich Heine believed that “wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings.”

The writer Rebecca West asserted, “God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.”