> That’s the problem with referring to the Talmud in secular non-Jewish circles. People have misunderstood it for millennia with extremely negative repercussions.
Like any other religious text, I'd question the idea it has a single meaning waiting to be understood. Just as Christians differ immensely in how to interpret the New Testament, I'd expect Jews to differ immensely in how to interpret the Mishnah and Gemara (and other associated literature) – of course, there is a certain core of majority-to-consensus opinion, but beyond that there is a lot of variation (you could say the same, roughly, about Christianity–although Christianity's much greater size and fissiparity makes this rather more marked in the Christian case.) Whichever religion we are talking about, I don't think we can necessarily say that in an objective sense, one interpretation is going to be right and the others wrong. Nobody can be sure what exactly was in the heads of the original authors, and with works of collective authorship, different authors may have understood the same passage in different ways–which understanding then is the "original" one?
I think antisemites generally jump to the worst possible readings of the Talmud, and are completely disinterested in any other readings, or understanding the history of the different ways in which it has been read–because they aren't approaching the text with an honest interest in it, simply using it as a means to express their animus towards the community which produced it. On the other hand, sometimes I get the impression that some Jewish defenders of the Talmud are too quick to rule out those kinds of problematic readings. Consider the late Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yosef, widely considered to be one of the greatest Torah scholars of his generation–yet also infamous for remarks such as "Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel"–while I have never read any of his Talmudic scholarship (has any of it even been translated to English?), if that is his attitude, I would not be surprised if he interpreted sources such as the Talmud in support of that perspective–and yet, those would be the kinds of interpretations of the Talmud which would make its antisemitic critics rub their hands with glee. Of course, views like Ovadia Yosef's are those of a small fringe of hardliners – Judaism has its "fundamentalists" just as Christianity and Islam and Hinduism and others have – and it is unfair to misrepresent the views of such an ultra-conservative minority as the mainstream reading or the only possible reading. On the other hand, it is also a mistake to refuse to acknowledge that the text can actually be read in such a way, and a (rather small, but arguably growing) minority of Jews even do.
Also, when antisemites cite the Talmud as justification for persecution, is that a cause or is it just a pretext? Could it be, that they would have engaged in the same quantum of persecution even if they'd never interpreted the Talmud as saying things they found objectionable? If there is a parallel universe out there in which most Jews were Karaites rather than Rabbanites, and as such most Jews would reject the Talmud, and (if it existed at all) it would be an obscure text of a tiny Jewish sect – it seems entirely possible that in such a universe, antisemites might have persecuted Jews just as much as in this one. They just would have found some other excuses for doing it.