I link the Talmud as an interesting historical/religious document to my blog, because I've seen so many misrepresentations of it.
Though I'm pretty sure that (like nearly everyone) I had Jewish ancestors, I am not a Jew. I do no believe in 'God.' I believe monotheism and perhaps all theisms lead to disaster.
East Asian religions of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism may be better.
But there is no need for any of them. We each have the ability to construct a framing reality to our experiences, and it is both our freedom and our responsibility to do so.
Along with ethics, social practices, personal habits, and more, the stuff normally associated with religions.
It's a problem that essential social functions (notably gathering, friend finding, and mating) are NOT very well handled completely with secular alternatives, but effectively outsourced to religion, as if atheists should not have friends and families.
Anyway, I do not believe the Talmud is the source of modern genocidal Zionism. Zionism was created by non-religious Jews, and religious Jews bitterly opposed it (even to their deaths during the Holocaust!). Only by a process of elimination (don't forget that part, the Jews who were murdered were mostly anti-Zionist, and many Holocaust survivors still are), corruption, propaganda, and shock did Zionism become the view of the majority of Jews.
If anything, the religion of Judaism resisted it for at least 1747 years, from Bar Kochba to Modern Zionism, and many Jews always continued to reunounce Zionism as being the opposite of Judaism (at the present time, that number is rapidly increasing). Some Jews, including at least one notable Holocaust survivor back in the day, called Zionism the same as Nazism, and many still do. It is basically true, except that Nazism was a movement of authentic nationalism (exposing the evil that nationalism can be) whereas Zionism was a based on ethnic religious settler colonialism. Notably in both cases it subordinated the darker people, in both cases the people with the larger proportion of middle eastern ancestry. Zionism is antisemitic, similarly to Nazism.
Right up front the Talmud has the Three Oaths, which forbid the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine or anywhere else! It is for God, and only God, to do that. (The first part of that has always seemed to me to be sagacious wisdom. The second part of that has always seemed to me to be a kind of sweetener thrown in to make the package easier to sell. I think it was a sell out from the beginning. Religions are always full of sweeteners like this, like taking over pagan holidays.)
It would have been better go go further, and say that God no longer wishes the Jewish People to be largely in Palestine at all, but all over the world wherever they can be, and fighting for all persecuted people including Jews if they are being persecuted. Tikkun Olam, that's the Judaism I respect, the Judaism I might have joined when I was much younger. All my respect went out the window when I heard about the Nakba from a Jewish Communist when I was 13. It was then many years until I discovered the vast array of Jewish voices among many others condemning Zionism, and finally came to understand that 'Israel' was not the 'Jewish State' as I had been told since birth, but something more like its antithesis, a replacement of rule obeying thoughtfulness with ethnic sentimentalist fascism.
Even letting 'God' bring all the Jews to Israel in the distant future maintains the fiction that it would be a good idea, the stuff of dreams and toasts.
(Note that even among Religious Jews, the Talmud is not the Word of God but only the views of ancient rabbis interpreting it.)
I'd say the moral collapse among Jewish Zionists is 99% because of Zionism and not Judaism.
Many of the best opponents of Zionists are anti-Zionist Jews. They already have been fighting for persecuted people including people persecuted at the hands of other Jews. Anti-Zionist Jews face among the worst discrimination in modern times, they are often bumped from Academic careers (such as Norm Finkelstein), government careers (such as Tony Greenstein, expelled from Labour on false charges of antisemitism), and sometimes even their own friends, families, and synagogues.
Many of these people have had better Talmudic education than most Zionists.
So I hardly lay any blame on the Talmud, though it does at least two bad things (all religions do lots of bad things...):
1) Because it promotes the idea that it's God's Will that Jews ultimately return to Palestine, it creates a nightmarish fantasy in disguise.
2) It does systematically try to say how Jews should treat other Jews different from non-Jews (which most all religions do). I understand it promotes fairness to non-Jews and more-than-fairness to Jews. That may be better than most. But even establishing that there should be a difference is wrongheaded.*
Notably, however, the Torah does say those things also, just less systematically, and the Torah could also be interpreted in more universalistic terms because of its ambiguity (thus leading to Christianity, which emphasizes exactly that interpretation--often practiced in the breach--as do many Jews--including Tony Greenstein who has said that the lesson of the Torah is to Love your Neighbor as Yourself (which comes straight from Leviticus, and is repeated not invented by rabbi Jesus).
All religions are full of crap, the true judge is how people actually act in this world, and especially towards others, the poor and needy, even their 'enemies.'
And for at least 1747 years, between Bar Kochba and Zionism, Jews were doing pretty well, no worse than others as far as I can tell, and causing fewer wars than Christians or Muslims (the Muslim wars so often decried by Zionists were mostly in the very distant past, while Christian wars began with the Roman Empire and are still 'leading' the world).
(*Note that in all my many personal dealings with Jews, I felt they were always being more-than-fair with me, perhaps all the better since they had imbibed the details of what that meant, and not trying to be 'just fair' as some might interpret an ancient religion to mean. Except perhaps in arguments...)
My own interpretation of the Torah (as a tiny part of where I gather the things I believe in, if not God per se) is exactly the one given by rabbi Jesus and Tony Greenstein. I would express it unambiguously as universal love, just as Jesus took the boundary case and said "Love your enemies and do them good." But also, the historical sweep of the Torah might best be summarized as: "States, you don't want to mess with States and, don't make waves with them, and be rid of them as soon as you can. However good great and glorious they start, in human hands, they won't end well." (That was why ultimately a divine Messiah was called for, but I don't believe in that part, I don't believe in personalized divinity, only the combined forces of everything adding together. Every damned kook is going to claim to be the Messiah, or that his expired supposed predecessor was--that's a more profitable schtick btw.)
I take that as cautionary advice. As a Communist, I still believe in building a socialist state, but long for the day when even that is no longer necessary. And recognize it won't be easy or magnificent. There is no short cut to doing things honestly, fairly, and of course with love. Otherwise you may not have socialism but fascism.
