**Pilpul** is basically a legalistic exercise that is removed from truthfulness, ethical thinking or even logic. – Gilad Atzmon “**Pilpul** is the rhetorical means to mark as ‘true’ that which cannot ever be disputed by rational means ……**Pilpul** was a means to justify practices already fixed in the behaviors of the community by re-reading the Talmud to justify those practices.” – David Shasha “What is actually permitted in the synagogues and schools was a unique form of dialectics designed still to further strengthen the edifice of The Law. The disputants were merely allowed to prove that *anything* was legal under the Talmud; one debater would state a proposition and another the contrary, each demonstrating that The Law allowed it! The practice was called “**pilpulism**”. It gives the key to a mystery which often baffles Gentiles: the agility with which Zionists are often able to justify, in themselves, precisely what they reproach in others. A polemist trained in **pilpulism** would have no difficulty in showing that (the) Judaic….. ban on intermarriage to be (a) “voluntary separation” and any Gentile counter-ban to be “discrimination based in prejudice”….” – Douglas Reed ‘ The Controversy of Zion’