Herem (censure) - in The Talmud, Twenty-four Offenses

In The Talmud, Twenty-four Offenses

The Talmud speaks of twenty-four offenses that, in theory, were punishable by a form of niddui or temporary excommunication. Maimonides (as well as later authorities) enumerates the twenty-four as follows:

1. insulting a learned man, even after his death;
2. insulting a messenger of the court;
3. calling an Israelite a "slave";
4. refusing to appear before the court at the appointed time;
5. dealing lightly with any of the rabbinic or Mosaic precepts;
6. refusing to abide by a decision of the court;
7. keeping in one's possession an animal or an object that may prove injurious to others, such as a savage dog or a broken ladder;
8. selling one's real estate to a non-Jew without assuming the responsibility for any injury that the non-Jew may cause his neighbors;
9. testifying against one's Jewish neighbor in a non-Jewish court, and thereby causing that neighbor to lose money which he would not have lost had the case been decided in a Jewish court;
10. a Kohen shochet (butcher) (all the more so an Israelite) who refuses to give the foreleg, cheeks and abomasum of kosher-slaughtered livestock to another Kohen;
11. violating the second day of a holiday, even though its observance is only a custom;
12. performing work on the afternoon of the day preceding Passover;
13. taking the name of God in vain;
14. causing others to profane the name of God;
15. causing others to eat holy meat outside of Jerusalem;
16. making calculations for the calendar, and establishing festivals accordingly, outside of Israel;
17. putting a stumbling-block in the way of the blind, that is to say, tempting another to sin (Lifnei iver);
18. preventing the community from performing some religious act;
19. selling forbidden ("terefah") meat as permitted meat ("kosher");
20. failure by a "shochet" (ritual slaughterer) to show his knife to the rabbi for examination;
21. masturbation;
22. engaging in intercourse with one's divorced wife;
23. being made the subject of scandal (in the case of a rabbi);
24. declaring an unjustified excommunication.

For all practical purposes, most of these conditions no longer were considered as grounds for a ban since the end of the Talmudic era, around 600 CE.