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Notes -
Please note that the Talmud is a record of historical debates, and therefore includes records of many positions which are advanced, considered, and then rejected. In ths case, Sanhedrin 59 is the section concerning Torah study and Gentiles, and the view that Gentiles should not study Torah is contested and rebutted - it goes on to say that "even a gentile who engages in Torah study is considered like a High Priest".
On a purely anecdotal level this has tracked with my experience with Jewish communities and synagogues - I mention the above passage in particular because I once discussed some of these questions (specifically the relation of Gentiles to Torah) with a few rabbis, brought up this dispute in the Talmud, and the response I got was a smiling rabbi saying, "Like you." I ended up attending a Torah study for a while and being part of a beit midrash.
Obviously synagogues vary widely in their level of welcome, but I bring this up just to have a contrary example present as well. There is tremendous internal debate within Judaism - even the link you provided above points to a record of debates about the status of Gentiles, and cites the very Gemara passage I mentioned above.
I think there's a tendency you get in many external critiques of religion that simply read a given sacred text, draw a lot of surface-level assumptions from it, and therefore conclude that either the religion is painfully anti-human and cruel, or that almost all practitioners of the religion are hypocrites. I'd suggest that it's often better to pay more attention to what is actually practiced - not that sacred texts don't matter, but those texts are held as part of interpretive communities. The history of the text's reception and interpretation, and then the way it is applied communally, are inseparable from its meaning.
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