Mishnah

The Mishnah organises the whole of Jewish practice into six orders, the sedarim, each gathering tractates on a broad area of life. Zeraim, seeds, opens with the laws of blessings and then treats agriculture in the Land of Israel, the tithes, the corner of the field left for the poor and the sabbatical year. Moed, appointed time, covers Shabbat and the festival calendar, from the intricate categories of forbidden Sabbath labour to the reading of the Scroll of Esther. Nashim, women, deals with betrothal, marriage contracts, divorce and vows. Nezikin, damages, is the civil and criminal code, and holds the courts, oaths and penalties, along with the atypical tractate Avot, a collection of ethical maxims rather than law.

Kodashim, holy things, preserves the procedures of the Temple sacrifices and the dietary rules of slaughter, recorded even though the Temple had been destroyed more than a century before the redaction. Tohorot, purities, the largest and most technical order, maps the transmission of ritual impurity and the immersion pools that remove it. The sixty three tractates move by topic rather than by verse, a deliberate departure from scriptural order that let the redactor place related rulings side by side, compare the opinions of named sages, and leave many disputes standing unresolved for later generations to argue.

Rabbinic tradition holds that alongside the written Torah an oral Torah was transmitted from teacher to student, and for generations committing it to writing was resisted precisely because its life was in the living chain of memory. The catastrophes of the first and second centuries changed the calculation. The destruction of the Temple in 70 CE ended the sacrificial system around which much of the law revolved, and the failed Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 to 135 CE devastated the scholarly centres of Judea.

Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, patriarch of the Jewish community in the Galilee around the year 200, presided over the project of sifting, selecting and fixing the tannaitic teaching into a single authoritative arrangement. The result was selective rather than exhaustive: rulings and traditions left out of the Mishnah survive as baraitot, many of them gathered in the parallel Tosefta. Once fixed, the Mishnah itself became the curriculum. The sages of the following centuries, the amoraim of the Galilee and of Babylonia, taught by analysing its clauses line by line, and their recorded discussions became the two Gemaras, which together with the Mishnah form the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds. The earliest complete manuscripts, such as the Kaufmann codex, preserve vocalised text that remains central to the study of Mishnaic Hebrew.