Talmud

The Mishnah was compiled around 200 CE under Judah ha-Nasi, gathering into writing the oral legal tradition of the tannaim, the rabbis of the preceding two centuries. It is arranged in six orders. Zeraim covers agriculture and, in its opening tractate, blessings and prayer; Moed the Sabbath and festivals; Nashim marriage, divorce and vows; Nezikin civil and criminal law, courts and, in tractate Avot, ethics; Kodashim sacrifices and the Temple; and Tohorot ritual purity. Much of Kodashim and Tohorot concerns a Temple destroyed in 70 CE and describes a system nobody could still practise, the Mishnah records the law as a whole, not only the part currently operable.

Its style is extremely compressed: a ruling, often a named dissent, rarely a reason. The Gemara is the analysis that grew around it in the academies over the following three centuries, written mostly in Aramaic by the amoraim. It asks where a rule comes from, whether it contradicts another, what case it was really addressing, and whether the dissenting view can be reconciled.

Together Mishnah and Gemara are what Jews call the Oral Torah written down: tradition holds that law transmitted orally from Sinai alongside the written text was committed to writing only when persecution and dispersion threatened its survival. Its unit of argument is the sugya, a self-contained discussion that states a difficulty, proposes answers, tests them against other sources and often ends unresolved. A frequent closing word is teiku, indicating that the question stands. The Talmud teaches how to argue about law at least as much as it delivers conclusions.

There are two Talmuds. The Jerusalem Talmud, or Talmud Yerushalmi, was compiled in the academies of the Land of Israel, principally Tiberias and Caesarea, and brought to an abrupt close around 400 CE as Roman pressure on Jewish institutions in Palestine intensified. It covers the first four orders substantially but is incomplete, its Aramaic is harder, and its transmission was poorer. The Babylonian Talmud, Talmud Bavli, was produced in the academies of Sura and Pumbedita and reached broadly its final form around 500 to 600 CE. It is roughly four times the size, its arguments are more developed, and its editing is far more thorough.

The Babylonian became authoritative for most of the Jewish world. The reasons are institutional as much as intellectual: the Babylonian academies survived and flourished under Sasanian and then Islamic rule while the Palestinian centres declined, and the geonim of Babylonia, who answered legal questions for communities from Spain to Persia, taught and cited their own Talmud. Where the two conflict, standard practice follows the Bavli, though the Yerushalmi is consulted and occasionally decides a point.

The physical page is itself an artefact of printing. Daniel Bomberg's Venice edition of 1519-1523 set the layout still in use: the Mishnah and Gemara in a block at the centre, Rashi's eleventh-century running explanation on the inner margin, and Tosafot, the dialectical glosses of his French and German successors, on the outer. Bomberg's foliation became standard, and the Vilna Shas printed by the Widow and Brothers Romm between 1880 and 1886 carried it forward with a large apparatus of further commentaries. Because that edition became the reference, a citation such as Berakhot 28b points to the same words on the same side of the same leaf in any Talmud anywhere.

The Talmud is studied rather than read. The traditional method is oral and adversarial: two students work through a passage aloud as a chavruta, a study pair, arguing it out line by line, and a page can take hours. Study is treated as a religious act in its own right, not merely preparation for practice, which is why tractates concerning the Temple sacrifices are learned as closely as those governing everyday obligations.

In 1923 Rabbi Meir Shapiro of Lublin proposed at the Agudath Israel congress in Vienna that Jews everywhere study the same folio on the same day. Daf Yomi began that September and takes about seven and a half years to complete the Babylonian Talmud's 2,711 folios. Each completion, a Siyum HaShas, is marked publicly; the first was held in 1931, and recent cycles have ended with gatherings of tens of thousands in stadiums in the United States and Israel, alongside daily study groups, recordings and online classes in many languages.

The text also carries the marks of Christian hostility. Following the Disputation of Paris in 1240, in which the convert Nicholas Donin pressed charges of blasphemy against it, cartloads of Talmud manuscripts were burned in Paris in 1242. Burnings recurred in Italy in the sixteenth century, and a papal bull of 1554 imposed systematic censorship. The Basel edition of 1578-1581 omitted the tractate Avodah Zarah entirely and altered passages thought to reflect on Christianity, and later printings inherited many of those changes. Modern editions restore the excised material, often marking it in brackets or in an appendix so that the reader can see where the censor's hand fell.