The Talmud

The Talmud is an enormous collection of oral teachings and discussions produced by the rabbis, a Jewish intellectual movement that emerged after the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. The Talmud explores almost every aspect of Jewish life in late antiquity, interpreting biblical texts and received traditions in light of the current moment.

What is the Talmud?

The temple’s destruction led to profound changes for the Jewish community. New Jewish groups and leadership structures emerged. One such group was the rabbis, a community of men whose Jewish practice focused on developing and teaching the Oral Torah. The Oral Torah was an extensive body of biblical interpretation, theological reflection, and discussions of Jewish law and its applications (known as halakah).

In the second and early third centuries CE, rabbis in the land of Israel collected and organized those oral traditions relating to halakah into a body of work called the Mishnah. The Mishnah presents statements, often attributed to specific named rabbis, about almost every aspect of Jewish life in the ancient world. The Mishnah is characterized by its structure: its editors present multiple rabbis’ opinions on a single topic, without then offering a conclusion about who is right. As Hermann Strack and Günter Stemberger note, scholars debate whether the Mishnah was originally meant to serve as an anthology, a law code, a textbook, or something else.

The Mishnah swiftly became seen as a foundational text for the rabbinic communities in both the land of Israel, which was part of the Roman Empire, and Babylonia, a province of the Sasanian Empire. And as a foundational text, it became the springboard for later rabbinic discussion, interpretation, and halakic development. These later discussions eventually became collected and structured into their own corpora, called Talmuds.

Each rabbinic center created its own Talmud. The rabbis in Roman Palestine created what today is called the Palestinian Talmud, or Talmud Yerushalmi. When the word Talmud is used today without a regional modifier, it refers to the Babylonian Talmud, or Talmud Bavli, the text produced by the Babylonian rabbinic community in the third through seventh centuries CE. While the Mishnah is written in Hebrew, the Babylonian Talmud contains a mix of Hebrew and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic.

The Talmud is framed as a commentary on the Mishnah, but it is even more expansive than the Mishnah in its content. It contains extensive discussions of halakah, biblical exegesis, and theology, but also stories about the lives of particular rabbis, medical knowledge, accounts of actual legal cases that were brought before the rabbis, and discussions of biblical Hebrew grammar. It weaves together statements by rabbis from different generations, empires, and cities into a holistic picture of rabbinic intellectual life. It demonstrates the rabbis’ diversity, creativity, and commitment to a deep exploration of both the Written Torah (or Tanak) and the Oral Torah as it continued to develop over the period of late antiquity.

Why is the Talmud important?

As the rabbinic movement spread over the course of late antiquity and the medieval period, the Babylonian Talmud came to be seen as authoritative for almost all communities across the Jewish world. It served as the main curriculum for rabbinic education, as the basis for the development of more practical legal codes, and as the source par excellence for answering the kinds of legal and ritual questions that emerged during the normal course of everyday life.

European Christians came to see the Talmud, and the continued flourishing of Jewish intellectual life, as the reason the Jews were unwilling to convert to Christianity en masse. This belief, together with talmudic discussions of Jesus and interpretations of the Bible in ways that the church saw as heretical, led to King Louis IX burning thousands of cartloads of volumes of the Talmud in Paris in 1240. The Talmud would continue to serve as a justification for Christian anti-Semitism throughout the medieval and modern worlds.

In spite of persecution, the Talmud remains a fundamental source of Jewish law and practice for many Jewish communities up until the present day. Indeed, the popularity of the Talmud has grown substantially in recent years with the advent of schools teaching Talmud to a more diverse population of students, the publication of more accessible translations, and the dissemination of digital tools that help facilitate Talmud study.