Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Talmud is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism, second in authority only to the Hebrew Bible. It is a primary source of Jewish law and theology, recording the teachings, opinions, and disagreements of thousands of rabbis collectively known as Chazal. It consists of the Mishnah and its commentary, the Gemara, across 63 tractates written in Aramaic and Hebrew.
The Babylonian Talmud was compiled likely in the sixth century in the academies of Babylonia, while the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled earlier, in the late fourth or early fifth century in Galilee. The Babylonian version is far longer at about 2.5 million words, more authoritative, and more widely accepted. The two also use different Aramaic dialects, Babylonian versus Western.
Tradition ascribes the compilation of the Babylonian Talmud to two sages, Rav Ashi and Ravina II. Rav Ashi presided over the Sura Academy from 375 to 427 and began the project, which Ravina II completed; the latest traditional date is 475, the year Ravina II died. A final redaction is attributed to the Savoraim in the sixth century, and modern historians place completion most likely in the sixth century.
The Talmud follows the Mishnah's Six Orders, known as the Shisha Sedarim or Shas, divided into 63 tractates and 517 chapters in total. Each chapter is numbered by the Hebrew alphabet and named after its opening words. In printed editions a page is a double-sided leaf called a daf, with sides labeled aleph and bet, following the pagination of the 1835 Vilna edition.
The Talmud was attacked in disputations such as the Disputation of Paris in 1240, after Nicholas Donin pressed 35 charges before Pope Gregory IX, leading to the first public burning in Paris in 1242. In 1553 the Roman Inquisition burned copies in Rome's Campo de' Fiori, seeing the work as an obstacle to converting Jews to Christianity. Censorship followed, including the omission of the tractate Avodah Zarah from the Basel edition of 1578 to 1581.
Almost every South Korean household owns a book they call Talmud, which parents read to children and which appears in the primary-school curriculum, reflecting a reported hope to emulate Jewish academic standards. These books trace back to 5,000 Years of Jewish Wisdom, created in 1968 by Japanese writer Hideaki Kase and American rabbi Marvin Tokayer, first published in Korean in 1974. They contain stories and proverbs drawn from the Talmud rather than the original text itself.