Talmud

• 1. Introduction

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  The Talmud runs to about 2.5 million words, and not one of them claims to be the final word. It records the teachings, opinions, and disagreements of thousands of rabbis and Torah scholars, collectively called Chazal. Rejected statements were never edited out. Losing arguments stay on the page beside the winning ones. This is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism, second in authority only to the Hebrew Bible. It is built from 63 tractates, written in a mixture of Aramaic and Hebrew. How does a work this vast hold contradiction at its core and call that a virtue? Who decided when the arguing had to stop? And why did a book of internal Jewish debate end up burned in public squares and read aloud to children in South Korea? The path runs from academies south of Baghdad to a courtroom in Paris, and it begins with the question of which Talmud anyone means when they say the word.

• 2. Two Centers, Two Talmuds

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  In antiquity the two great centers of Jewish scholarship sat far apart, in Syria Palaestina and in Babylonia, and each produced its own Talmud. The earlier compilation came out of Galilee, in the late fourth or early fifth century, drawing on the academies of Tiberias, Sepphoris, and Caesarea. It is called the Jerusalem Talmud, though that name is misleading, since it was not compiled in Jerusalem. The more accurate label is the Palestinian Talmud, or the Talmud of the Land of Israel.

  The Jerusalem Talmud is written largely in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, a Western dialect distinct from its Babylonian counterpart. Its redaction process was left incomplete, which makes the text fragmentary and difficult to read. Its argumentation tends toward logical deductive reasoning, and its discussions stay more factual. Despite its broken state, it remains an indispensable source for the development of Halakha in the Holy Land.

  The Babylonian Talmud took shape later, likely in the sixth century, and grew far longer. Its discussions are discursive and rambling, leaning on anecdote and on argument by syllogism and inductive reasoning. Non-legal Aggadah makes up a third of its material, against a sixth in the Jerusalem. When someone says Talmud without qualification, this is the one they mean. As the Palestinian Jewish community lost influence and Babylonia became the intellectual center of the diaspora, the Babylonian version became the more widely accepted, and the more authoritative of the two.

• 3. The Academies Of Babylonia

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  Sura sat roughly 60 kilometers south of Baghdad, one of several Mesopotamian centers of learning alongside Nehardea, Nisibis, Mahoza, and Pumbedita. The Babylonian Talmud is the culmination of centuries of analysis and dialectic carried out in these academies. Tradition holds that the foundations of that process were laid by Abba Arika, who lived from 175 to 247 and studied under Judah ha-Nasi.

  Rav Ashi presided over the Sura Academy from 375 to 427, and tradition credits him with beginning the written compilation. The project passed to Ravina II, described as the final Amoraic expounder of the Oral Torah. The latest traditional date for the compilation is 475, the year Ravina II died. Even those who hold traditional views allow that a final redaction came later, made by the Savoraim in the sixth century.

  Modern historians place the completion most likely in the sixth century, no later than the early Muslim conquests of the mid-seventh. Their evidence is linguistic. The Talmud carries no loanwords or syntax from Arabic, while Islamic-era rabbinic documents are heavily marked by Arabic, and rabbinic writing had shifted entirely to Arabic by the eighth century. Its earliest possible date must follow the early fifth century, since the Babylonian text relies on the Jerusalem Talmud.

• 4. How A Page Argues

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  The structure follows the Mishnah, divided into Six Orders known as the Shisha Sedarim, or Shas, and broken into 63 tractates of focused subject matter. Those tractates contain 517 chapters in total, each numbered by the Hebrew alphabet and named, usually after the first words of its opening Mishnah. A single chapter can stretch over tens of pages.

  The Mishnah supplies the terse opinions. Its statements are brief, recording a rabbi's view or an unattributed ruling that seems to mark consensus. The rabbis preserved in it are the Tannaim, the repeaters, working in the second century. They must be distinguished from the Amoraim, the speakers of the third to fifth centuries, who produced the two Talmuds.

  The Gemara is the commentary, growing out of a long tradition of rabbis analyzing and debating the Mishnah, a process called shakla v'tarya. Each discussion arrives as a self-contained edited passage known as a sugya. The exchange is often framed between two anonymous, possibly metaphorical figures, the makshan who questions and the tartzan who answers. The Gemara also hunts for the biblical basis of a given law, a search itself once called talmud, long before the Talmud became a book. Not every tractate carries Gemara, and the Babylonian commentary covers only 37 of the 63 tractates.

• 5. Centuries Of Commentary

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  Isaac Alfasi, working in North Africa between 1013 and 1103, set out to extract the binding legal opinions from the Talmud's vast corpus. His work proved so influential that it drew commentaries of its own and became a basis for later halakhic codes. Other legal compilations followed the same path, including the Mordechai by Mordechai ben Hillel and the work of Asher ben Yechiel, who died in 1327.

  Rashi's commentary covers most of the Talmud and has become a classic. He did not finish all of it. His students completed sections on a few tractates, and parts attributed to him in some printed editions were not his at all. On Shevuot 3b he flagged a passage as foreign, writing that a mistaken student had scribbled it in the margin and copyists had folded it into the Gemara.

  The Tosafot emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a genre built around Rashi's commentary to supplement it and reconcile its internal contradictions through the technique of pilpul. Among its founders were Rabbeinu Tam, a grandson of Rashi, and Rabbeinu Tam's nephew Isaac ben Samuel. Unlike Rashi's running commentary, the Tosafot comment only on selected matters, and their explanations often diverge from his. The version printed in the standard Vilna edition is an edited compilation drawn mostly from the collection of Eliezer of Touques.

• 6. Sharpening The Method

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  Pilpul as an intensive style of study arose in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, built on the premise that the Talmud could hold no redundancy or contradiction at all. Its practitioners invented new categories and distinctions, the hillukim, to dissolve apparent conflicts through novel logical means. In the Ashkenazi world its founders are generally taken to be Jacob Pollak, who lived from 1460 to 1541, and Shalom Shachna, and the art reached its height in the yeshivot of Poland and Lithuania.

  Not everyone admired the technique. As early as the fifteenth century the ethical tract Orhot Zaddikim faulted pilpul for prizing intellectual acuity over substance. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague, joined the critics, along with Isaiah Horowitz and Yair Bacharach. By the eighteenth century the method waned, and the word pilpul began to be used derogatorily for hairsplitting. Authors started labeling their own work al derekh ha-peshat, by the simple method, to set it apart.

  The Brisker method arrived in the late nineteenth century, developed by Hayyim Soloveitchik of Brisk, who lived from 1853 to 1918. It works by reductive analysis, sorting differing rabbinic opinions into a categorical structure, and it is so analytical that critics call it a modern version of pilpul. Its influence is wide. Most present-day yeshivot study the Talmud through some form of it, with rival approaches coming from the Mir and Telz yeshivas.

• 7. The Word On Every Page

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  In 1483 Joshua Solomon Soncino printed the first individual tractates and created the layout that endures. The Talmud text sits in the middle of the page, Rashi runs along the inside near the binding, and Tosafot run along the outer edge. The first complete edition of the Babylonian Talmud was printed in Venice by Daniel Bomberg between 1520 and 1523, with the support of Pope Leo X. Almost every printing since has followed Bomberg's pagination.

  The Vilna edition carried that tradition into modern use. After a religious-community copyright neared its end, and following a bitter dispute with the Szapira family of Slavita, Menachem Romm of Vilna printed a new edition in 1835. Known as the Vilna Edition Shas, it became the basis for later editions of the Talmud Bavli. A page number in it refers to a double-sided leaf called a daf, each with two sides labeled aleph and bet. References today take the form of tractate and daf, such as Berachot 23b.

  The count of 63 tractates and the name Shas both carry old scars. The convention of calling the work Shas, short for shishah sidre Mishnah, dates to 1564, when Pope Pius IV lifted the ban on the Talmud but decreed it could not bear the word Talmud on its title page. The first expurgated edition, the basis for most that followed, appeared at Basel between 1578 and 1581 with the entire tractate Avodah Zarah omitted and certain phrases modified.

• 8. Burned, Translated, Reread

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  In the 1230s Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, pressed 35 charges against the Talmud before Pope Gregory IX. He translated passages he called blasphemous, and he singled out a ruling he said permitted Jews to kill non-Jews. The charges led to the Disputation of Paris in 1240 at the court of Louis IX, where rabbis including Yechiel of Paris and Moses ben Jacob of Coucy defended the work. The outcome was condemnation and the first public burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1242.

  The attacks recurred across centuries and shifting motives. At the Disputation of Barcelona in 1263, Nahmanides faced Pablo Christiani over whether Jesus was the prophesied messiah. At Tortosa in 1413, Geronimo de Santa Fe argued that the Talmud's condemnations of pagans were veiled references to Christians, a claim Jewish scholars rejected by noting Judaism's sharp distinction between polytheists and monotheists who worship incorrectly. In 1553 the Roman Inquisition saw the work as an obstacle to conversion, and on Rosh Hashanah, the 9th of September 1553, confiscated copies were burned in Rome's Campo de' Fiori.

  The same work later drew sympathetic study far outside Judaism. Christian scholars such as Johann Reuchlin, John Selden, and Johannes Buxtorf turned to it from the Renaissance on, finding in it context for their own scriptures. In modern South Korea, almost every household owns a book they call Talmud, read by parents to children and built into the primary-school curriculum. Those books trace back to 5,000 Years of Jewish Wisdom, created over three days in 1968 by the Japanese writer Hideaki Kase and the American rabbi Marvin Tokayer, and first published in Korean in 1974. They contain stories and proverbs drawn from the Talmud, but not the arguing text itself, the one whose rejected opinions were never edited out.