Talmud

The Talmud is one of the central documents in Judaism. It is a written record of religious traditions and practices that were transmitted orally during Temple times. Jews consider it to be the repository of the Oral law that was given to Moses along with the written Torah.

The Talmud consist of two parts, the Mishna and the Gemara. The Mishna was recorded in Hebrew by a Rabbi named Judah HaNasi ("Judah the Prince") around 200 AD. He realized that the oral traditions were in danger of being lost after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The longer part of the Talmud, the Gemara, records ongoing discussions and debates among Rabbis over the next three centuries. It is written in Aramaic.

For a thousand years, the Talmud was preserved in hand-scribed editions. A printed edition was made not long after the invention of movable type. The standard Vilna edition of the Talmud encompasses 2711 large two-sided pages, or folios. The text of the Mishna is interspersed with the Gemara that comments on it. Both texts are surrounded on the printed page with later commentaries.

There are two versions of the Talmud, Babylon (Balvi) and Jerusalem (Yerushalmi). Both are accepted but the Babylonian Talmud is more extensive and more widely studied. Both are available in English translation.