Talmud

Talmud, body of Jewish civil and religious law, including commentaries on the Torah, or Pentateuch. The Talmud consists of a codification of laws, called the Mishnah, and a commentary on the Mishnah, called the Gemara. The material in the Talmud that concerns decisions by scholars on disputed legal questions is known as the Halakhah; the legends, anecdotes, and sayings in the Talmud that are used to illustrate the traditional law are known as Haggada.

Two compilations of the Talmud exist: the Palestinian Talmud, sometimes called the Jerusalem Talmud, and the Babylonian Talmud. Both compilations contain the same Mishnah, but each has its own Gemara. The contents of the Palestinian Talmud were written by Palestinian scholars between the 3rd century ad and the beginning of the 5th century; those of the Babylonian Talmud, by scholars who wrote between the 3rd century and the beginning of the 6th century. The Babylonian Talmud became authoritative because the rabbinic academies of Babylonia survived those in Palestine by many centuries.

The Talmud itself, the works of talmudic scholarship, and the commentaries concerning it constitute the greatest contributions to rabbinical literature in the history of Judaism. One of the most important of the works of scholarship is the Mishneh Torah (Repetition of the Torah, c. 1180) by the Spanish rabbi, philosopher, and physician Maimonides; it is an abstract of all the rabbinical legal literature in existence at his time. The most widely known commentaries are those on the Babylonian Talmud by the French rabbi Rashi and by certain scholars known as tosaphists, who lived in France and Germany between the 12th and 14th centuries and included some of Rashi's grandsons.

The Babylonian Talmud and the Palestinian Talmud were first printed in 1520-22 and in 1523 in Venice by the printer Daniel Bomberg. The entire Babylonian Talmud is available in an English translation (1935-52) edited by the British rabbi and scholar Isidore Epstein. Most of the Palestinian Talmud is available in a 19th-century French translation, but the rendering is defective and inaccurate. Twenty tractates of the Palestinian Talmud are found in a Latin translation, in the Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum (1744-69) of Blasio Ugolino, an 18th-century Italian historian and antiquarian.