What Is the Talmud? The Argument That Shaped Judaism

Rabbinic Judaism holds that Moses received two teachings at Sinai: the written Torah, the five books of the Bible, and an oral Torah that explained how to apply it. The written text says to rest on the Sabbath but not what counts as work, to bind God's words on the hand but not how, and for centuries the explanations were passed on by teachers and not written down. After the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 AD and dispersed the community, the danger of losing the oral tradition became acute, and around 200 AD Rabbi Judah the Prince compiled it into the Mishnah, a compact code in Hebrew of some sixty tractates covering agriculture, festivals, marriage, civil law, sacrifices and ritual purity.

The Mishnah settled nothing. It records disagreements without always resolving them, and the generations of rabbis who studied it in the academies of Palestine and Babylonia debated its meaning, its sources and its gaps for the next three hundred years. Their discussions, in Aramaic, were themselves compiled into the Gemara, and Mishnah and Gemara together are the Talmud.

There are two. The Jerusalem Talmud was compiled in the academies of Galilee around 400 AD, in difficult conditions under Roman rule, and is shorter, terser and less finished. The Babylonian Talmud was compiled in the flourishing Jewish communities of Mesopotamia around 500 AD, with further editing for another century or two, and it is the one that became authoritative; when people say the Talmud they mean this one. In its standard printed form it runs to about 2,700 double-sided pages, and the pagination fixed by a Venetian printer in the 1520s is still used, so that a reference to Berakhot 2a means the same page in every edition in the world.

The Talmud is usually divided into two kinds of content that run through each other on every page:

• •Halakhah: legal argument about what the law requires, in which a case is posed, a ruling proposed, objections raised from other texts, distinctions drawn and the matter sometimes settled and often left open
• •Aggadah: everything else, including stories about the rabbis, parables, ethics, folklore, medicine, astronomy, interpretations of Bible stories and accounts of the world to come

The Talmud is meant to be argued with, not read. Traditional study is done in pairs, out loud, one partner proposing a reading and the other attacking it, and the text encourages this by preserving the losing side of every debate; the rabbis who are overruled are quoted as fully as those who win. The page is built to carry the argument forward. Around the Talmud text sit the commentary of Rashi, the eleventh-century French scholar whose explanation is the one every student learns first, and the Tosafot, the notes of his grandsons and their pupils, who question Rashi and reconcile contradictions across the whole work. Later commentaries fill the margins, and the codes that distil the Talmud into practical rulings, such as Maimonides' in the twelfth century and the Shulchan Aruch in the sixteenth, stand alongside.

Since 1923 there has been a worldwide programme, Daf Yomi, in which participants study one page a day and finish the entire Babylonian Talmud in seven and a half years. The last cycle ended in January 2020 with a gathering of ninety thousand people in a New Jersey stadium, and the next began the following morning.

Because it is the text that defines rabbinic Judaism, the Talmud has drawn its enemies. It was put on trial in Paris in 1240, condemned, and twenty-four cartloads of manuscripts were burned; it was censored by the Church for centuries, with passages about Jesus and Christianity cut from printed editions, and copies were burned in Rome in 1553 and by the Nazis in the twentieth century. The Karaites within Judaism rejected it as human invention. It survived because it was memorised and copied, and because a community that argued with it every day could not be separated from it. Its influence runs beyond religion: the habit of testing a proposition against every objection, of keeping minority opinions on record and of treating a text as an unfinished conversation is a Talmudic inheritance, and it is visible in the law courts and the universities of the countries where Jews have lived.

The Babylonian Talmud opens with tractate Berakhot, on blessings, and its very first Mishnah shows how the work behaves. It asks from what time in the evening a person may recite the Shema, the declaration of faith said at night and in the morning. The answer is from the time the priests go in to eat their sacred food, which they could do after nightfall. Then it asks how late, and gives three views: Rabbi Eliezer says until the end of the first watch of the night, the sages say until midnight, and Rabban Gamaliel says until dawn.

The Gemara begins not with the answer but with a question about the question: why does the Mishnah start with the evening rather than the morning? It offers two explanations. One points to the biblical verse about speaking these words when you lie down and when you rise up, which mentions night first. The other points to the creation story, where each day runs from evening to morning. Within a few lines you have seen the method in miniature: a practical rule, a spread of opinions kept on record, and a search for the reasoning in scripture behind even the order of the words.

The Talmud explains its habit of argument through stories, one of the most famous about an oven. Rabbi Eliezer held that a certain kind of clay oven could not become ritually impure, and when the other sages disagreed he called on a carob tree to uproot itself, a stream to flow backwards and the walls of the study house to lean, and each did. Finally a voice from heaven declared that he was right. Rabbi Joshua stood and quoted the Torah: it is not in heaven. Once the law had been given, the sages held, it was decided by the majority of those who studied it, not by miracles.

The story ends with the prophet Elijah reporting that God laughed and said, my children have defeated me. A second passage explains why the long-running disputes between the schools of Hillel and Shammai were decided in favour of Hillel, even though a heavenly voice declared that both views were the words of the living God. The reason given is character rather than cleverness: Hillel's followers were patient and humble, studied their opponents' rulings, and even taught Shammai's view before their own. Together the stories place authority in the community of study and treat respect for the losing side as part of reaching the right answer.

The Talmud is the record of rabbinic debate about how to apply the Torah: the Mishnah, a legal code compiled around 200 AD, wrapped in the Gemara, three centuries of argument about it, and finished in Babylonia around 500 AD. Its pages preserve both sides of every dispute, are surrounded by a millennium of further commentary, and are studied in pairs and by daily page around the world, as the text that has defined Jewish practice since antiquity.