21 Talmud Facts Every Jew Should Know – Talmud

1. TheTalmud Is the Link Between Scripture and Jewish Practice

The Hebrew Scripture (also known as Torah) is thebedrock of Jewish practice and beliefs. But the verses are often terse,containing layers of hidden meaning. Since the Giving of theTorah, Jewish people studied Scripture along with a corpus of Divinetraditions (the Oral Torah), which elucidated and expanded the Divine wisdom ofTorah. These oral traditions, and much more, were eventually recorded in theTalmud. Heres how it happened...

Read: What Is the Talmud?

Following the destruction of the second HolyTemple and the subsequent breakdown of Jewish life and scholarship, Rabbi Judahthe Prince edited the first layer of the Talmud, a compendium of Jewish lawsknown as the Mishnah, in 189. The Mishnah comprises short teachings on virtuallyevery area of Jewish law. Even with the basic laws now recorded, much stillremained oral, and teachings that did not make it into the Mishnah (braitot) as well as subsequentscholarship were carefully studied by the rabbis of each generation. Thiscontinued for several hundred years until the decision was made that thesetraditions, too, needed to be written down.

Read: History of the Mishnah

Manuscript of the Mishnah dating to the 10th or 11th century from the collection of David Kaufmann.

In the Talmudic era, there were two maincenters of Jewish learning: The Galilee (northern Israel) and Babylon. Therewas significant back-and-forth; messengers and letters were regularly sentbetween them, yet the traditions varied, as did the style of learning, promptingone Babylonian sage, Rav Zeira, to fast for 100 days, praying that he forgetthe Babylonian way of learning and merit to learn the teachings of the mastersof the Land of Israel with clarity.

As Jewish life in the Holy Land disintegrated,the teachings of the Galilean scholars were written (but never properlyredacted) in what is commonly known as the Jerusalem Talmud (TalmudYerushalmi). Several generations later, early in the fifth century, theteachings of the Babylonian academies were finally codified in the BabylonianTalmud (Talmud Bavli).

Both can be loosely described as commentarieson the Mishnah, but are really much more than just that. They begin eachsection by quoting the Mishnah, which is then parsed and elucidated by thesages of the Talmud.

Read: The Two Talmuds

The Babylonian Talmud was completed later andunder more tranquil circumstances, making for a more seasoned product.Moreover, most rabbis in the years after the completion of the Talmud werestudents of the Babylonian school. For these reasons (and others), theBabylonian Talmud has become the dominant tradition among Jews today. In fact,due to its scarcity, there are significant chunks of the Jerusalem Talmud thathave been lost, and that which we do have is based off just a few survivingmanuscripts. Thus, whenever someone says Talmud, without specifying which one,you can be almost certain they are referring to the Babylonian Talmud.

A copy of the Jerusalem Talmud found in the Cairo Geniza

The word talmudmeans learning, closely related to the word talmid,Hebrew for student. The Talmudic commentaries on the Mishnah have anothername as well, gemara, Aramaic forcompletion, thus named because they provide the full context andinterpretation for the Mishnah. Since the middle ages, Gemara has become thepreferred term for Talmud among learned Jews. In part, this was in order toavoid undue attention from Christian authorities who abhorred Talmud, whichthey saw as a threat to their traditions.

Shas is an acronym for shisha sedarim,six orders. In common parlance, when one studies Talmud we say he islearning Gemara, but when speaking of the work as a whole, it is oftenreferred to as Shas, since itencompasses teachings on all six orders of the Mishnah.

Read: Why Was the Talmud Called Gemara?

A complete set of the Babylonian Talmud. (Photo by Wikimedia)

The Mishnah was written in Hebrew. The rabbisof the Talmud, however, primarily spoke and wrote in Aramaic, with the dialectsin the Holy Land and Babylon differing significantly. The text of theBabylonian Talmud transfers back and forth between Babylonian Aramaicdiscussion provided by the Babylonian rabbis, and Hebrew quotes from sages ofprevious generations and contemporaneous sages from the Holy Land (who arealmost never quoted in their native Galilean Aramaic). Similarly, the JerusalemTalmud contains a mix of Hebrew and Galilean Aramaic.

Read: Why Is the Talmud in Aramaic?

The Mishnah comprises six sedarim, orders, each covering another area of Jewish law:agriculture, holidays, marriage and divorce, civil jurisprudence, the Templesacrifices, ritual purity. Each order is further divided into masechtot, tractates. A tractate ismade up of several perakim, chapters,each of which contains a number of mishnayot,paragraphs.

Since many of these subjects (such as mostagricultural laws or those pertaining to the Holy Temple) did not apply to Jewsliving outside of Israel after the destruction of the Temple, the BabylonianTalmud is missing commentary for many of those tractates.

Read: The Six Orders of the Mishnah

A sage from the era of the Mishnah is known asa tana. Conversely, one from theTalmudic era is known as an amora.Following the Jewish tradition that the generations closer to the revelation atSinai had a more perfect tradition and were gifted with greater wisdom, thegeneral rule is that an amora may notdisagree with the teachings of a tana.

How do you know if someone is a tana or an amora? Heres a simple trick:

Although, the term rabbi is fairly ubiquitousnowadays, in ancient Israel, only a Torah scholar who was deemed worthy wasconferred this special title in a ceremony known as semichah. Since the Babylonian sages did not live in Israel, theywere not able to receive semichah andwere thus simply known as rav so-and-so.So if someone in the Talmuds name is preceded by rabbi you can assume he is either a tana or an amora from theLand of Israel. Conversely, if his title is rav,you know he is a Babylonian amora.

Read: A Brief History of Rabbinical Ordination

Much of the Talmud is written as aconversation. A statement will be made, questions will be asked, answers willbe suggested and rebutted, and more answers will be proffered, often going onfor pages. Looking carefully at the names to whom the questions and answers areattributed (and many are simply anonymous), one can see hundreds of years ofbrilliant scholarship and intense analysis packed together. Like anyconversation, things sometimes veer off topic, and can easily turn to thingsmore germane to another tractate for many pages.

Read: Is It Really the Torah, or Just the Rabbis?

Studying Talmud. (Photo: Lubavitch Mesivta of Chicago)

The Talmudic discussion was by real people whowere working their hardest to apply Gds word to their real life. Thus, thebulk of the Talmudic texts contain analysis of Biblical verses and Torah law,but its interspersed with everything from medical advice to stories, from folksayings to fabric dying tips.

Read: 38 Folk Sayings From the Talmud

In the Talmud, nothing is trivial orirrelevant, which means the conversation can sometimes center around unlikelyscenarios that can never actually happen. Why bother discussing something thatyou will never encounter, and may not have happened to anyone in history?Because its the Divine wisdom, and when your mind is trying to wrap itselfaround Gds mind, youre unified with Him in the most intense way.

Read: Gd in the Talmud

The Talmud is almost entirely the product ofthousands of discussions that took place in Torah academies. In Hebrew, thesecan be known as a yeshivah ([placeof] sitting) or beit midrash (houseof study). The Aramaic counterparts of these terms are metivta and bei midrasha. Untilthis very day, yeshivah studentsaround the world spend many hours a day poring over the Talmud and itscommentaries.

Read: What Is a Yeshivah?

Talmud is traditionally studied aloud in asingsong, with each part of the conversation intoned differently. Questions,replies, and proofs, for example, all have their own unique tunes.

This holds true when someone is learning witha study partner (chavruta) as well aswhen one studies alone. It is also traditional to sway (shokel) when studying, resembling a restless flame, passionate andfull of warmth.

The beitmidrash is therefore typically vibrant, noisy and pulsating with livelydiscussion in a medley of languages.

Read: Why Do Jews Rock While Learning and Praying

Carl Schleicher, Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud

Almost immediately after the Talmud wascompleted, students began compiling commentaries. The most widely studied isthat of Rashi, 11th-century leader of Ashkenazi Jewry, who also composed acommentary on the entire Hebrew Scripture. Second in prominence are thosecomposed by rabbis who lived until the start of the 16th century (known asRishonim, first ones), notably the authors of Tosafot (Additions), many ofwhom were actually Rashis descendants. Throughout the centuries, thousands ofcommentaries and supercommentaries have been written, each one enriching thecorpus of Torah scholarship.

Read: A Biography of Rashi

Almost as soon as the printing press was invented,printers (notably the Soncino family) began printing individual tractates ofTalmud. The first complete printing was done in Venice by Daniel Bomberg, a Christian, in the early 16th century. Thetext of the Talmud was printed surrounded by the classic commentaries of Rashiand Tosafot. This layout (and pagination) was found to be so convenient andwell arranged that it has remained standard until this very day.

Watch: Introduction to theBomberg Talmud

The Talmud is a collection of writings that covers the full gamut of Jewish law and tradition. Jewish people devote much time to studying the Talmud. Seen here is an open volume of the Talmud.

The standard edition of Babylonian Talmudfills 2,711 double-sided pages of text, as well as many thousands more devotedto various commentaries.

Each page is referred to as a daf (Hebrew for board) or blatt (Yiddish for leaf), and eachside is called an amud (column).The pages are typically referenced by Hebrew letters rather than Arabicnumerals. Thus, the second half of the 10th page of the tractate devoted to theShabbat laws, for example is referred to as Shabbat,daf yud amud bet, since yud and bet are the 10th and second letters ofthe Hebrew alphabet respectively.

Celebrating the completion of all 2,711 pagesis known as a siyum hashas. Masteringthe entire Talmud is a lifetimes achievement, as one can study the same textagain and again, each time finding more meaning and depth.

Read: What Is a Siyum Hashas?

Both Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic are written instandard Hebrew letters. It is interesting to note, however, that the standardedition of the Talmud contains two kinds of lettering. The primary text of theTalmud is in block lettering (also known asktav ashurit), and many of the commentaries are written in a more roundedfont known as Rashi script.

Read: What Is Rashi Script and Where Did It ComeFrom?

The first page of Talmud as it appears in standard editions, the text surrounded by the commentaries of Rashi,Tosafot, and others.

In the middle ages, Christians believed that the Talmud was the main obstacle to Jews adoptingChristianity, and that it contained insults to their religion. In 1244, KingLouis IX (later St. Louis) of France had 24 wagon loads of Talmudic volumespublicly burned outside the famed Notre Dame cathedral. At the time, books werepainstakingly handwritten and could not be easily replaced, making it adisaster of massive proportions for French Jewry.

Read: The Talmud Is Burnt

Talmud is not something to read once. Ratherit is studied again and again. In the words of the Talmudic sage, RabbiYehoshua ben Korcha: Learning without reviewing is like planting but notreaping.

After learning and relearning the same textagain and again, with intense concentration, it is natural for people to becomeso familiar that it is committed to memory. Thus, the accomplished scholarstypically know large chunks of the Talmud more or less by heart. In fact, thehighest praise one can apply to a Talmudist is that he can pass the pin test,in which a pin is inserted into a tome of Talmud and he would be able to saywhich word it would meet on any given page of text.

In recent centuries the Talmud has beentranslated into multiple languages, meaning that Jews from the US, France,Russia and Latin America (among others) can all study in their native tongue.

Read: The Historic Translation of Talmud IntoRussian

In the 1990s, cassette tapes with classes onevery page of the Talmud were produced. With the advent of easy and affordableinternet streaming, many teachers began releasing Talmud classes online. Infact, master Talmud teacher Rabbi Avraham Zajac has classes on almost theentire Talmud right on Chabad.org.

Watch: Advanced Talmud Classes

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21 Talmud Facts Every Jew Should Know - Talmud