# Talmud The central text of rabbinic [[Judaism]] — not a book but a **record of argument**, layering centuries of legal debate around the Mishnah without, in most cases, resolving it. Two Talmuds exist: the **Jerusalem Talmud** (Yerushalmi), compiled c. 370–425 CE, and the far larger and more influential **Babylonian Talmud** (Bavli), composed from the mid-6th to the early 7th century. Neither comments on the whole Mishnah; each covers roughly 50–70 percent of it. ## Composition - **c. 200 CE — the Mishnah.** Redacted by Judah ha-Nasi at Beit She'arim or Sepphoris, after the Sanhedrin's relocation to the Galilee following the [[Destruction of the Second Temple]] and the Bar Kokhba defeat. Six orders, sixty-three tractates, in terse legal Hebrew. The received text appears to carry some later additions; the oldest surviving fragments are 6th–7th century. - **c. 370–425 CE — the Jerusalem Talmud.** Its incompleteness was traditionally blamed on Theodosius II's suppression of the office of Nasi around 425; modern scholars prefer the simpler account that the Babylonian version simply got one to two more centuries of editing. - **mid-6th – early 7th century — the Babylonian Talmud.** Tradition credits Ravina and Rav Ashi with compiling it around 550 CE. The **Savoraic question** complicates that: the Savoraim span c. 500–600 CE, the text refers to generations after Rav Ashi, and it preserves competing versions of the same discussions. Sherira Gaon, writing around 987, said the text was not final until many generations after Ravina and Rav Ashi. Most scholars conclude the Bavli was smoothed over editorially after its nominal compilers. ## What kind of text it is The Talmud's form is the argument itself. A Mishnaic ruling is quoted; objections, counter-cases, competing traditions and unresolved disputes accumulate around it; and the text frequently ends without deciding. Minority opinions are preserved *as* minority opinions rather than discarded. The practical effect is that Jewish law is transmitted together with the record of its own contestation, which is why later codification — Maimonides' *Mishneh Torah*, the *Shulchan Aruch* — was itself controversial: extracting settled rulings meant discarding the arguing. This is the structural feature to hold onto. **A legal tradition that canonizes its own dissents cannot easily produce a magisterium**, and Judaism never has. Compare the identical outcome in [[Sunni Islam]], reached by a different route through the failure of the 9th-century Mihna. ## Right-wing politics tributaries The Talmud enters American right-wing discourse almost exclusively as an object of antisemitic fabrication. The genre runs from **August Rohling's *Der Talmudjude* (1871)** — a forgery-laden compilation whose author was exposed as a fraud in the 1880s Bloch libel case — through Elizabeth Dilling's mid-century American editions, to the present: **Candace Owens promoted Rohling's text and blood-libel claims in December 2025.** See [[Antisemitism]] and [[Blood Libel]]. The technique is consistent and worth naming because it generalizes: quote a minority opinion that the text itself records in order to reject it, strip the surrounding argument, and present the fragment as doctrine. A corpus that preserves its own dissents is uniquely vulnerable to this, and the vulnerability is a direct consequence of its intellectual honesty. Medieval Christian authorities went after the physical books: the **Paris Talmud burnings of the 1240s** followed the 1240 Disputation of Paris, and the confiscations recur through the Counter-Reformation. Those burnings interrupted the [[Maimonides]] controversy — one of the few cases where external persecution ended an internal Jewish fight. ## See also [[Judaism]] | [[Judaism Timeline]] | [[Destruction of the Second Temple]] | [[Maimonides]] | [[Haskalah]] | [[Reform Judaism]] | [[Conservative Judaism]] | [[Modern Orthodox Judaism]] | [[Haredi Judaism]] | [[Antisemitism]] | [[Blood Libel]] | [[Sunni Islam]]