Talmud

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The Talmud is the central compendium of rabbinic Judaism: a vast record of legal argument, scriptural interpretation, custom, and lore, built in two layers. The first is the Mishnah, a terse code of Jewish law compiled in the land of Israel and traditionally credited to Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi around the year 200. The second is the Gemara, generations of analysis and discussion that grew up around the Mishnah and was eventually written down with it. The two together are what the word names.

There are, in fact, two Talmuds. The Jerusalem (or Palestinian) Talmud was edited in the land of Israel by roughly the early fifth century; the Babylonian Talmud, redacted in the rabbinic academies of Mesopotamia over a longer span ending perhaps around 600, is the larger and the more authoritative for later tradition. When the word is used without qualification, it usually means the Babylonian. Its character is distinctive: not a settled code but a transcript of reasoning, preserving minority opinions alongside the rulings that overruled them, following an argument down branching paths and often leaving it open. The page itself, in its classic printed form, surrounds the central text with later commentaries, so that voices centuries apart sit in conversation on a single leaf.

The Talmud’s authority rests on a claim the tradition makes about itself: that alongside the written Torah given at Sinai there was handed down an oral Torah, an interpretive tradition that the rabbis transmitted and elaborated. On this understanding the Talmud is not commentary added to scripture but the unfolding of revelation’s other half. The discipline it records is overwhelmingly legal and ethical rather than mystical; its world is one of law, ritual, agriculture, marriage, and the close reading of texts.

Its relation to Jewish esotericism is therefore real but oblique. The Talmud itself flags certain subjects as dangerous to teach openly — the account of creation and the vision of the divine chariot in Ezekiel — and warns that such matters be expounded only to the few and the fit. Later mystics read those warnings as the tradition’s own acknowledgement of a hidden layer, and medieval Kabbalah would present itself, in part, as the recovery of that concealed teaching. Scholarship generally holds the developed Kabbalah of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to be a later growth rather than a direct continuation of rabbinic mysticism, however much it drew on earlier material. The Talmud supplies vocabulary, anchoring texts, and the authority of the sages; the esoteric systems built on that foundation are their own construction.

What the Talmud preserves, finally, is a method as much as a content: the conviction that the divine will is found by argument, that disagreement recorded faithfully is itself a form of fidelity, and that the text is never finished being read.

→ Related: Pentateuch · Esotericism · Abraham Abulafia · Mysticism