Unit 5 · The Gemara and the Two Talmuds

Around the year 200, Rabbi Judah the Prince finished the Mishnah. It was short and clear. But short rules make people ask questions. What does this word mean? What if two rules seem to disagree? Why did the Mishnah say it this way? Rabbis in the Land of Israel and in Babylon began to study it line by line.

The rabbis’ discussion of the Mishnah is called the Gemara. The word comes from Aramaic and means something like "completion" or "study." The rabbis of the Gemara are called amoraim. One of them is an amora, which means "one who speaks" or "one who explains." They lived from about 200 to about 500 CE.

Put the two parts together and you get the Talmud. Talmud means "learning." A page of Talmud shows a line of Mishnah, then the Gemara that talks about it. The Gemara does not just give an answer. It shows the question, the proof, the objection and the reply, so a reader can follow the whole path.

The Mishnah was finished in the Land of Israel, in the north, in a hilly region called Galilee. Rome ruled the land. Many rabbis lived in the towns of Sepphoris, Caesarea and Tiberias, a town on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Tiberias became the most important center for study after about 250.

The best-known teacher there was Rabbi Yochanan. Historians think he died around 279 CE. His study partner was Resh Lakish. The Talmud says Resh Lakish had once been a strong man who lived by his sword, and Rabbi Yochanan talked him into a life of study. The two argued about almost every line.

Rabbi Yochanan valued his partner’s objections. The Talmud tells that after Resh Lakish died, other students only agreed with the teacher, and this made him sad. A good study partner pushes back. The rabbis of the Land of Israel wrote their Gemara in their own kind of Aramaic, with plenty of Hebrew mixed in.

Far to the east of the Land of Israel lay Babylonia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Today that land is Iraq. Jews had lived there for a very long time. In 586 BCE the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple and carried many people from Judah into exile. Some went home later. Many stayed.

By the time of the Mishnah, Babylonia was a large and settled Jewish community. Farmers grew dates and grain. Traders sailed the rivers. The rulers were Persian kings, called the Sasanians from about 224 CE. The Persians let the Jewish community run many of its own affairs.

The community had a leader called the Exilarch, the "head of the exile." Jewish tradition says his family came from King David. The Exilarch dealt with the Persian court and helped support the schools. In these schools the rabbis of Babylon studied the Mishnah that had come from the west.

Tradition says a teacher called Rav had studied with Judah the Prince in the Land of Israel. Around 219 CE he traveled east to Babylonia. He brought the Mishnah with him, in his memory. He settled in a town called Sura and started a school. A school like this is called an academy.

Another great teacher, Shmuel, led the school at Nehardea. Tradition remembers him as a doctor who also knew the stars. Rav and Shmuel disagreed often. The Gemara records both opinions. A later rule says: in matters of ritual, follow Rav; in matters of money, follow Shmuel.

Sura lasted for hundreds of years. Rav Ashi taught there much later, around 400. The academies of Babylonia did not look like a school today. Students sat in rows by rank. The head of the academy sat in front. A speaker repeated his words loudly so everyone could hear. Then the arguing began.

In 259 CE the town of Nehardea was destroyed in a war. Its scholars moved. A new academy grew up at Pumbedita, on the Euphrates river. For centuries Sura and Pumbedita were the two great schools of Babylonia. Students called them simply "the two academies."

The most famous pair from Pumbedita were Abaye and Rava. They lived in the 300s CE. They had studied together as young men. Then they argued for the rest of their lives. The Gemara records their debates on hundreds of pages. In most of them, later readers follow Rava’s view. But Abaye’s side is always kept.

Twice a year, in the months of Adar and Elul, the academies held a kallah. Farmers and traders left their work and came to study for a whole month. They reviewed one tractate together. Then they went home. The Talmud was never only for rabbis. It was for anyone who came.

There were no phones and no printing presses. So how did the rabbis of Tiberias know what was said in Sura? People walked. Some rabbis made the long journey again and again. They learned teachings by heart in one land and repeated them in the other. The Gemara often says, "When Rav Dimi came, he said..."

Rav Dimi and a scholar named Ulla were two of these travelers. Their trips took weeks each way. Because of them, an answer given in Babylon could be tested in Galilee, and a ruling from Galilee could be argued over in Pumbedita. The two Gemaras grew apart, but they never stopped talking.

Both centers spoke Aramaic, the everyday language of the Middle East then. But each had its own kind. Babylonian Aramaic and the Aramaic of Galilee sounded a little different, like English in Chicago and English in London. The Mishnah stayed in Hebrew, and the Gemara around it was in Aramaic.

The rabbis of the Land of Israel finished their Gemara first, around the year 400. It is called the Jerusalem Talmud, or in Hebrew the Yerushalmi. The name is a little surprising. It was not made in Jerusalem. Most of the work was done in Tiberias, in Galilee. The name honors the holy city.

The Yerushalmi is shorter than the Babylonian Talmud. Its arguments are often brief. Historians think the rabbis of the Land of Israel had a hard time under the Roman rulers, who by then were Christian, and the work stopped earlier than it did in Babylon.

The Yerushalmi has Gemara on 39 tractates of the Mishnah. A tractate is one book of the Mishnah on one subject. Most of the Yerushalmi’s tractates are in the first four orders. It is the main source for the laws of farming in the Land of Israel, which the Babylonian rabbis had less reason to discuss.

The rabbis of Babylonia kept going for another hundred years. Their Gemara is the Babylonian Talmud, or in Hebrew the Bavli. Tradition says two teachers at Sura, Rav Ashi and Ravina, gathered and arranged it. Rav Ashi died in 427. The Gemara itself calls them "the end of instruction."

After them came teachers called the Savoraim, the "explainers." Between about 500 and 600 they added short notes and smoothed the text. Historians still debate how much of the Bavli was shaped in this time. The book was finished slowly, by many hands, not on one day.

The Bavli has Gemara on 37 tractates. In the standard printing it fills 2,711 leaves, each with two sides. It is long, and its arguments run deep. When people today say "the Talmud" with no other word, they almost always mean the Bavli. It became the main book of Jewish law and study for the next 1,500 years.

Why are there two Talmuds? Because there were two centers, each with its own rabbis, questions and language. Both start from the same Mishnah. Often they reach the same answer by different roads. Sometimes they disagree. Readers who compare them can see how one question looked from two places.

The Bavli became the main Talmud for a simple reason. The Jewish community of Babylonia stayed strong for centuries. After the Talmud, its academies were led by teachers called the Geonim. From about 600 to 1000 they answered questions sent from Jewish communities everywhere, and their answers followed the Bavli.

So the Bavli became the base of halakhah, Jewish law as the rabbis develop it. The Yerushalmi was studied less, but never forgotten. Today Orthodox, Conservative and Reform scholars all study both, and university scholars compare them to see how the text grew. Both are open to anyone who wants to read.

Open a printed Talmud and you see a leaf, not a page. The rabbis call it a daf. Each daf has two sides. The front is called side a, and the back is side b. A side is called an amud, which means "column." So "Berakhot 2a" means tractate Berakhot, leaf 2, front side.

Why does every tractate start at daf 2? Because in the early printings the title page was daf 1. It had no Talmud on it. The first leaf with Gemara was leaf 2. Printers kept that habit for 500 years. Today every edition, in every country, still begins at 2a.

This is very useful. A teacher in Chicago can say "look at Berakhot 2a," and a student in Jerusalem, Buenos Aires or Denver will find the same words in the same spot. The page numbers are the same in every standard edition, so everyone can point to the same place.

Look at the middle of the page. That is the main text. It begins with a short piece of Mishnah, in Hebrew. The word "Mishnah" is often printed in big letters before it. Then comes the Gemara, in Aramaic, with the word "Gemara" in big letters before it. The two follow each other down the column.

The letters in the middle column are large and square. But there are no vowel marks, no periods and no question marks. Readers have to know where a sentence ends. Many words are cut short. An abbreviation is a shortened word. The Talmud is full of them, so a beginner needs help.

That is why people study out loud, and usually with a partner. One reads, the other checks. When the middle column is hard, the reader looks to the sides of the page, where the helpers wait. The first line of the whole Talmud, in Berakhot, is a question about when to say the evening Shema prayer.

Around the middle column run other blocks of text in smaller letters. On the inside edge, nearest the fold of the book, is the explanation by Rashi. He lived in France from 1040 to 1105. He explains hard words and fills in missing steps. Beginners read Rashi first when they get stuck.

On the outside edge are the Tosafot. The word means "additions." They were written by Rashi’s grandsons and their students in the 1100s and 1200s. They ask hard questions. Often they say: but on another page the Talmud seems to say the opposite! Then they try to work it out.

The small letters on the sides are printed in a special font called Rashi script. Along the very edges are even smaller notes that point to other pages and to later law books. The page is like a table where a rabbi from the year 300, a teacher from 1100 and a printer from 1880 all sit and talk.

Rashi is a short name made from the first letters of Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki. He was born in 1040 in Troyes, a town in northern France, and died there in 1105. As a young man he studied in schools along the Rhine river in Germany. Then he came home and taught.

Rashi wrote a commentary, an explanation that follows a text line by line. He did it for the Torah and for almost all of the Babylonian Talmud. His style is plain. He tells you what a word means. He tells you who is speaking. He fills in a missing step so the argument makes sense.

Jewish readers of every kind, Orthodox, Conservative and Reform, still study with Rashi. So do university scholars. His Torah commentary was one of the first Hebrew books ever printed, in 1475. When printers made the Talmud page, they gave Rashi the inside edge, the place closest to the text.

Rashi had daughters, and their sons became great teachers. One grandson was called Rabbeinu Tam. Another was the Rashbam. They and their students, in France and Germany in the 1100s and 1200s, wrote the Tosafot. They loved Rashi. They also argued with him.

The Tosafot ask a special kind of question. They remember the whole Talmud at once. So they say: here the Gemara says one thing, but on a page in another tractate it says the opposite. That is a contradiction. Then they find a difference between the two cases that explains both.

Reading the Tosafot is like watching a chess player think many moves ahead. Their notes are harder than Rashi’s, so students usually learn Rashi first. But the Tosafot show what Talmud study became: not only reading a page, but holding the whole book in your head and asking it to agree with itself.

For a thousand years the Talmud was copied by hand. Each copy looked different. Then came the printing press. In Venice, Italy, between 1520 and 1523, a printer named Daniel Bomberg printed the whole Babylonian Talmud. Bomberg was a Christian. His Jewish editors helped him plan the page.

Bomberg’s page put the Mishnah and Gemara in the middle, Rashi on the inside and the Tosafot on the outside. He numbered the leaves. Printers who came after him copied his page numbers, so that Berakhot 2a stayed Berakhot 2a everywhere.

The most famous printing came from Vilna, today the city of Vilnius in Lithuania. The Romm family press printed it between 1880 and 1886. The press was run by a widow, Deborah Romm, with her brothers-in-law. The Vilna edition added more notes around the edges. It became the standard page, copied by nearly every edition since.

In 1923 a young rabbi from Poland, Meir Shapiro of Lublin, stood up at a big meeting of Jewish leaders in Vienna. He had an idea. What if Jews everywhere read the same daf on the same day? One page a day, every day, until the whole Babylonian Talmud was done. He called it Daf Yomi, "the daily page."

The plan was simple. Day one is Berakhot 2a. Day two is Berakhot 2b. The Bavli has 2,711 leaves, so one cycle takes 2,711 days, about seven years and five months. When the last page is read, the next day starts again at Berakhot 2a.

Rabbi Shapiro said a traveler could get off a train in any city, walk into a study hall and find people on the same page. It worked. The first cycle began in September 1923. Since then the cycle has run without a break, through wars and hard years, with people joining and leaving along the way.

Finishing a book of Talmud is a happy day. Jewish tradition marks it with a siyum, a celebration of finishing. People read the last lines, say a special prayer, and share a meal. When a whole Daf Yomi cycle ends, the celebration is called the Siyum HaShas, the finishing of the whole Talmud.

On January 1, 2020, the thirteenth cycle ended. About 90,000 people filled MetLife Stadium in New Jersey for a Siyum HaShas. Days later, thousands of women gathered in Jerusalem for a siyum of their own, since more women now study the daily page too. Groups met in many cities, including Chicago.

The next cycle began on January 5, 2020, with Berakhot 2a. Since then the readers have moved together through tractate after tractate. Some study in a hall with a teacher. Some listen to a podcast on the train. Some read with a grandchild on the phone. The page is the same for all of them.

Here is how to find the first page. The Mishnah has six orders. The first order is Zera'im, "Seeds," about farming and blessings. Its first tractate is Berakhot, "Blessings." Find the volume marked Berakhot. Open it past the title page to daf 2. Side a is on your left when the book is open the Hebrew way.

You can also find it online. A free website called Sefaria shows the Hebrew and Aramaic beside an English translation. It lets you click on Rashi and the Tosafot. Type "Berakhot 2a" and the page appears. Many people in Chicago and around the world read the daily page this way.

The best way to read is with a chavruta, a study partner. One reads a line. The other asks what it means. When you are stuck, you look at Rashi together. The Talmud says students learn from their teachers, more from their friends, and most from the questions of their own students.