more scholars, it became the subject of more and of better
commentaries; it was copied more often and more carefully
by larger numbers of scribes. The result is that modern schol-
ars have a more solidly established text of the Babylonian
Talmud and a more fully developed exegetical tradition with
which to work. Modern critical study of the Jerusalem Tal-
mud has much more fundamental analytical and restorative
work to accomplish before a reliable and comprehensible text
becomes available.
It should be noted as well that the power of the medieval
Christian church affected the development of the Talmud in
two important ways. Periodic waves of seizure and destruc-
tion reduced the number of Talmud manuscripts available
in certain parts of Europe. The most important of these
waves took place in thirteenth-century France and in Italy
at the time of the Counter-Reformation; the last burning of
the Talmud occurred in Poland in 1757. Occasionally thou-
sands of copies of the Talmud or of Talmudic digests and
commentaries were destroyed at a time. In addition, Jewish
efforts to avoid such destruction often led to voluntary or in-
voluntary submission of the Talmud to censorship by church
authorities. As a result, much early rabbinic discussion of
Jesus or the Christian religion has been lost or must now be
recovered from scattered manuscripts.
TALMUDIC RELIGION. Despite its vast size and scope, the
Talmud is not without focus. Certain themes and certain
styles of argument and discourse strongly predominate in its
pages, and as a result both the religion of the Talmudic sages
themselves and the forms of Judaism based on the Talmud
that flourished during the Middle Ages are more compatible
with certain types of spirituality than with others.
The role of law. Well more than half of the Babylonian
Talmud and more than three quarters of the Jerusalem Tal-
mud are devoted to questions of law. The Mishnah itself
takes the form of a law code, and Talmudic discussions are
chiefly concerned with clarifying, extending, and finding
new applications for the provisions of Mishnaic law. This
concentration on law is related to the ancient rabbis’ role in
their communities, where they usually served as judges,
teachers, or public administrators. Rabbinic piety came to be
organized around gratitude for the law and joy in its fulfill-
ment. The law was understood to be a divine gift, and obser-
vance of its provisions was seen as the appropriate response
to this generosity. To observe the law meant to strengthen
one’s link to its giver, and in developing the law into a huge
accumulation of detailed regulations covering all aspects of
day-to-day living, rabbinic teachers sought to multiply occa-
sions for strengthening this link. Study of the law was both
the highest intellectual activity in which a Jew might engage
and also a practical activity designed to further this expansion
of opportunity. Enlarging the scope of the law was not felt
to be adding to an already heavy burden; on the contrary,
it increased the portion of one’s life that could be conducted
in response to the voice of God.
The role of study and intellect. While the Mishnah
looks like a law code, however, in fact it is probably some-
thing other; its numerous unresolved disputes, its sporadic
use of biblical proof texts, and its occasional narratives all re-
flect the value of study as a religious ritual in its own right,
and eventually the activity of studying God’s law was as im-
portant in Talmudic religion as was the content of that
study. Even before the Talmud was completed, this enhance-
ment of study as religious rite had led to the creation of an
elaborate set of legal corpora, most of which were identified
by the name of the master to whom the discrete opinions in
each corpus were attributed. The well-known Talmudic pen-
chant for hair-splitting dialectics reflects the rabbis’ concern
that each of these sets of teachings be internally consistent
on the one hand and significantly different from any other
such set on the other. Hence the frequency with which the
Talmud records the chains of transmission by which individ-
ual sayings were passed on. Hence the steadily growing inte-
gration of teachings from widely disparate fields of law into
a single web, and the often forced effort to find unifying
principles behind teachings that seem to have nothing to do
with one another. Hence, as well, the relative lack of interest
in the personalities of early masters, except, paradoxically, for
those few who became the subject of frequently incredible
legends.
This intellectual tendency had several important conse-
quences for Talmudic religion. It gave rabbinic studiousness
a scholastic tinge that continued to sharpen as later centuries
wore on. It made text commentary an important genre of re-
ligious literature; a standard edition of the Talmud even
today contains several classical commentaries on the page
along with the text and many, many more at the back of the
volume. Rabbinic intellectualism turned into disciplined ar-
gument; the interplay of proof and refutation became a holy
activity. It also gave primacy to the correct formulation of
sacred texts and recitations; this in turn had important effects
on Talmudic and post-Talmudic conceptions of prayer,
meditation, and inward spirituality.
TALMUDIC LEARNING AND RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY. In the
ancient rabbis’ view there was a connection between their
emphasis on learning and the role of leadership to which they
aspired. It was taken for granted that only the Torah, when
properly and sufficiently studied and understood, could en-
able the people of Israel to become the “kingdom of priests
and holy nation” (Ex. 19:6) that God intended them to be.
This in turn meant that only those properly and sufficiently
learned in Torah should be allowed to assume leadership
over the community, since only such leaders could be trusted
to guide the people in a divinely ordained direction.Inherent in Talmudic and post-Talmudic Judaism is the
assumption that Torah learning (once the Talmud was com-
plete, this meant Talmudic learning) is the only proper crite-
rion by which the leaders of the community should be select-
ed. Whenever conditions permitted, rabbis sought to
institutionalize their authority over the community. In theTALMUD 8971