Summary
The Talmud, a commentary on the Jewish Bible written during the Babylonian Captivity, has a new English-Hebrew-Aramaic edition begun in 1998 that is planned to finish in 2004. Study of the Talmud has been a daily task for millions of Jews in the past 1,500 years, and makes the text accessible to English speakers. Jewish identity and the Talmud are profoundly intertwined.
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Extract
Discovering the Talmud.
Consider the book we are talking about. It is written in two foreign languages, one of which is native to but one small country, and the other now spoken nowhere on earth. It is the product of a minority culture within a vast and now crumbled empire. The text itself is ancient, handicapped by scribal errors and emendations of hostile censors over the centuries. Its subject matter is often abstruse, ranging from such exalted topics as the contents of the phylacteries worn by a decidedly non-corporeal divinity, to such humble ones as the direction a person should face while defecating. Its logic is precise, indeed sharply exacting, but idiosyncratic. There is no obvious order to its discussion, it has neither index nor table of contents, not even punctuation, and it is riddled with unexplained abbreviations. Oh, yes, one other thing: there are no vowels.
The book, of course, is the Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli in Hebrew). And despite all the difficulties described above, the Talmud has been the daily reading of thousands of people for fifteen hundred years. During two-thirds of that time, the book existed only in manuscript form. For centuries it was commonplace for scholars to scrimp on food in order to afford a tractate of the Talmud, and bequea...See the full content of this document
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