The Talmud is a large collection of texts that forms the basis of religious law and lore in Rabbinic Judaism. On a given page of Talmud, there actually lies a text within a text; a portion of the Mishnah, the record of early oral law, is surrounded on all sides by the Gemara, the later commentaries on the Mishnah by celebrated rabbis. Together, these texts emerged out of the centuries following the destruction of Jerusalem's temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. With the ritual center of their society gone, Jews living in exile created the Talmud as a kind of portable temple, a canon to serve as the new locus of authority. Two Talmudic collections were developed in different regions, the Babylonian and the Palestinian, and were competed by the sixth century.
Talmud