Integral to Judaism is the great compendium of Jewish law and lore called the Talmud. As noted by Fisher (1999), the Jewish sense of history begins with the stories recounted in the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, starting with the creation of the world by God and progressing through the lives of the patriarchs and Moses as well as later prophets and kings. Jewish history does not end with the final book of Tanakh, but continues in Talmud after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, when it became the history of a dispersed people finding unit in their teachings and traditions (Jacobs, 1984).
The Mishnah, also known as the oral Torah, was compiled in about 200 CE by Judah the Prince (Fisher, 1999). It consists of the legal teachings of the oral Torah as set forth by the leading rabbis of various rabbinical schools. These sages set out to systematize the commentaries on the written Torah and to formalize the oral tradition of the laws, which was then continually expanding and being updated. The legal code was divided into six orders: seeds, festivals, women, damages, holy things, and purities. The Mishnah became the basic study text for rabbinic academies in Judaea and Babylonia and after several centuries the Mishnah and commentaries on it were organized into the Talmud, which is itself a vast compendium of law, midrash and argument that has no beginning, middle or end (Fisher, 1999).
Fisher, M.P. (1999). Living Religions. Upper Saddle River,
Jacobs, L. (1984). Principles of the Jewish Faith. Upper
Saddle River, New Jersey: Jason Aronson.
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