The Rabbinical headquarters of Palestine and Babylonia alike regarded the study of the Mishnah as their chief task. In Palestine the principal academies were Jamnia (Jabne), Lydda, and subsequently Tiberias. In Babylonia the principal seats of the academies were Sepphoris, Nehardea, Pumbeditha, and especially Sura.
Gemara.—The word signifies “that which has been learned,” the learning transmitted to scholars by tradition; and in a more restricted sense it came to denote “the traditional exposition of the Mishnah.”
Talmud primarily means “teaching,” though it denotes also “learning”; practically it is a mere amplification of the Mishnah, the Talmud being made up of the Mishnah and Gemara.
Like the Mishnah, the Talmud was not the work of one author, or of several authors, but was the result of the collective labours of many successive generations, whose task finally resulted in the great and complex book known as the Talmud.
The Palestinian Talmud received its present form in the academy of Tiberias; the Babylonian Talmud, largely in the academy of Sura.
[166] R. Akiba (early second century) in the Mishnah treatise “Pirke Aboth” used to say, “Massorah is a fence to the Torah.” This has been generally understood as a reference to the Massorah of which we are speaking here. But many scholars now consider that R. Akiba was referring in this saying to “tradition” generally, and they understand the word Massorah as correlative to “Kabbala” (tradition in general), such as is embodied in the Mishnah.
[167] “It is evident that some of the ‘dicta’ of the Rabbis, such as, for instance, the above-quoted passages, are not intended to be taken literally, but are the paradoxes of idealists, which leave us in some doubt as to how much they supposed to have been revealed explicitly to Moses.”—Pirke Aboth (Sayings of the Fathers), note by Dr. Taylor, Master of S. John’s, Cambridge, p. 122.
Dr. Taylor, however, adds that “such statements have to be taken into account in estimating the ancient Rabbis’ views of revelation.”
[168] “For when they shall rise from the dead [men and women are both alluded to] ... they are as the angels which are in heaven” (S. Mark xii. 25). The prominent position of women in the early Church is asserted in the “Gospels” and “Acts”; they never are alluded to as occupying an inferior place. See below, p. [380], for a further note on the position of women.
[169] Renan recognizes the service rendered by the Talmudical Rabbis to Christianity, but while acknowledging this, curiously limits it to the preservation of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament Scriptures, which he thinks would probably have been lost but for the labours of the Rabbis of the Talmud—he characterizes this as “un service du 1er ordre.” To him the Hebrew Old Testament is an incomparable monument of history, archæology, and philology. The deeper signification of these sacred records, which in the hearts of earnest Christians constitutes their exceeding preciousness, finds little place, alas, in the cheerless conception of the brilliant French scholar.