Jerusalem Talmud

Despite its name, the Talmud was compiled not in Jerusalem, where Jews had been barred from living since Hadrian, but in Galilee (the academies of Tiberias and Sepphoris) and at Caesarea; scholars therefore often call it the Palestinian Talmud or the Talmud of the Land of Israel. For almost two centuries the Amoraim, the sages who came after the compilers of the Mishnah, had debated and explained its rulings; their discussions, the Gemara, were arranged around the text of the Mishnah, tractate by tractate. The compilation probably began in the school of Rabbi Johanan bar Nappaha at Tiberias. It was never fully finished: the Gemara does not cover the whole Mishnah, and whole orders are missing, either never written or lost.

When the text was closed is disputed. Medieval tradition linked the end of the work with the suppression of the Jewish patriarchate around 425. Modern scholars date it from the second half of the 4th to the first half of the 5th century: Christine Hayes argues for about 370, since there is little trace of the Amoraim in Palestine after the 370s, while references to officials of about 380 point to the late 4th century. The suppression of a Jewish revolt in 351 and a series of earthquakes in Galilee are often cited as reasons why the work was left unfinished. The Babylonian Talmud, completed in Sasanian Mesopotamia in the 6th or early 7th century, became the more authoritative; the Jerusalem Talmud survives complete in a single manuscript, copied in 1289 and now in Leiden.