Mishnah of Judah ha-Nasi

The Mishnah (“study by repetition”) gathers the legal traditions of the Tannaim, the rabbinic sages of the 1st and 2nd centuries, which until then had been handed down by word of mouth. Judah, who as nasi headed the Sanhedrin, arranged them and set them down — by rabbinic tradition, for fear that the teaching would be forgotten in the upheavals that followed the destruction of the Temple and the defeat of the revolts against Rome. Written mainly in Mishnaic Hebrew, with some passages in Aramaic, it is divided into six orders (sedarim) — on agriculture, festivals, women and marriage, civil and criminal law, the Temple and its sacrifices, and ritual purity — and 63 tractates, and it often records the opinions of dissenting sages alongside the accepted ruling.

When and where the work was completed is not recorded. Modern scholars place the final redaction at the end of the 2nd or the beginning of the 3rd century; a medieval Jewish chronology gives 189. Judah headed the Sanhedrin at Beit She'arim and spent the last years of his life at Sepphoris, where he died around 217–220; he was buried in the necropolis of Beit She'arim, where Jews from all over the land and the diaspora then sought burial near his grave. The Mishnah was completed in one of these two Galilean towns. Rabbinic legend also tells of his friendship with a Roman ruler called Antoninus, whose identity is disputed.

In the following centuries the sages of Palestine and Babylonia, the Amoraim, discussed and interpreted the Mishnah; their commentary, the Gemara, together with the Mishnah makes up the Jerusalem and the Babylonian Talmud.