omplete unless it included
the Talmud.

"Talmud" in Hebrew means "Doctrine," and this strange work must be looked
upon as a practical handbook, intended for the Jews who, after the
downfall of Jerusalem and the Dispersion, found that most of the Law had
to be adjusted to new circumstances, in which the institution of
sacrifices and propitiatory offerings had been practically abolished. The
Talmud contains the decisions of Jewish doctors of many generations on
almost every single question which might puzzle the conscience of a
punctilious Jew in keeping the Law under the altered conditions of the
nation. The basis of the Talmud is the Mishna, _i.e._, an explanation of
the text of the Mosaic laws, and their application to new cases and
circumstances. The Mishna has been well described by the illustrious
Spanish Jew, Maimonides, who in the twelfth century published it at
Cordova, with a preface, in which he says: "From Moses, our teacher, to
our holy rabbi, no one has united in a single body of doctrine what was
publicly taught as the oral law; but in every generation, the chief of the
tribunal, or the prophet of his day, made memoranda of what he had heard
from his predecessors and instructors, and communicated it orally to the
people. In like manner each individual committed to writing, for his own
use and according to the degree of his ability, the oral laws and the
information he had received respecting the interpretation of the Bible,
with the various decisions that had been pronounced in every age and
sanctified by the authority of the great tribunal. Such was the form of
proceeding until the coming of our Rabbi the Holy, who first collected all
the traditions, the judgments, the sentences, and the expositions of the
law, heard by Moses, our master, and taught in each generation."

The Mishna itself in turn became the subject of a series of comments and
elucidations, which formed what was called the Gemara. The text of the
original Hebrew scripture was abandoned, and a new crop of casuistical
quibbles, opinions and decisions rose like mushrooms upon the text of the
Mishna, and from the combination of text and Gemaraic commentary was
formed that odd, rambling, and sometimes perplexing work, "wonderful
monument of human industry, human wisdom and human folly," which we know
as the Talmud. The book is compounded of all materials, an encyclopaedia of
history, antiquities and chronology, a story book, a code of laws and