The Jewish community in Babylon dates back to late biblical times and originates from the deportations of Jews from the Land of Israel that followed before and after the destruction of the First Temple (586 BCE). Following the Hellenistic conquest of the East, the Jews of Babylon, like their brethren in Eretz Israel, lived first under the rule of the Seleucids and then became subjects of the Kingdom of Parthia, a federation of feudal principalities, which gave them a certain autonomy since, as long as they gave their support in times of war, the rulers did not interfere in their internal affairs.

It was after the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) and the Bar Kochba revolt (132-135) that groups of scholars from Eretz Israel emigrated to Babylon, no doubt in the wake of the religious persecution that followed at the hands of the Romans. Although Eretz Yisrael remained the center where matters of religious practice, such as the order of the Hebrew calendar, were decided, over time and with Rome’s continuing campaign to wipe out Judaism, this function had, by the mid-third century, passed to the academies of study (yeshivot) in Babylon.

It was in these academies that the Babylonian Talmud began to be written down. The sages and their disciples interpreted the Mishnah in oral discussions that were transcribed as is. That is why these texts do not bear a systematic and concise account. The conversations were transcribed with everything that could come up in a conversation, including topics that were unrelated to the main point or comments that went off on a tangent. The Babylonian Talmud is said to be like the sea: immense in size, with hidden depths and without a specific shape.

According to scholars, the Babylonian Talmud, as opposed to the Jerusalem Talmud, eventually became “The Tamud” as a result of Babylon being the main center of Torah learning. The academies of Sura and Pumbedita, their teachers, and their teachings were accepted as the supreme rabbinical authority for the entire diaspora. The fact that the Tamud Jerusalemmi had been completed 150 years earlier gave the Talmud Babli an advantage, since being later, it gave it greater authority in case of discrepancies.

The Talmud Babli is a storehouse of information relating to the life itself, customs, beliefs, and superstitions of both Jews and non-Jews. It is a source of history, medicine, astronomy, commerce, agriculture, magic, botany, zoology, and other sciences. When it was finally completed, it became the basic text used in academies throughout the Jewish world. But putting it into writing (more than 2.5 million words) was a Herculean task, since there was no printing press at that time. You can imagine that hand-copying involved errors, changes and additions, making it difficult to canonize a definitive text. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century helped to mitigate the problem somewhat. But even so, despite the many editions, it has always had the stamp of “Made in Babylon.”

By Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: Encyclopaedia Judaica and “Babylonian Rabbinic Culture” by Professor Isaiah Gafni, part of the book “Cultures of the Jews” edited by David Biale.