From Oral Teaching to Written Code

Rabbinic tradition holds that alongside the written Torah an oral Torah was transmitted from teacher to student, and for generations committing it to writing was resisted precisely because its life was in the living chain of memory. The catastrophes of the first and second centuries changed the calculation. The destruction of the Temple in 70 CE ended the sacrificial system around which much of the law revolved, and the failed Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 to 135 CE devastated the scholarly centres of Judea.

Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, patriarch of the Jewish community in the Galilee around the year 200, presided over the project of sifting, selecting and fixing the tannaitic teaching into a single authoritative arrangement. The result was selective rather than exhaustive: rulings and traditions left out of the Mishnah survive as baraitot, many of them gathered in the parallel Tosefta. Once fixed, the Mishnah itself became the curriculum. The sages of the following centuries, the amoraim of the Galilee and of Babylonia, taught by analysing its clauses line by line, and their recorded discussions became the two Gemaras, which together with the Mishnah form the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds. The earliest complete manuscripts, such as the Kaufmann codex, preserve vocalised text that remains central to the study of Mishnaic Hebrew.