The Talmud is studied rather than read. The traditional method is oral and adversarial: two students work through a passage aloud as a chavruta, a study pair, arguing it out line by line, and a page can take hours. Study is treated as a religious act in its own right, not merely preparation for practice, which is why tractates concerning the Temple sacrifices are learned as closely as those governing everyday obligations.
In 1923 Rabbi Meir Shapiro of Lublin proposed at the Agudath Israel congress in Vienna that Jews everywhere study the same folio on the same day. Daf Yomi began that September and takes about seven and a half years to complete the Babylonian Talmud's 2,711 folios. Each completion, a Siyum HaShas, is marked publicly; the first was held in 1931, and recent cycles have ended with gatherings of tens of thousands in stadiums in the United States and Israel, alongside daily study groups, recordings and online classes in many languages.
The text also carries the marks of Christian hostility. Following the Disputation of Paris in 1240, in which the convert Nicholas Donin pressed charges of blasphemy against it, cartloads of Talmud manuscripts were burned in Paris in 1242. Burnings recurred in Italy in the sixteenth century, and a papal bull of 1554 imposed systematic censorship. The Basel edition of 1578-1581 omitted the tractate Avodah Zarah entirely and altered passages thought to reflect on Christianity, and later printings inherited many of those changes. Modern editions restore the excised material, often marking it in brackets or in an appendix so that the reader can see where the censor's hand fell.