The Talmud
[The Talmud is the] body of Jewish civil and religious
law, including commentaries on the Torah, or Pentateuch.
The Talmud consists of a codification of laws, called the
Mishnah, and a commentary on the Mishnah, called the
Gemara. The material in the Talmud that concerns
decisions by scholars on disputed legal questions is
known as the Halakah; the legends, anecdotes, and sayings
in the Talmud that are used to illustrate the traditional
law are known as Haggada [sic., i.e. Aggada].
Two compilations of the Talmud exist: the Palestinian
Talmud, sometimes called the Jerusalem Talmud, and the
Babylonian Talmud. Both compilations contain the same
Mishnah, but each has its own Gemara. The contents of the
Palestinian Talmud were written by Palestinian scholars
between the 3rd century AD and the beginning of the 5th
century; those of the Babylonian Talmud, by scholars who
wrote between the 3rd century and the beginning of the 6th
century. The Babylonian Talmud became authoritative
because the rabbinic academies of Babylonia survived
those in Palestine by many centuries.
The Talmud itself, the works of talmudic scholarship, and
the commentaries concerning it constitute the greatest
contributions to rabbinical literature in the history of
Judaism. One of the most important of the works of
scholarship is the Mishneh Torah (Repetition of the
Torah, c. 1180) by the Spanish rabbi, philosopher, and
physician Maimonides; it is an abstract of all the
rabbinical legal literature in existence at his time. The
most widely known commentaries are those on the
Babylonian Talmud by the French rabbi Rashi and by
certain scholars known as tosaphists, who lived in France
and Germany between the 12th and 14th centuries and
included some of Rashi's grandsons.
The Babylonian Talmud and the Palestinian Talmud were
first printed in 1520-22 and in 1523 in Venice by the
printer Daniel Bomberg. The entire Babylonian Talmud is
available in an English translation (1935-52) edited by
the British rabbi and scholar Isidore Epstein. Most of
the Palestinian Talmud is available in a 19th-century
French translation, but the rendering is defective and
inaccurate. Twenty tractates of the Palestinian Talmud
are found in a Latin translation, in the Thesaurus
Antiquitatum Sacrarum (1744-69) of Blasio Ugolino, an 18th-century
Italian historian and antiquarian.
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The Torah (Tanakh)
[The Torah] (Hebrew, "law" or "doctrine")
[is], in Judaism, the Pentateuch, especially when in the
form of a parchment scroll for reading in the synagogue.
The Torah is the cornerstone of Jewish religion and law.
The scrolls are considered most holy and are beloved by
the pious; every synagogue maintains several scrolls,
each of which may be protected by a covering of rich
fabric and decorated with silver ornaments. A special
holiday in honor of the Torah, known as Simhath Torah (Hebrew,
"rejoicing in the Law"), is celebrated in the
synagogue by singing, and marching and dancing with the
scrolls.
The term Torah also is used to refer to the entire corpus
of the Scriptures of the Jews together with the
commentaries on them. The commentaries, which arose
through the centuries out of learned discussion, are
called oral Torah to distinguish them from the Pentateuch
itself, the written Torah.
The Zohar
(Cabala)
I.
Introduction
Cabala (Hebrew,
"received tradition") [is], generically, Jewish
mysticism in all its forms; specifically, the esoteric
theosophy that crystallized in 13th-century Spain and
Provence, France, around Sefer ha-zohar (The Book
of Splendor), referred to as the Zohar, and
generated all later mystical movements in Judaism.
The earliest known form of Jewish mysticism dates from
the first centuries AD and is a variant on the prevailing
Hellenistic astral mysticism, in which the adept, through
meditation and the use of magic formulas, journeys
ecstatically through and beyond the seven astral spheres.
In the Jewish version, the adept seeks an ecstatic
version of God's throne, the chariot (merkava)
beheld by Ezekiel (see Ezekiel 1).
II. The Medieval Period
Medieval Spanish Cabala, the most important form of
Jewish mysticism, is less concerned with ecstatic
experience than with esoteric knowledge about the nature
of the divine world and its hidden connections with the
world of creation. Medieval Cabala is a theosophical
system that draws on Neoplatonism and Gnosticism and is
expressed in symbolic language. The system is most fully
articulated in the Zohar, written between 1280 and
1286 by the Spanish Cabalist Moses de León, but
attributed to the 2nd-century rabbi Simeon bar Yohai. The
Zohar depicts the Godhead as a dynamic flow of
force composed of numerous aspects. Above and beyond all
human contemplation is God as he is in himself, the
unknowable, immutable En Sof (Infinite). Other
aspects or attributes, knowable through God's relation to
the created world, emanate from En Sof in a
configuration of ten sefirot (realms or planes),
through which the divine power further radiates to create
the cosmos. Zoharic theosophy concentrates on the nature
and interaction of the ten sefirot as symbols of
the inner life and processes of the Godhead. Because the sefirot
are also archetypes for everything in the world of
creation, an understanding of their workings can
illuminate the inner workings of the cosmos and of
history. The Zohar thereby provides a cosmic-symbolic
interpretation of Judaism and of the history of Israel in
which the Torah and commandments, as well as Israel's
life in exile, become symbols for events and processes in
the inner life of God. Thus interpreted, the proper
observance of the commandments assumes a cosmic
significance.
III. Lurianic Cabala
This cosmic aspect of the Zohar is developed
dramatically and with great consequence in 16th-century
Lurianic Cabala (named for its formulator, Isaac ben
Solomon Luria). The Lurianic system represents a response
to the cataclysmic experience of Jewish exiles expelled
from Iberia in the 1490s; it projects this experience
onto the divine world. In this system, the En Sof
withdraws into itself (tzimtzum) at the outset of
creation, making room for the world, but also for evil. A
cosmic catastrophe occurs during emanation when vessels
of the divine light shatter and the sparks are imprisoned
in the world in shards of evil (qelippot). The
human task, through prayer and proper observance of the
commandments, becomes nothing less than the redemption (tiqqun)
of the world and the reunification of the Godhead. The
Cabala was thus transformed into a popular messianic
movement, which later generated Sabbatian messianism and
18th-century Polish Hasidism.