הלכה.

The Hebrew term halakha (הלכה) designates the normative corpus of Jewish religious law, the body of prescriptions, prohibitions, and customs that govern the life of the faithful, from prayer to diet, from marriage to commerce. Halakha is defined as the normative system of Jewish law that regulates all aspects of daily life, encompassing both the written law (Torah) and the oral law (Talmud), and is characterized by its development across various historical periods and geographical centers. More than a mere legal code, it constitutes a way of being in the world, a discipline of life that inscribes the believer's existence within a constant obedience to the divine will as interpreted by the sages.

Its very etymology illuminates its nature: the root h-l-kh (ה-ל-ך) means "to walk," "to journey." Halakha is therefore "the way in which one walks," the path the Jew must follow. This image is not incidental: it conveys a dynamic conception of the Law, perceived not as a fixed edifice but as a continuous journey, transmitted from generation to generation, ceaselessly reinterpreted in the face of new circumstances.

The present work traces the history of this cardinal notion of Judaism: its biblical origins, its crystallization in the oral Law, its monumental codification by the medieval masters, its diffusion across the diasporas, and finally the contemporary tensions that animate it. The aim will be to distinguish, as far as the sources allow, what belongs to transmitted Memory and what is established by research.

Halakha claims its origin in the Sinaitic revelation. According to rabbinic tradition, when the Torah was given at Mount Sinai, Moses received not only the Written Law — the five books of the Pentateuch — but also an Oral Law (Torah she-be-al pe) intended to make its commandments explicit. This doctrine of the dual revelation constitutes the theological foundation of the entire halakhic architecture that followed [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

The biblical text itself does not present itself as a systematic legal code. It sets out prescriptions — the six hundred and thirteen commandments (taryag mitzvot) enumerated by tradition — often in a terse, even elliptical manner. The prohibition against "boiling a kid in its mother's milk" (Exodus 23:19), repeated three times, is a famous example: the biblical letter requires interpretation in order to become an applicable norm. It is precisely the role assigned to the Oral Law to fill these silences, to specify the modalities of application, and to adapt the commandment to concrete life [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

The word halakha does not appear in the Hebrew Bible. It emerges in rabbinic literature to designate an authoritative legal ruling, as opposed to aggada, which gathers narratives, parables, and non-binding ethical teachings. This structuring distinction runs through all of Jewish thought: halakha pertains to the norm, aggada to narrative wisdom.

During the period of the Second Temple, the Pharisaic, Sadducean, and Essene currents clashed precisely over the legitimacy and authority of this oral tradition. The Pharisees, spiritual ancestors of rabbinic Judaism, affirmed its binding character; the Sadducees, attached to the written letter alone, rejected it. The destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and the disappearance of the sacrificial cult gave decisive importance to the Pharisaic heritage, which became the foundation of normative Judaism [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

The major turning point came around the year 200 CE with the compilation of the Mishna by Rabbi Yehouda ha-Nassi, known simply as "Rabbi." Until then transmitted orally, the mass of halakhic teachings accumulated over generations of sages — the Tannaïm — was arranged into a structured collection. The Mishna is divided into six orders (sedarim), themselves subdivided into tractates, covering agriculture, the festivals, marital law, civil and criminal law, sacrificial worship, and the laws of ritual purity [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

The Mishna does not merely state rules: it preserves the divergences of opinion between the schools, notably between those of Hillel and Shammaï. This preservation of disagreement is characteristic of the halakhic method: juridical truth is not laid down dogmatically but emerges from a reasoned debate, where minority views are recorded out of respect for dialectic and for possible future reassessments.

Alongside the Mishna circulated other collections, such as the Tosefta — a complementary compilation — and the collections of legal commentary on the biblical verses (the Midrashei halakha such as the Mekhilta, the Sifra, and the Sifré). Together, these works constitute the heritage of the Tannaitic period, the first written stratum of a law until then entrusted to the memory of the masters.

In the following centuries, the generations of sages known as Amoraim, active in Galilee and especially in Babylonia, subjected the Mishna to an exhaustive commentary. This work of analysis, confrontation and deepening gave rise to the Guemara, which, joined to the text of the Mishna, forms the Talmud. A distinction is made between the Jerusalem Talmud (Yerushalmi), completed around the fifth century, and the Babylonian Talmud (Bavli), completed toward the end of the sixth century and which established itself as the preeminent authority [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

The Talmud is not a code but a vast record of discussions. Within it, halakha is inextricably intertwined with aggada, legal reasoning proceeds by questions, objections and resolutions, often without a clear-cut conclusion. This dialectical form, the sugya, makes the Talmud a text of formidable complexity, dubbed by tradition "the sea of the Talmud" (yam ha-Talmud).

It is from this geonic period — that of the heads of the great Babylonian academies of Sura and Pumbedita, between the seventh and eleventh centuries — that the first attempts to draw practical conclusions from the Talmudic mass date. The Geonim responded in writing to the legal questions addressed to them from all the communities of the diaspora: thus was born the literature of responsa (she'elot u-teshuvot, "questions and answers"), which would remain to this day one of the principal instruments of halakhic evolution. Each response from an authorized master constitutes a precedent liable to be invoked and discussed.

The immense difficulty of accessing the Talmud called for synthetic works capable of providing practical rulings without the detour of argumentation. The Middle Ages were thus the age of the great codifiers. In the eleventh century, Isaac Alfasi (the Rif) composed a halakhic abridgement of the Babylonian Talmud. But it was Moses Maimonides (the Rambam), in the twelfth century, who undertook the most ambitious enterprise with his Mishneh Torah [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

Written in clear Hebrew, organized into fourteen thematic books, the Mishneh Torah claimed to offer a complete and self-contained exposition of the whole of halakha, from ritual laws to civil laws, including those rendered inapplicable after the destruction of the Temple. In it, Maimonides settled rulings without citing his sources or reproducing the debates, a bold choice that drew criticism but established an unequaled model of clarity. The work remains a major reference of Jewish legal thought [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

Alongside Maimonides, the school of the Tosafists — heirs of the great commentator Rashi of Troyes, active in France and the Rhineland — pursued a dialectical glossing of the Talmud, enriching the Ashkenazi tradition. In the fourteenth century, Jacob ben Asher composed the Arba'a Turim ("Four Columns"), a code that organized halakhic material into four great divisions, a structure that would serve as the model for the definitive code.

In the sixteenth century, in the city of Safed in the Galilee, the Sephardic rabbi Joseph Karo composed his monumental commentary Beit Yossef, then drew from it a practical digest intended for everyday use: the Shulchan Aruch ("The Set Table"), published in Venice in 1565. Following the fourfold division of the Turim, the work ruled on halakha according to Sephardic customs [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

The work risked remaining confined to the Sephardic world. It was the intervention of the Ashkenazi rabbi Moses Isserles (the Rema) of Kraków that secured its universal triumph: he added glosses to it, the Mappah ("The Tablecloth"), recording Ashkenazi customs where they differed from Karo's rulings. This posthumous collaboration between a Sephardi and an Ashkenazi thereafter made the Shulchan Aruch the reference code accepted by all of rabbinic Judaism, Sephardic as well as Ashkenazi [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

The Shulchan Aruch became the object of countless commentaries and super-commentaries, a living sign that codification never halts the halakhic movement but merely provides it with a new foothold. Halakha continued to unfold through the responsa of the great decisors (poskim), constantly confronted with the unprecedented situations of communal life in the diaspora.

The emancipation of the Jews in Western Europe, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, confronted halakha with an unprecedented challenge. The departure from the ghetto, access to citizenship, and the penetration of Enlightenment ideas fractured the unity of the Jewish world and provoked divergent responses regarding the binding authority of traditional law.

Orthodox Judaism, under the impetus of figures such as Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch in Germany, reaffirmed the immutable and divine character of halakha. Reform Judaism, by contrast, relativized ritual obligation in favor of a universal prophetic ethics, regarding many prescriptions as historically situated. Between these poles, the Masorti (Conservative) movement sought a middle path, recognizing the authority of halakha while admitting its historical evolution and the possibility of regulated reforms [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

In the twentieth century, two events further transformed the halakhic landscape: the Shoah, which gave rise to a rich literature of responsa born of the extreme situations of the camps and ghettos, and the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, which reintroduced questions that had remained theoretical since Antiquity — agricultural laws of the Holy Land, the relationship between rabbinic law and civil law, the status of the Chief Rabbinate. Here, transmitted tradition and historical reality echo and sometimes confront one another: ancestral law must be embodied in the institutions of a modern state, which tests its flexibility as much as its permanence.

The history of halakha is that of a fertile paradox: a law that proclaims itself divine in origin and immutable, yet which has never ceased to develop, reinterpret itself, and adapt to exiles, persecutions, and the transformations of the world. From the claimed Sinaitic revelation to the Mishna, from the Talmud to the great medieval codes, from the Shulhan Arukh to contemporary debates, halakha appears less as a frozen monument than as a journey — faithful in this to the etymology of its name, "the way on which one walks."

What scholarship establishes is the remarkable continuity of a legal tradition which, across nearly three millennia and on every continent of the diaspora, has managed to preserve its unity while diversifying into Sephardic, Ashkenazi, Italian, and Eastern customs. This tension between the one and the many, between the received letter and living interpretation, remains the very mainspring of halakhic vitality.