The Talmud Yeroushalmi (Jerusalem Talmud) and rabbinic Palestine

The Jerusalem Talmud (Talmud Yeroushalmi), also called the Palestinian Talmud or the Talmud 'of Eretz Israel,' is the compilation of rabbinic discussions (guemara) conducted in the academies of Roman and Byzantine Palestine, principally at Tiberias and Caesarea, around the Mishna. Its redaction was interrupted and fixed toward the end of the fourth or the beginning of the fifth century, most likely due to the deterioration of conditions for Jewish life under the Christian Byzantine Empire. More concise, sometimes more elliptical, and written in a Western Aramaic distinct from that of its Babylonian counterpart, it was historically less studied and did not acquire the same normative authority as the Talmud Bavli. It nonetheless remains a source of inestimable value: it illuminates the practice of law in the Land of Israel, preserves traditions absent from the Babylonian Talmud, and constitutes a primary witness to the social, economic, and religious life of the Jews of Palestine in late antiquity.

Sources & resources

• Sefaria ↗
• Encyclopaedia Judaica — 2e éd., Keter/Macmillan