Jerusalem Talmud

An extensive commentary (Gemara) on the Mishnah, produced by generations of sages working in the academies of Roman Palestine, chiefly Tiberias and Caesarea, and combined with the Mishnah to form one of Judaism's two Talmuds. Compared with its larger, later counterpart compiled in Babylonia, it is generally terser, less systematically edited, and covers fewer of the Mishnah's six orders, reflecting both an earlier, less finished redaction and the increasingly difficult conditions facing Jewish communities in the late Roman and early Byzantine province. Though eclipsed in later authority by the Babylonian Talmud, it remains an essential, independent witness to how the land-of-Israel rabbinic tradition read and applied Mishnaic law in the same region, if not always the same social conditions, that produced the Mishnah itself.