1.
Jews
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The Jews, also known as the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group originating from the Israelites, or Hebrews, of the Ancient Near East. Jews originated as a national and religious group in the Middle East during the second millennium BCE, the Merneptah Stele appears to confirm the existence of a people of Israel, associated with the god El, somewhere in Canaan as far back as the 13th century BCE. The Israelites, as an outgrowth of the Canaanite population, consolidated their hold with the emergence of the Kingdom of Israel, some consider that these Canaanite sedentary Israelites melded with incoming nomadic groups known as Hebrews. The worldwide Jewish population reached a peak of 16.7 million prior to World War II, but approximately 6 million Jews were systematically murdered during the Holocaust. Since then the population has risen again, and as of 2015 was estimated at 14.3 million by the Berman Jewish DataBank. According to the report, about 43% of all Jews reside in Israel and these numbers include all those who self-identified as Jews in a socio-demographic study or were identified as such by a respondent in the same household. The exact world Jewish population, however, is difficult to measure, Israel is the only country where Jews form a majority of the population. The modern State of Israel was established as a Jewish state and defines itself as such in its Declaration of Independence and its Law of Return grants the right of citizenship to any Jew who requests it. The English word Jew continues Middle English Gyw, Iewe, according to the Hebrew Bible, the name of both the tribe and kingdom derive from Judah, the fourth son of Jacob. The Hebrew word for Jew, יְהוּדִי ISO 259-3 Yhudi, is pronounced, with the stress on the syllable, in Israeli Hebrew. The Ladino name is ג׳ודיו, Djudio, ג׳ודיוס, Djudios, Yiddish, ייִד Yid, ייִדן, Yidn. The etymological equivalent is in use in languages, e. g. but derivations of the word Hebrew are also in use to describe a Jew, e. g. in Italian. The German word Jude is pronounced, the corresponding adjective jüdisch is the origin of the word Yiddish, in such contexts Jewish is the only acceptable possibility. Some people, however, have become so wary of this construction that they have extended the stigma to any use of Jew as a noun, a factual reconstruction for the origin of the Jews is a difficult and complex endeavor. It requires examining at least 3,000 years of ancient human history using documents in vast quantities, as archaeological discovery relies upon researchers and scholars from diverse disciplines, the goal is to interpret all of the factual data, focusing on the most consistent theory. In this case, it is complicated by long standing politics and religious, Jacob and his family migrated to Ancient Egypt after being invited to live with Jacobs son Joseph by the Pharaoh himself. The patriarchs descendants were later enslaved until the Exodus led by Moses, traditionally dated to the 13th century BCE, Modern archaeology has largely discarded the historicity of the Patriarchs and of the Exodus story, with it being reframed as constituting the Israelites inspiring national myth narrative. The growth of Yahweh-centric belief, along with a number of practices, gradually gave rise to a distinct Israelite ethnic group
2.
Land of Israel
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The Land of Israel is the traditional Jewish name for an area of indefinite geographical extension in the Southern Levant. Related biblical, religious and historical English terms include the Land of Canaan, the Promised Land, the Holy Land, and Palestine. The definitions of the limits of this territory vary between passages in the Hebrew Bible, with mentions in Genesis 15, Exodus 23, Numbers 34. Nine times elsewhere in the Bible, the land is referred as from Dan to Beersheba. According to the Book of Genesis, the land was first promised by God to the descendants of Abram, abrams name was later changed to Abraham, with the promise refined to pass through his son Isaac and to the Israelites, descendants of Jacob, Abrahams grandson. During the mandatory period the term Eretz Yisrael or the Land of Israel was part of the official Hebrew name of Mandatory Palestine, official Hebrew documents used the Hebrew transliteration of the word “Palestine” פלשתינה followed always by the two initial letters of Eretz Yisrael, א״י Aleph-Yod. The Land of Israel concept has been evoked by the founders of the State of Israel. It often surfaces in political debates on the status of the West Bank, Ezekiel, though generally preferring the phrase soil of Israel, employs eretz israel twice, respectively at Ezekiel 40,2 and Ezekiel 47,18. According to Anita Shapira, the term Eretz Yisrael was a term, vague as far as the exact boundaries of the territories are concerned. The Hebrew Bible provides three specific sets of borders for the Promised Land, each with a different purpose. And to their descendants after them, whilst Numbers 34, 1–15 describes the Land of Canaan which is allocated to nine, the expression Land of Israel is first used in a later book,1 Samuel 13,19. It is defined in detail in the exilic Book of Ezekiel as a land where both the tribes and the strangers in midst, can claim inheritance. The name Israel first appears in the Hebrew Bible as the name given by God to the patriarch Jacob, deriving from the name Israel, other designations that came to be associated with the Jewish people have included the Children of Israel or Israelite. The term Land of Israel occurs in one episode in the New Testament, the section in which it appears was written as a parallel to the earlier Book of Exodus. The passage describes the area as the land of the ten named ancient peoples living there. Genesis gives the border with Egypt as Nahar Mitzrayim – nahar in Hebrew denotes a river, never a wadi. Only the Red Sea and the Euphrates are mentioned to define the southern and eastern borders of the land promised to the Israelites. The Red Sea corresponding to Hebrew Yam Suf was understood in ancient times to be the Erythraean Sea, thus the entire Arabian peninsula lies within the borders described
3.
Talmud
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The Talmud is a central text of Rabbinic Judaism. It is also referred to as Shas, a Hebrew abbreviation of shisha sedarim, the six orders. Talmud translates literally as instruction in Hebrew, and the term may refer to either the Gemara alone, or the Mishnah, the entire Talmud consists of 63 tractates, and in standard print is over 6,200 pages long. The Talmud is the basis for all codes of Jewish law, Rabbis expounded and debated the Torah and discussed the Tanakh without the benefit of written works, though some may have made private notes, for example of court decisions. It is during this period that rabbinic discourse began to be recorded in writing, the earliest recorded oral Torah may have been of the midrashic form, in which halakhic discussion is structured as exegetical commentary on the Pentateuch. But an alternative form, organized by subject matter instead of by biblical verse, became dominant about the year 200 CE, the Oral Torah was far from monolithic, rather, it varied among various schools. The most famous two were the School of Shammai and the School of Hillel, in general, all valid opinions, even the non-normative ones, were recorded in the Talmud. The oldest full manuscript of the Talmud, known as the Munich Talmud, each tractate is divided into chapters,517 in total, that are both numbered according to the Hebrew alphabet and given names, usually using the first one or two words in the first mishnah. A perek may continue over several pages, each perek will contain several mishnayot with their accompanying exchanges that form the building-blocks of the Gemara, the name for a passage of gemara is a sugya. A sugya, including baraita or tosefta, will comprise a detailed proof-based elaboration of a Mishnaic statement. A sugya may, and often does, range widely off the subject of the mishnah, in a given sugya, scriptural, Tannaic and Amoraic statements are cited to support the various opinions. In so doing, the Gemara will highlight semantic disagreements between Tannaim and Amoraim, and compare the Mishnaic views with passages from the Baraita. Rarely are debates formally closed, in instances, the final word determines the practical law. There is a literature on the procedural principles to be used in settling the practical law when disagreements exist, see under #Logic. The Mishnah is a compilation of legal opinions and debates, statements in the Mishnah are typically terse, recording brief opinions of the rabbis debating a subject, or recording only an unattributed ruling, apparently representing a consensus view. The rabbis recorded in the Mishnah are known as the Tannaim, the Mishnahs topical organization thus became the framework of the Talmud as a whole. But not every tractate in the Mishnah has a corresponding Gemara, also, the order of the tractates in the Talmud differs in some cases from that in the Mishnah. In addition to the Mishnah, other tannaitic teachings were current at about the time or shortly thereafter
4.
Lod
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Lod is a mixed Jewish-Arab city 15 km southeast of Tel Aviv in the Central District of Israel. In 2015 it had a population of 72,819, the name is derived from the Biblical city of Lod, and it was a significant Judean town from the Maccabean Period to the early Christian period. During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War most of the citys Arab inhabitants were expelled in the 1948 Palestinian exodus from Lydda, the town was resettled by Jewish immigrants, most of them from Arab countries, alongside 1,056 Arabs who remained. Israels main international airport, Ben Gurion International Airport is located on the outskirts of the city, the Hebrew name Lod appears in the Bible as a town of Benjamin, founded by Shamed or Shamer. In the New Testament, it appears as its Greek form, the city also finds reference in an Islamic Hadith, as the location of the battlefield where the antichrist will be slain before the Day of Judgment. Pottery finds have dated the citys initial settlement to 5600–5250 BC, the earliest written record is in a list of Canaanite towns drawn up by the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III at Karnak in 1465 BC. From the fifth century BC until the Roman conquest in 70 CE, according to Martin Gilbert, during the Hasmonean period, Jonathan Maccabee and his brother Simon Maccabaeus enlarged the area under Jewish control, which included conquering the city. In 43 BC, Cassius, the Roman governor of Syria, sold the inhabitants of Lod into slavery, during the First Jewish–Roman War, the Roman proconsul of Syria, Cestius Gallus, razed the town on his way to Jerusalem in 66 CE. It was occupied by Emperor Vespasian in 68 CE, in the period following the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Rabbi Tarfon, who appears in many Tannaitic and Jewish legal discussions, served as a rabbinic authority in Lod. During the Kitos War, 115-117 CE, the Roman army laid siege to Lod, torah study was outlawed by the Romans and pursued mostly in the underground. The distress became so great, the patriarch Rabban Gamaliel II, other rabbis disagreed with this ruling. Lydda was next taken and many of the Jews were executed, in 200 CE, emperor Septimius Severus elevated the town to the status of a city, calling it Colonia Lucia Septimia Severa Diospolis. The name Diospolis may have been bestowed earlier, possibly by Hadrian, at that point, most of its inhabitants were Christian. The earliest known bishop is Aëtius, a friend of Arius, in December 415, the Council of Diospolis was held here to try Pelagius, he was acquitted. In the sixth century, the city was renamed Georgiopolis after St. George, a soldier in the guard of the emperor Diocletian, the Church of St. George is named for him. The Madaba map shows Lydda as a city under a black inscription with a cluster of buildings. An isolated building with a plaza in front of it might represent the St. George shrine. The population of al-Ludd was relocated to Ramla, as well, with the relocation of its inhabitants and the construction of the White Mosque in Ramla, al-Ludd lost its importance and fell into decay
5.
Tiberias
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Tiberias is an Israeli city on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. Established around 20 CE, it was named in honour of the 2nd Emperor of the Roman Empire Tiberius, in 2015 it had a population of 42,610. In the 2nd–10th centuries, Tiberias was the largest Jewish city in the Galilee and the political and religious hub of the Jews of Israel. Its immediate neighbour to the south, Hammat Tiberias, which is now part of modern Tiberias, has known for its hot springs, believed to cure skin and other ailments. Herod Antipas made it the capital of his realm in the Galilee, the city was built in immediate proximity to a spa which had developed around 17 natural mineral hot springs, Hammat Tiberias. Tiberias was at first a pagan city, but later became populated mainly by Jews, with its growing spiritual. The Jewish oral tradition holds that Tiberias was built on the site of the ancient Israelite village of Rakkath or Rakkat, in Talmudic times, the Jews still referred to it by this name. Conversely, in The Antiquities of the Jews, the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus calls the village with hot springs Emmaus, todays Hammat Tiberias and this name also appears in The Wars of the Jews. Antipas settled many non-Jews there from rural Galilee and other parts of his domains in order to populate his new capital, and built a palace on the acropolis. The prestige of Tiberias was so great that the Sea of Galilee soon came to be named the Sea of Tiberias, however, the Jewish population continued to call it Yam Ha-Kineret, its traditional name. The city was governed by a city council of 600 with a committee of 10 until 44 CE when a Roman procurator was set over the city after the death of Herod Agrippa I. Tiberias is mentioned in John 6,23 as the location from which boats had sailed to the side of the Sea of Galilee. The crowd seeking Jesus after the feeding of the 5000 used these boats to travel back to Capernaum on the north-western part of the sea. Under the Roman Empire, the city was known by its Greek name Τιβεριάς, in 61 CE Herod Agrippa II annexed the city to his kingdom whose capital was Caesarea Philippi. It became a city after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, with Judea subdued. It was to be its final meeting place before its disbanding in the early Byzantine period, when Johanan bar Nappaha settled in Tiberias, the city became the focus of Jewish religious scholarship in the land. The Jerusalem Talmud would follow being compiled by Rabbi Jochanan between 230–270 CE, Tiberias 13 synagogues served the spiritual needs of a growing Jewish population. In the 6th century Tiberias was still the seat of Jewish religious learning, in 628, the Byzantine army returned to Tiberias upon the surrender of Jewish rebels and the end of the Persian occupation after they were defeated in the battle of Nineveh
6.
Rav Ashi
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For the seventh generation Amora sage of Babylon, see Mar b. Rav Ashi was a Babylonian Amoraic Talmid Chacham, who reestablished the Academy at Sura and was first editor of the Babylonian Talmud. Simai, Ashis father, was a rich and learned man, a student of the college of Naresh near Sura, Ashis teacher was Rav Kahana, a member of the same college, who later became president of the academy at Pumbedita. While still young, Rav Ashi became the head of the Sura Academy and it had been closed since Rav Chisdas death, but under Rav Ashi it regained all its old importance. Indeed, Rav Ashi was the man destined to undertake a similar to that which fell to the lot of Judah I. Conjointly with his disciples and the scholars who gathered in Sura for the Kallah, or semi-annual college conference, the kindly attitude of King Yazdegerd I, as well as the devoted and respectful recognition of his authority by the academies of Nehardea and Pumbedita, greatly favored the undertaking. The same process was repeated for thirty years more, at the end of which period the work was considered complete. Rav Ashi actually revised the work twice—a fact that is mentioned in the Talmud, beyond this, the Talmud itself contains not the slightest intimation of the activity which Ashi and his school exercised in this field for more than half a century. It is nevertheless probable that the fixation of the text of so comprehensive a literary work could not have been accomplished without the aid of writing. The work begun by Rav Ashi was continued in the two succeeding generations and completed by Ravina II, another president of the college at Sura, to the work as the last-named left it, only slight additions were made by the Saboraim. Rav Ashi not only elevated Sura until it became the center of the Babylonian Jews. He rebuilt Ravs academy and the synagogue connected with it, sparing no expense, Sura maintained the prominence conferred on it by Rav Ashi for several centuries, and only during the last two centuries of the Gaonic period did Pumbedita again become its rival. According to traditional Jewish belief, the tomb of Rav Ashi is situated on a hill overlooking Kibbutz Manara, Muslims claim that it is the tomb of a Shiite Muslim, Sheikh Abbad, considered a founder of the Shiite movement in Lebanon who lived around 500 years ago. When Israel withdrew from South Lebanon in May 2000, the main obstacle holding up the deployment of United Nations peacekeepers along the border was the allocation of this disputed site and it was among the last to be settled between the State of Israel and Lebanon. One option was to erect a barricade around the tomb to prevent Muslims, subsequent to the Blue Line drawn by the United Nations, the border fence cuts through the middle of the disputed tomb. Letter of Sherira Gaon, Heilprin, Seder ha-Dorot, Zacuto, YuḦasin, Weiss, Dor, iii.208 et seq. W. Bacher, Jewish Encyclopedia article for Rav Ashi, by Marcus Jastrow and Wilhelm Bacher. This article incorporates text from a now in the public domain, Singer, Isidore. New York, Funk & Wagnalls Company
7.
Judah ha-Nasi
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Judah the Prince or Judah I, also known as Rabbi or Rabbenu HaQadosh, was a second-century rabbi and chief redactor and editor of the Mishnah. He was a key leader of the Jewish community during the Roman occupation of Judea, according to the Talmud he was of the Davidic line, the royal line of David, hence the title nasi prince. The title nasi was also used for presidents of the Sanhedrin, Judah HaNasi died on 15 Kislev around 217 CE. Judah the Prince was born in 135 CE to President of Sanhedrin Simeon ben Gamliel II, according to the Midrash, he came into the world on the same day that Rabbi Akiva died as a martyr. The Talmud suggests that this was a result of Divine Providence and his place of birth is unknown. He is the only known as Rabbeinu HaQadosh, our holy teacher. Judah spent his youth in the city of Usha and his father presumably gave him the same education that he himself had received, including the Greek language. This knowledge of Greek enabled him to become the Jews intermediary with the Roman authorities and he favored Greek as the language of the country over Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. It is said that in Judahs house, only the Hebrew language was spoken and he also did the same for the cities of Kefar Tzemach, Caesarea and Beit Gubrin. According to the Talmud, Rabbi Judah HaNasi was very wealthy, the Talmud records the tradition that Judah was buried in the necropolis of Beit Shearim, in the Lower Galilee. It was here that he established a seat of learning. According to Rabbinical Jewish tradition, God gave both the Written Law and the Oral law to Moses on Mount Sinai, the Oral law is the oral tradition as relayed by God to Moses and from him, transmitted and taught to the sages of each subsequent generation. For centuries, the Torah appeared only as a written text transmitted in parallel with the oral tradition, fearing that the oral traditions might be forgotten, Judah undertook the mission of consolidating the various opinions into one body of law which became known as the Mishnah. This completed a project which had been clarified and organized by his father. The Mishnah consists of 63 tractates codifying Jewish law, which are the basis of the Talmud. According to Abraham ben David, the Mishnah was compiled by Rabbi Judah the Prince in anno mundi 3949, or what is also the year 500 of the Seleucid era, various stories are told about Judah to illustrate different aspects of his character. One of them begins by telling of a calf breaking free from being led to slaughter. According to the story, the calf tries to hide under Judahs robes, bellowing with terror, for this, Heaven inflicted upon him kidney stones, painful flatulence and other gastric problems, saying, Since he showed no pity, let us bring suffering upon him
8.
Yeshiva
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Yeshiva is a Jewish institution that focuses on the study of traditional religious texts, primarily the Talmud and Torah study. Study is usually done through daily shiurim and in pairs called ḥavrutas. Ḥavruta-style learning is one of the features of the yeshiva. In the United States and Israel, the different levels of education have different names. In Israel, elementary-school students are enrolled in a Talmud Torah or cheder, post-bar mitzvah-age students learn in a yeshiva ketana, a kollel is a yeshiva for married men. It is common for a kollel to pay a stipend to its students. Students of Lithuanian and Hasidic yeshiva gedolas usually learn in yeshiva until they get married, historically, yeshivas were attended by males only. Today, all non-Orthodox and a few Modern Orthodox yeshivas are open to females, although there are separate schools for Orthodox women and girls, yeshivas for women do not follow the same structure or curriculum as the traditional yeshiva for boys and men. Alternate spellings and names include yeshivah (/jəˈʃiːvɑː/, Hebrew, ישיבה, sitting, metivta and mesivta, Beth midrash, Talmudical Academy, Rabbinical Academy, the word yeshiva, lit. sitting, is applied to the activity of learning in class, and hence to a learning session. The Mishnah tractate Megillah mentions the law that a town can only be called a city if it supports ten men to make up the required quorum for communal prayers. Likewise, every beth din was attended by a number of pupils up to three times the size of the court and these might be indications of the historicity of the classical yeshiva. As indicated by the Talmud, adults generally took off two months a year, Elul and Adar, the preceding the pilgrimage festivals of Sukkot and Pesach. The rest of the year they worked, the Geonic period takes its name from Gaon, the title bestowed on the heads of the three yeshivas in existence from the third to the thirteenth century. The Geonim acted as the principals of their individual yeshivot, and as spiritual leaders, the yeshiva conducted all official business in the name of its Gaon, and all correspondence to or from the yeshiva was addressed directly to the Gaon. Throughout the Geonic Period there were three yeshivot, there was however, no requirement for this, and each community could choose to associate with any of the yeshivot. The yeshiva served as the highest educational institution for the Rabbis of this period, in addition to this, the yeshiva wielded immense power as the principal body for interpreting Jewish law. In this regard, the community saw the Gaon of a yeshiva as the highest judge on all matters of Jewish law, each yeshiva ruled differently on matters of ritual and law, the other yeshivot accepted these divisions, and all three ranked as equally orthodox. The yeshiva also served as an authority, in conjunction with local communities
9.
Babylonia
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Babylonia was an ancient Akkadian-speaking state and cultural area based in central-southern Mesopotamia. A small Amorite-ruled state emerged in 1894 BC, which contained at this time the city of Babylon. Babylon greatly expanded during the reign of Hammurabi in the first half of the 18th century BC, during the reign of Hammurabi and afterwards, Babylonia was called Māt Akkadī the country of Akkad in the Akkadian language. It was often involved in rivalry with its older fellow Akkadian-speaking state of Assyria in northern Mesopotamia and it retained the Sumerian language for religious use, but by the time Babylon was founded, this was no longer a spoken language, having been wholly subsumed by Akkadian. The earliest mention of the city of Babylon can be found in a tablet from the reign of Sargon of Akkad. During the 3rd millennium BC, a cultural symbiosis occurred between Sumerian and Akkadian-speakers, which included widespread bilingualism. The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian and vice versa is evident in all areas, from lexical borrowing on a scale, to syntactic, morphological. This has prompted scholars to refer to Sumerian and Akkadian in the millennium as a sprachbund. Traditionally, the religious center of all Mesopotamia was the city of Nippur. The empire eventually disintegrated due to decline, climate change and civil war. Sumer rose up again with the Third Dynasty of Ur in the late 22nd century BC and they also seem to have gained ascendancy over most of the territory of the Akkadian kings of Assyria in northern Mesopotamia for a time. The states of the south were unable to stem the Amorite advance, King Ilu-shuma of the Old Assyrian Empire in a known inscription describes his exploits to the south as follows, The freedom of the Akkadians and their children I established. I established their freedom from the border of the marshes and Ur and Nippur, Awal, past scholars originally extrapolated from this text that it means he defeated the invading Amorites to the south, but there is no explicit record of that. More recently, the text has been taken to mean that Asshur supplied the south with copper from Anatolia and these policies were continued by his successors Erishum I and Ikunum. During the first centuries of what is called the Amorite period and his reign was concerned with establishing statehood amongst a sea of other minor city states and kingdoms in the region. However Sumuabum appears never to have bothered to give himself the title of King of Babylon, suggesting that Babylon itself was only a minor town or city. He was followed by Sumu-la-El, Sabium, Apil-Sin, each of whom ruled in the same manner as Sumuabum. Sin-Muballit was the first of these Amorite rulers to be regarded officially as a king of Babylon, the Elamites occupied huge swathes of southern Mesopotamia, and the early Amorite rulers were largely held in vassalage to Elam
10.
Gemara
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The Gemara is the component of the Talmud comprising rabbinical analysis of and commentary on the Mishnah. After the Mishnah was published by Judah HaNasi, the work was studied exhaustively by generation after generation of rabbis in Babylonia and their discussions were written down in a series of books that became the Gemara, which when combined with the Mishnah constituted the Talmud. There are two versions of the Gemara, the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled by scholars of the Land of Israel, primarily of the academies of Tiberias and Caesarea, and was published between about 350–400 CE. The Talmud Bavli was published about 500 CE by scholars of Babylonia, primarily of the academies of Sura, Pumbedita, by convention, a reference to the Gemara or Talmud, without further qualification, refers to the Babylonian version. The main compilers were Revina and Rav Ashi, the Gemara and the Mishnah together make up the Talmud. The Talmud thus comprises two components, the Mishnah – the core text, and the Gemara – analysis and commentary which completes the Talmud, the rabbis of the Mishnah are known as Tannaim. The rabbis of the Gemara are referred to as Amoraim, the Gemara is mostly written in Aramaic, the Jerusalem Gemara in Western Aramaic and the Babylonian in Eastern Aramaic, but both contain portions in Hebrew. Sometimes the language changes in the middle of a story, in a narrow sense, the word Gemara refers to the mastery and transmission of existing tradition, as opposed to sevara, which means the deriving of new results by logic. Both activities are represented in the Gemara as a literary work, the analysis of the Amoraim is generally focused on clarifying the positions, words and views of the Tannaim. These debates and exchanges form the building-blocks of the gemara, the name for such a passage of gemara is a sugya, a sugya will typically comprise a detailed proof-based elaboration of the Mishna. Every aspect of the Mishnaic text is treated as a subject of close investigation and this analysis is aimed at an exhaustive understanding of the Mishnas full meaning. In the Talmud, a sugya is presented as a series of hypotheses and questions – with the Talmudic text as a record of each step in the process of reasoning. The Gemara thus takes the form of a dialectical exchange, the disputants here are termed the makshan and tartzan. The gemara records the semantic disagreements between Tannaim and Amoraim, some of these debates were actually conducted by the Amoraim, though many of them are hypothetically reconstructed by the Talmuds redactors. The distinctive character of the gemara derives largely from the use of argumentation and debate. In each sugya, either participant may cite scriptural, Mishnaic and Amoraic proof to build a support for their respective opinions. The process of deduction required to derive a conclusion from a prooftext is often logically complex, confronted with a statement on any subject, the Talmudic student will proceed to raise a series of questions before he satisfies himself of having understood its full meaning. The actual debate will usually centre on the categories, Why does the Mishna use one word rather than another
