The Talmud is becoming the template for public law in the United States, it is clearly the civic right and the civic duty of every American to become intimately acquainted with the Talmud.







This dictionary is an absolute must for anyone learning Gemara or any other Aramaic works.






Not only is every possible definition given, Jastrow brings down numerous examples of the usage of each word, ensuring a firm grasp of each word's nuances.




The Talmud is the product of Israel, the land of the Bible, and of Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilisation.




The beginnings of Talmudic literature date back to the time of the Babylonian Exile in the sixth pre-Christian century, before the Roman Republic had yet come into existence.


When, a thousand years later, the Babylonian Talmud assumed final codified form in the year 500 after the Christian era, the Western Roman Empire had ceased to be.


That millenium opens with the downfall of Babylon as a world-power; it covers the rise, decline and fall of Persia, Greece and Rome; and it witnesses the spread of Christianity and the disappearance of Paganism in Western and Near Eastern lands.







The Babylonian Exile is a momentous period in the history of humanity - and especially so in that of Israel. During that Exile, Israel found itself.



It not only rediscovered the Torah and made it the rule of life, but under its influence new religious institutions, such as the synagogue, i.e., congregational worship without priest or ritual, came into existence - one of the most far-reaching spiritual achievements in the whole history of Religion.

At the re-establishment of the Jewish Commonwealth, Ezra the Sofer, or Scribe, in the year 444 B.C.E. formally proclaimed the Torah the civil and religious law of the new Commonwealth.



He brought with him all the oral traditions that were taught in the Exile, and he dealt with the new issues that confronted the struggling community in that same spirit which had created the synagogue.


His successors, called after him Soferim (Scribes'), otherwise
known as the `Men of the Great Assembly', continued his work. Their teachings and ordinances received the sanction of popular practice, and came to be looked upon as halachah, literally, `the trodden path', the clear religious guidance to the Israelite in the way he should go. When the Men of the Great Assembly were no more, the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem took their place. The delight of all those generations was in the Law of the Lord, and in His Law did they meditate day and night. When their exposition followed the verses of Scripture, it was called Midrash; and when such exposition followed the various precepts, it was known as Mishnah.

Academies arose for systematic cultivation of this New Learning, as well as for the assiduous gathering of the oral traditions current from times immemorial concerning the proper observance of the commandments of the Torah. This movement for the intensive study of Scripture did not pass unchallenged. The aristocratic and official element of the population - later known as the Sadducees - unhesitatingly declared every law that was not specifically written in the Torah to be a dangerous and reprehensible innovation.


The opposition of the Sadducees only gave an additional impetus to the spread of the Oral Law by the Scribes, later known as the Pharisees. What they sought was the full and inexhaustible revelation which God had made.

The knowledge of the contents of that revelation, they held, was to be found in the first Instance in the Written Text of the Pentateuch; but the revelation, the real Torah, was the meaning of that Written Text, the Divine thought therein disclosed, as unfolded in ever greater richness of detail by successive generations of devoted teachers.


`Apart from the direct intercourse of prayer,' says Herford, `the study of Torah was the way of closest approach to God; it might be called the Pharisaic form of the Beatific Vision. To study Torah was to think God's thoughts after Him, as Kepler said.

Of course all students of Talmud need a Jastrow dictionary, but this CD rom is a scam! It has no search capacity--you have to scroll through 1700+ pages to find what you're looking for. Some con artist must have scanned the book into PDF format and then put it out on the market for nearly 20 dollars a pop. Shameful, shameful, shameful! It is completely unusable.