Mishnah or Second Law. Mark the date. We have passed the period of the
fall of Judea's nationality. And it was these very academies in which
the Jewish tradition--the Jewish Law was studied, that kept alive the
Jewish people as a religious community after they had ceased to be a
nation. This Mishnah, divided into six _sedarim_ or chapters, and
subdivided into thirty-six treatises, became now in the academies of
Palestine, and later in Babylonia, the text of further legal
elaboration, with the theory of deduction from Scripture still
maintained.

Although the life of denationalized Israel was much narrower and more
circumscribed, with fewer outlets to their capacities, nevertheless the
new laws deduced from the Mishnah code in the academies grew far larger
than the original source, while the discussions which grew around each
Halacha, as the final decision was termed, and which was usually
transmitted with the decision, grew so voluminous that it became
gradually impossible to retain the complex tradition in the
memory--remarkable as the Oriental memory was and is. That fact, added
to the growing persecutions from Israel's over-lords, and the consequent
precarious fate of these precious traditions, made it necessary to write
them down in spite of the prejudice against committing the oral law to
writing at all. This work was undertaken by Rav Asche and his disciples,
and was completed before the year 500. The Mishnah, together with the
laws that later grew out of it, called also Gamara, or Commentary, form
the Talmud. While the Palestinian school evolved a Gamara from the
Mishnah which is called the "Palestinian Talmud," it was the tradition
of the Babylonian academies, far vaster because they continued for so
many more centuries, that is the Talmud _per se_, that great work of
2,947 folio leaves. Were we to continue the tradition further, we might
show how often this vast legal compilation was the subject of further