Talmud Hebrew and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and contains the teachings and opinions of thousands of rabbis (dating from before the Common Era through to the fifth century) on a variety of subjects, including "halakha", Jewish ethics, philosophy, customs, history, lore and many other topics. The Talmud is the basis for all codes of Jewish law, and is widely quoted in rabbinic literature. Talmud translates as "instruction, learning", from a root " "teach, study". Originally, Jewish scholarship was oral. Rabbis expounded and debated the Torah (the written Torah expressed in the Hebrew Bible) and discussed the Tanakh without the benefit of written
Hebrew language (often technical) from European languages and adopted terms (often colloquial) from Arabic. The literary and narrative use of Hebrew was revived beginning with the Haskalah movement. The first secular periodical in Hebrew, "HaMe'assef" (The Gatherer), was published by maskilim in Königsberg (today's Kaliningrad) from 1783 onwards. In the mid-19th century, publications of several Eastern European Hebrew-language newspapers (e.g. "Hamagid", founded in Ełk in 1856) multiplied. Prominent poets were Hayim Nahman Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky; there were also novels written in the language. The revival of the Hebrew language as a mother tongue was initiated in the late 19th century by