Ancient Hebrew writings the Tannaim (rabbis cited in the Mishnah), the spoken vernacular of Jews in Judaea was a late form of Hebrew known as Rabbinic or Mishnaic Hebrew, whereas during the period of the Amoraim (rabbis cited in the Gemara), which began around 200 CE, the spoken vernacular was Aramaic. Hebrew continued to be used for the writing of religious texts, poetry, and so forth. There are significant differences between the two Talmud compilations. The language of the Jerusalem Talmud is a Western Aramaic dialect, which differs from the form of Aramaic in the Babylonian Talmud. The Jerusalem Talmud is often fragmentary
Jesus in the Talmud descriptions of Jesus in the Talmud, and which would become the basis of much anti-Semitic literature in later centuries such as "The Talmud Unmasked" written in 1892 by Justinas Bonaventure Pranaitis. Starting in the 20th century the topic of Jesus in Judaic literature became subject to more unbiased, scholarly research, such as "Das Leben Jesu nach jüdischen Quellen" written in 1902 by Samuel Krauss, which was the first scholarly analysis of the Judaic anti-Christian polemic "Toledot Yeshu" ("The Biography of Jesus"). In 1903, Unitarian scholar R. Travers Herford wrote "Christianity in Talmud and Midrash", which became the standard work on