Revival of the Hebrew language many Jews spoke a related Semitic language, Aramaic.) From the 2nd century CE until the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language "circa" 1880, Hebrew served as a literary and official language and as the Judaic language of prayer. After the spoken usage of Mishnaic Hebrew ended in the 2nd century CE, Hebrew had not been spoken as a mother tongue. Even so, during the Middle Ages, Jews used the language in a wide variety of disciplines. This usage kept alive a substantial portion of the traits characteristic of Hebrew. First and foremost, Classical Hebrew was preserved in full through
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