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
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