The Jerusalem Talmud (Hebrew: תַּלְמוּד יְרוּשַׁלְמִי, romanized: Talmud Yerushalmi, often Yerushalmi for short) or Palestinian Talmud,[1][2] also known as the Talmud of the Land of Israel,[3][4] is a collection of rabbinic notes on the second-century Jewish oral tradition known as the Mishnah. Naming this version of the Talmud after Palestine or the Land of Israel—rather than Jerusalem—is considered more accurate, as the text originated mainly from Galilee in Byzantine Palaestina Secunda rather than from Jerusalem, where no Jews lived at the time.[5][6]
The Jerusalem Talmud predates its counterpart, the Babylonian Talmud (known in Hebrew as the Talmud Bavli), by about a century, written primarily in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. It was compiled between the late fourth century to the first half of the fifth century.[7] Both versions of the Talmud have two parts, the Mishnah (of which there is only one version), which was finalized by Judah ha-Nasi around the year 200 CE, and either the Babylonian or the Jerusalem Gemara. The Gemara is what differentiates the Jerusalem Talmud from its Babylonian counterpart. The Jerusalem Gemara contains the written discussions of generations of rabbis of the Talmudic academies in Syria Palaestina at Tiberias and Caesarea.
^Bokser, Baruch M. (1981). "An Annotated Bibliographical Guide to the Study of the Palestinian Talmud". In Jacob Neusner (ed.). In The Study of Ancient Judaism. Vol. 2, The Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. New York: Ktav. pp. 1–119.
^Schiffman, Lawrence (1991). From Text to Tradition: A History of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism. KTAV Publishing House, Inc. p. 227. ISBN978-0-88125-372-6. Although it is popularly known as the Jerusalem Talmud (Talmud Yerushalmi), a more accurate name for this text is either "Palestinian Talmud" or "Talmud of the Land of Israel." Indeed, for most of the amoraic age, under both Rome and Byzantium, Jews were prohibited from living in the holy city, and the centers of Jewish population had shifted northwards... The Palestinian Talmud emerged primarily from the activity of the sages of Tiberias and Sepphoris, with some input, perhaps entire tractates, from the sages of the "south" (Lydda, modern Lod) and the coastal plain, most notably Caesarea.
