During the manuscript age, the Talmud belonged to the scholarly few. But with the invention of the printing press in the early sixteenth century, Jewish life, and the place of the Talmud within it, changed forever. With abundant new printed volumes available, yeshivahs grew and Talmud study flourished, making the status of “Talmud scholar” open to larger numbers of Jewish males and transforming the values of Jewish society forever. Religious Jewish life for men came to be devoted to Talmud study as never before, and the most esteemed citizen was the greatest scholar. This valorization of Talmud provoked reaction, but even when early Hasidim sought to promulgate a populism that was open to all, the terms of their reaction were shaped by the Talmud. While printing propelled these dynamics in Jewish society, it made the Talmud available to Christians, who could now learn Hebrew and Aramaic from polyglot Bibles. Christians could gain greater understanding of Jesus’ Jewishness, while being reminded of some of the hateful things the rabbis said about Jesus. Due to the latter, the Talmud was burned or censored, though it was also prized by some as a compendium of Jewish wisdom and practice.

The rabbis did not emerge as leaders of the Jewish community until at least the seventh century. So how did the Talmud, a product of ancient rabbinic culture, become so influential? The acceptance of the Bavli was due to several factors, including the fact that the academies that sponsored it were located in the center of the new Islamic empire, Bagdhad. But this did not assure the authority of the rabbis or their Talmud, and some Jews opposed rabbinic authority for centuries. In this chapter, we trace the growing authority of the Talmud in different sections of the Jewish world, along with different approaches to studying the document. We come to recognize the medieval Jewish world as the world of halakhah (Jewish law), conceived as an outgrowth of Talmudic deliberations. We consider the reception of the Talmud in Christian Europe, in which the Talmud represented the error of the Jews from the time of Jesus onward. We recount disputations in which prominent rabbis were forced to defend the Talmud against Christian condemnation, and we detail the earliest burnings of Talmuds, so hateful was the text in the eyes of many in the church.