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Talmud

In 70 CE, the romans destroyed the second temple in Jerusalem (built 500 years earlier to replace the first temple which had been destroyed in a previous siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and subsequent interruption of the orderly running of the kingdom, due to everyone being carted off to slavery or whatever).

Previously, law wasn't written down, but would be ruled upon by priests/rabbis, based on the wisdom, precedent and law accumulated since Moses. However, now Rabbis rightly feared that the Jewish people would be scattered, and generally find it impossible to maintain the continuity, so over the next 200 years rushed to write down all of that oral tradition. However, because the intent was to act as a helpful reminder notes for people who already sort of knew it, but needed extensive details that previously might have been acquired over their lifetime by arguing with people who had learnt it over their lifetime, the form is excessively abbreviated: a few words to recall an illustrative example which the 200CE reader is expected to know and remember the relevance of, very terse, leaving out all punctuation and vowels and so on. [Later on this is filled back in non-canonically according to what later authorities interpret it as having originally meant.]

That is known as the Mishnah. If it were published as-is, it would be somewhat smaller than the bible, but Liv showed me an example, which is six hard-back books, each page containing Hewbrew Mishna, an English translation, and a similar amount of footnotes by a modern author clarifying stuff. (I think the content of the footnotes is fairly standard, but the exact ones are not traditional?) It's the "Big book of Jewish Law, circa 220 CE". (It comes in little sections of a couple of paragraphs, individually called "a Mishnah")

In another three hundred years, people have been passing down oral traditions of Jewish law, but mostly oral traditions of how to interpret the Mishnah, and dialogues between disagreeing rabbis on exactly how the Mishnah applies in such-and-such situation, and extensive digressions on how to make rulings about such-and-such an issue, which didn't have much to do with the Mishnah, but this bit of the Mishnah vaguely reminds us of, and examples of famous cases used as examples where the ruling was that so-and-so, and what Rabbi so-and-so said that everyone else disagreed with but thought was relevant enough to record, and so on.

And then they wrote all that down too. Which is known as the Gemara, and is generally even more terse and impossible to read without context [but nowadays is never published without later commentaries].

Together, the Mishnah, and the Gemara, constitute the Talmud, which is the "Big Book of all Jewish law ever", although it is almost always published in the traditional format in which it was first printed, with the Mishnah and the Gemara in the middle of the page in Hebrew, and medieval commentaries on both, which are closer to modern comprehensibility, and are now regarded as very very standard, but are not as enshrined as the Mishnah and Gemara are. One small section of the Mishnah translates to a giant book of Mishnah+Gemara+commentaries, of which the Talmud comprises sixty.

Attitude to the Talmud

The Talmud is the Big Book of Law. Everyone can/should study the Talmud, and if you study the Talmud ENOUGH and pronounce on it sensibly and fairly you're probably a Rabbi, and ARE a Rabbi if another Rabbi says you are (although now this is a much more codified process, and no-one will say you're a Rabbi unless you go to Rabbinical school).

You should (in very very rough approximation) follow a Rabbi on points of law. There is not one law, it's possible -- indeed, universal -- for different Rabbis to interpret the law different ways, and the Rabbi then may or may not go and argue with other Rabbis what the standard ruling ought to be. However, younger Rabbis should respect older Rabbis, so decisions on law will (notionally) be something like "The Mishnah/Gemara says this, and this respected Rabbi from the commentaries says it means this, and I say that applies in this situation thuswise." Or sometimes "The Mishnah/Gemara looks like it says this, but the Gemara/commentaries say it actually says the opposite of that, so that's probably right." Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but you really, really have to think before departing from what was very traditional.

This is simplification and distortion of galactic proportions, for which I apologise, but just intended to indicate roughly how Rabbis writing in the Talmud are seen. Which is extremely venerated, but not literally the word of God -- that's the Torah (bible) which the Rabbis will ultimately have based the law on, but there's a long way from what God dictated to Moses, which was QUITE detailed, to the Talmud, which contains 60 volumes of how you should apply that in day-to-day life.