Enabling Communities by Constructed Media: The Case of a Web-Based Study Environment for a Talmudic Tractate

The Babylonian Talmud is still an authoritative source for many orthodox Jews, an dialogic encyclopaedia of knowledge and one of the most impressive pieces of world literature. However, the distribution of this knowledge is limited by the burdensome task of studying this complex work. The paper presents a comprehensive study environment for a Talmudic tractate which transcribes an original printed edition into a structured electronic version, thus enabling much easier ways of studying the text with hypertextual annotations and dynamic knowledge level-dependent features. This radically changes the addressable knowledge communities.