With the fall of Rome, the non-Jewish world plunged into the Dark Ages, but for the Jews of Babylonia, these were times of enlightened scholarship. While war raged on in the world at large, the Talmudic scholars put the finishing touches on the monumental work which has sustained the Jews through the long centuries of exile.

• how Christian theology brought on the Dark Ages
• the strange theory of the "witness people"
• the Eastern Orthodox versus Roman Catholic Church
• how the end of Jewish autonomy in Babylonia meant the end of the Talmudic Era
• the mind-boggling accomplishment of writing the Talmud in the age before pen and paper