it was brought to closure in the province of Babylonia near present day Baghdad then under Iranian (Sasanian) rule. Jews had lived there in numbers for more than a thousand years stretching back to the time of Jeremiah and the destruction of the first Temple of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. The Gemara brought the Mishnah “down to earth” by focusing attention on the application of the laws that continued to pertain in the new environment following the destruction of the second Temple, the Mishnah’s laws