Never forget that the Talmud is the “oral torah” and was supposedly given to Moses by God at the same time as the written torah. So the Talmud was transmitted orally for centuries until it was written down in two versions: the Palestinian Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud. Each one is different. The common one that gets referenced is the Babylonian Talmud.
This is why I can never take the chosen people shtick seriously. They look as inbred as the Whittaker family out of West Virginia and are prone to guttural outbursts and fits of violence. The modern variants of the Von Neumann type Jews are the ones that intermarry and are abandoning Judaism in droves. What increasingly remains amongst the Orthodox are the Whittaker Jews that study the torah all day because they’re only capable of reading one book. Even then they probably don’t remember what they just read.