The Talmud (10 page)

Pirkoi’s most famous letter, known quite simply as the Letter of Pirkoi ben Baboi was ostensibly written to communities in Israel, pointing out that many of their practices were not in line with the rulings of the Babylonian Talmud. His teacher Yehudai had tried something similar and had been rebuffed, the heirs to the Jerusalem Talmud were not going to be dictated to by those of the Babylonian version. The Academy in Israel had told Yehudai that their traditions were firmly established, and that in matters of ritual, a long-established tradition overrides a theoretical law. Paltoi tried a different approach. He sent his letter not just to Israel but to the Jews in Kairouan, then an important city about a hundred miles from the modern Tunis.

Kairouan had a large and thriving Jewish community. The city enjoyed economic stability and its Jewish community was well educated, with close ties to their co-religionists in Spain, whom they helped to establish their own centres of learning. Pirkoi pointed out to the Jews in Kairouan that the traditions observed in Israel were unique to that country and had been forced upon them by persecutions. Even though the citizens of Kairouan were in close
contact with, and travelled frequently to Israel, there had been no persecutions in Kairouan. There was no reason therefore for the Jews there to mimic practices in Israel. They couldn’t use the same argument as the Jerusalem Academy to do things that were not in accord with the Babylonian Talmud.

What Pirkoi was really doing, in copying his letter to Kairouan, and probably elsewhere as well, was to raise the stakes in the battle between the two Talmuds for religious authority. He recognized the strategic value of establishing the authority of the Babylonian Talmud in Kairouan. By starting from a position which claimed Israel was wrong and Babylon was right, he was doing what polemicists have done since time immemorial; he was framing the debate in terms which made his position correct from the outset.

But this wasn’t all. Pirkoi may have believed firmly that the Babylonian Talmud was the more authentic because it had never been forced to seek compromise with oppressors, but nevertheless the struggle between the two Talmuds was an internal matter. There was a far more urgent battle looming. Against a Jewish sectarian group known as the Karaites. Who, like the Sadducees some centuries earlier, did not accept the Oral Law at all. Overcoming the Karaites was Pirkoi’s real aim, and he couldn’t argue for the validity of the Oral Law if there were two Talmuds with conflicting practices, each claiming to represent the authentic tradition, each contradicting the other. That was the real reason Pirkoi was insistent that the Jews of Kairouan followed the dominant Babylonian Talmud. He wanted to take the Jerusalem Talmud out of the picture altogether.

The Karaites

The two Talmuds may have struggled for dominance out of a competing sense of superiority, but they were about to be hit by a challenge that was wholly out of their control. Nobody had seen what was coming when, in the second half of the eighth century, the exilarch-in-waiting, Anan ben David was passed over for the job in favour of his brother, nor when, some years later, his grandson Daniel became embroiled in a separate dispute over the succession. The fact that another member of Anan’s family, a man named Josiah, was the head of the Academy in Israel did nothing to help.

Anan was a charismatic intellectual who attracted followers towards him, polymaths with interests in law, philosophy, language and biblical interpretation. His disenchantment with the Talmudic establishment may have been
why he didn’t get the post of exilarch, or it may have been a consequence of his rejection. Either way, he began to explore the origins of Talmudic religion and to enter into dialogue with other dissenting Jewish sects, including Abu Isa’s movement, and the Yudghanites, a Jewish sect influenced by Sufism.
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An amalgamation of sorts began to take place and by the ninth century the coalition, although patchy at first, had developed its own distinctive identity, and taken a name that implied ‘followers of the Bible’, thus making it clear they were no disciples of the Talmud.
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The Karaites actively recruited converts and established communities across the Islamic and Byzantine Empires. The two Academies of Babylon and Israel, still eyeing each other suspiciously, had a bigger threat to deal with than anything they had previously known.

The Karaites’ fundamental premise was the rejection of Talmudic Judaism, in favour of a literal interpretation of the Bible. This did not mean that they had no traditions or biblical interpretations of their own, it would be very difficult to take the Bible at face value without any need for interpretation or explanation. The Karaites had their own principles for interpreting the Bible, but they rejected out of hand the idea of an Oral Law handed down from Mount Sinai, of which the Talmud was the summation. Just as the earlier Sadducees, with whom they share many similarities, had rejected the Oral Law adhered to by the Pharisees.

Pirkoi ben Baboi believed the Karaite threat could only be contained if the struggle between the Academies was resolved. A divided Talmud played into the hands of those who opposed it; dissent could only be contained by a single, universally accepted legal authority. He used his letter to highlight seemingly minor points of law which he believed illustrated the failings of the Israel Academy. He railed against them for hesitating over whether the Sabbath regulations prohibiting the lighting of fires could be overruled to heat water for a woman in labour. All agreed that preservation of life came ahead of everything else and therefore, he argued, there was no question that a fire must be lit. But his real purpose in this argument was to point the finger at the Karaites who
took the biblical prohibition against lighting a fire on the Sabbath literally and would spend the whole day with no heat and no light. By accusing the scholars in Israel of endangering women in childbirth by not lighting fires he was by implication accusing the Karaites of an even greater recklessness; in ignoring the Oral Law’s interpretation of a biblical commandment they risked the lives of anyone who needed to be warmed on the Sabbath for the sake of their health.

Pirkoi didn’t just use legal arguments against the Karaites. He appealed to their interest in biblical interpretation by adapting a well-known homily on a verse at the end of the Book of Deuteronomy, one which implies that God had offered the Torah to other Middle Eastern tribes before offering it to the Israelites.
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In the original homily all the tribes had rejected the Torah because it contained too many restrictions. In Pirkoi’s adaptation, the tribes had agreed to accept the written Torah, but it was not given to them because they would not accept an Oral Law. The homily implied that the Karaites were beyond the fold; by not accepting the Oral Law they had implicitly rejected the written Torah.

Nevertheless, despite Pirkoi’s best efforts, the Karaites were far and away the most successful of the anti-Talmudic groups, and the only one from that period to survive to the present day. They based their interpretation of Bible upon reason. Despite doctrinal differences they were considered by all parties, including the Talmudists, to be part of the Jewish community. It was their membership of the community, coupled with their opposition to the Talmud, that caused emotions to run so high, and made the dispute so bitter.

Much of our knowledge of the Karaites comes from the writings of their tenth-century apologist, Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Qirqisani. His
Book
of
Lights
and
Watch
Towers
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is a detailed description of the many Jewish sects in Babylon, and the differences between them. Al-Qirqisani’s charge against the Talmud is exactly that which Pirkoi had tried to eliminate; namely that differences of opinions between Talmudic scholars undermines their doctrine of a divinely given Oral Law that by definition should be clear and unambiguous. Karaites, on the other hand, says al-Qirqisani, ‘arrive at our knowledge by the mere deduction of our reason; since this is so, it cannot be denied that controversy may possibly
arise’.
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Pirkoi ben Baboi did manage to keep the North African communities on side; they didn’t place themselves under the authority of the Israel Academy, as
he had feared. But other than that his evangelism for the Babylonian Talmud wasn’t particularly successful. Not just because the Karaites were growing more numerous and confident daily. He also hadn’t really gained any territorial advantage in the battle between the academies; the communities of Syria, Lebanon and most of Egypt still looked to Israel for guidance. It would take a stronger, more assertive character to strengthen the Babylon Academy, and to take decisive steps towards eliminating the Karaite threat.

Saadia’s controversies

Pirkoi was an important figure at a particular moment in the story of the Babylonian Talmud, but few people remember him today. Not so Saadia,
Gaon
of Sura.

At the beginning of the tenth century the Sura academy was in decline. According to Sherira
Gaon’s
letter many of the scholars had died within a three-month period around the year 886 
ce
; Moshe Gil suggests this may have been the result of a plague.
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The number of scholars fell away so sharply that when the academy head died in 924
ce
the exilarch had to recruit from outside the academy. He appointed a local lay scholar, a weaver by profession, as
gaon.
Four years later, when the weaver died and the academy was in danger of closing, the exilarch, David ben Zakkai appointed another outsider, this time Saadia ben Yosef, who had been making something of a name for himself in Baghdad.

Saadia had been born in Fiyum, in Egypt. He was known locally as al-Faiyumi. Like the Karaites, Saadia had been influenced by the rationalist, Islamic school of Mu’tazilite philosophy. He wrote prolifically, on philosophy, biblical interpretation and grammar. People still read his works today.

Saadia was a great scholar but a quarrelsome man. He had been involved in controversy before his appointment as
Gaon
of Sura. David the Exilarch had been warned off the appointment, for Saadia ‘feared no one, deferred to no-one in the world, because of his great wisdom and his large mouth and his long tongue …’ .
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Saadia’s attitude towards the perceived dangers of Karaism was far more impassioned than his fellow Talmudists; he had no interest in communal
reconciliation, he considered the Karaites to be apostates who should be ostracized by the community. At the age of twenty three, whilst still in Egypt and long before he was appointed
gaon
,
Saadia had fired his first shot in his war against them, publishing a fierce polemic against the followers of Anan, who at that time still retained a separate identity within the Karaite movement. Not surprisingly the Karaites regarded him as their main opponent and they counter-attacked vigorously. Salmon ben Jeroham was particularly abusive towards him: ‘You have written lies … where do you flee to hide yourself in utter ruin … may your steps be hampered as you walk’.
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But Saadia wasn’t just quarrelsome; he was a good strategist. His persistent attacks achieved the outcome he had wanted, a complete break between the Talmud academies and the Karaites. He didn’t get everything right; he strengthened the Karaites by propelling the Ananites, who were his intellectual equals and could hold their own against him in polemic, into a dominant position in Karaism. Saadia’s attacks helped the Karaite ideologues to create a unitary position out of quarrelling sects. ‘Karaism honed its intellectual edge on the confrontation with Saadia … without Saadia, Karaism might have had a very different fate & form.’
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Saadia’s quarrelsome reputation wasn’t confined to his war against the Karaites. He also had a go at the Jerusalem Talmud. Six years before his appointment as
gaon
he had instigated the fiercest of all disputes between the adherents of the two Talmuds, a dispute which to all intents and purposes finally established the hegemony of the Babylonian school. It all had to do with the fixing of the calendar, and a squabble over a couple of missing days.

The Talmudic calendar is a unique and complex combination of both the lunar and solar cycles. The months are determined by the new moons, the years are dictated by the position of the earth relative to the sun. There are twelve months in the Talmudic year, but a lunar month is less than thirty days. Twelve of them do not add up to a solar year of three hundred and sixty five days. To bring the lunar and solar cycles into line a rigorous calculation had to be implemented, in which some years had additional months inserted, and two particular months could vary between twenty nine or thirty days. Tradition has it that this calculation was introduced in the year 358
ce
by the
Nasi
Hillel IV
but Sacha Stern has shown that the development of this hybrid calendar was far more complicated than that.
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Until Saadia’s time, responsibility for performing the calculation and announcing the leap years had rested with the Israel Academy. This was a relic of the custom in the days of the Temple, before the calculation was introduced, when the rabbis in Jerusalem would call for witnesses to come forward to testify they had seen the new moon. When a pair of reliable informants arrived, the rabbis would proclaim the new month.

In the year 922
ce
a dispute broke out, for highly technical reasons, over whether the two flexible months should have twenty nine or thirty days. The
gaon
in Israel, ben Meir, held that the two months should have wenty nine days. The Babylonian scholars disagreed; they argued for thirty days. The details of the disagreement may have appeared trivial, they were arguing over a matter of a few minutes here or there, but the consequences were that, unless the two academies agreed, the communities over which they each held sway would celebrate their festivals on different days. Each school contended that if they followed the opinion of the other they would be eating forbidden bread on the day they had calculated to be the Passover.
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