The Talmud (11 page)

Saadia led the attack on the
Nasi’s
calculation. He wrote to ben Meir, to his former pupils in Egypt and to ‘most of the great cities’ warning that if the view of the Israel Academy were to be followed this would lead to a profanation of Passover and the fast of the Day of Atonement, which would both be celebrated two days earlier than prescribed. Letters and counter-letters flew between Babylon and Israel. Ben Meir seems to have been the more short-tempered of the two protagonists, Saadia managed to keep his cool whilst protesting ben Meir’s attempts to implement what he, Saadia, saw as a change to the calendrical rules.

The fury with which the dispute was conducted masked a fear which was uppermost in the minds of all Talmudic scholars. Were a schism to develop in which Israel and Babylon permanently observed different calendars, with their festivals falling on different days, the authority of the Talmud would be seriously compromised. There would in effect be two Talmudic sects. It was one thing for the Academies in Israel and Babylon to differ over minor points of law, such as heating water on the Sabbath. It was wholly another for them to
create an ongoing situation in which one group regarded a certain day as holy, whilst their co-religionists profaned it, in which there was never any possibility that the entire nation would celebrate their festivals as they had been ordained. It would destroy the integrity of the Talmud, and it would hand a victory to the non-Talmudic sects; particularly the Karaites.

Despite this fear the two communities did observe separate festivals in 922
ce
. We don’t know how long this situation went on for, or how it was resolved, but, when all was over, it was of course Saadia who’d won the day. His ‘fiery genius, profound learning and above all his superior literary skill proved more than a match for his opponent and finally brought about ben Meir’s overthrow’.
31
The ancient privilege of the Israel Academy to set the calendar had been taken from them, and a decisive victory had been won in the battle for the dominance of the Babylonian.

That might have been Saadia’s finest hour, but victory over the Israel Academy was by no means the only controversy he was embroiled in. Two years after his appointment he fell out with David ben Zakkai, the exilarch who had appointed him. It happened because Saadia had refused to countersign a deed which ruled in favour of one of the parties in a dispute over a large inheritance. The deed would have allowed the Exilarch to benefit from a 10 per cent levy on the money collected. A row broke out between Saadia and the exilarch. The
Gaon
of Pumbedita, who had already signed the deed, weighed in on the Exilarch’s side, wealthy Baghdadis took Saadia’s part. Whilst abusive letters circulated, the Exilarch’s son threatened to beat Saadia’s head with a shoe, a threat which misfired when the enraged students at the
yeshiva
charged at him and struck him with their footwear.

The Exilarch placed Saadia under a ban. He fled for his life, but not before he had taken his revenge by trying to appoint the Exilarch’s brother in David’s place.

The acrimony lasted for seven years until some of the leading families in Baghdad exerted pressure on the Exilarch to make peace with Saadia. The Exilarch gave way and consented to a reconciliation ceremony at which Saadia would appear at his house, where a feast would be held, complete with hugs and kisses.

Following the reconciliation Saadia was readmitted to his position as
Gaon
of Sura, but as part of the peace accord, was obliged to share the post with Joseph
ben Jacob, who had been appointed when Saadia was expelled. Fortunately, Joseph was smart enough to know not to aggravate Saadia. Rather than actively participating in the activities of the academy he stayed at home, all the while continuing to draw his salary.
32

Saadia was a confident and assertive man who was not afraid to stand up for his beliefs and defend his position, come what may. He may sound like a quarrelsome character, and maybe he was, but he was far more than just that.

Saadia was a pioneer in the new form of literature which would come to dominate Talmud scholarship in the medieval period. He wrote treatises on specific topics of law, in which he gives both the laws and the Talmud proofs underlying them. His topic-by-topic approach represented a significant development in codification; the earlier works of Shimon Kayyara and Yehudai
Gaon
had followed a far more fluid, less systematic arrangement. It wasn’t just that he explained the law and made it accessible, he wrote in Arabic, the language which everyone now spoke, rather than Hebrew or Aramaic. This enabled his writings to reach a far wider audience.

But the Talmud was only one of his literary activities. Saadia spoke and wrote Arabic but he pioneered the study of the Hebrew language, composing some of its most enduring poetry. He wrote commentaries on much of the Hebrew Bible. But more than anything else, he was a philosopher. Drawing on the rational principles of the Mu’tazilite school in which he had been raised, he sought to establish a rational basis for articles of faith, a synthesis between reason and tradition.

Saadia was without doubt the greatest scholar of the
geonic
period. He was also one of the last
geonim.
He lived at a time when Baghdad’s influence on the world was beginning to wane. The Abbasid caliphate was losing control of its empire, the dominant centres of Islamic life were becoming more diffuse. The Talmud was on the move too. Its story was shifting, to North Africa and Spain, Provence and the Rhineland. Saadia had laid the foundations for the next phase in the life of the Talmud; one in which Babylon would play a far smaller part.

Notes

1
Avot 4.1.

2
Ginzberg, 1909, Hullin 59b. The characters named in this account, who are disputing whether or not it is permissible to eat the fat of a certain species of wild goat, are amongst the last of the
amoraim
and their discussions occur right at the close of the Talmudic period. We don’t have evidence of subsequent scholars sending questions from Babylon to Israel.

3
For example,
berirah
, retrospective designation, is a concept developed by the Talmud to explain a series of specific rulings in the Mishnah.
Muktzeh
, set aside, although touched upon in the Mishnah is another (Jacobs, 1984).

4
Jokisch, 2007.

5
Jokisch, 2007.

6
For an overview of the various scholarly opinions about the relationship of the two works see the article by Yehoshua Horowitz in the
Encyclopaedia
Judaica
, 2nd edn., vol. 8, pp. 2601 s.v.
Halachot
Gedolot
. For a contradictory view see the article in the same volume by Mordechai Margoliot, idem, pp. 262–3 s.v.
Halachot
Pesukot
. The traditional religious view is that Halachot Gedolot was the first of all Talmudic codifications.

7
Midrashic
techniques of biblical interpretation were typical of the Palestinian school; all significant
midrashic
compilations emanated from there.

8
Epstein, 1935.

9
Menachot 43b.

10
Brody, 1994.

11
Amram’s prayer book,
Seder Rav Amram
, has been extensively edited and elaborated by successive generations of scholars. We no longer have a record of his original letter to the Spanish community and we don’t know how much detailed was contained in his reply. A critical edition was published by Daniel S. Goldschmidt, Mossad HaRav Kook, Jerusalem, 1971.

12
Louis Ginzberg argued that there must have been some sort of written text that the prayer leader used, since a responsa of Amram’s teacher Natronai permits a blind person to act as prayer leader, and the question would not have been asked if prayers were recited from memory. But Ginzberg may be wrong, there may have been other reasons why a congregation might have thought a blind person was ineligible (Ginzberg, 1909, p. 120–1) .

13
Bava Batra 41b. Similar instances in the Talmud in which aggrieved parties offer to bring a letter appear in Sanhedrin 29a and Shevuot 48b.

14
Ketubot 63b–64a.

15
Iggeret of Sherira Gaon
, ed. Lewin, p. 101, discussed in Mann, 1919.

16
‘Or
Zarua
2, #432, p. 177 cited in Mann, 1917, p. 461.

17
The Cairo Genizah, was a ancient storeroom discovered in the late nineteenth century in the synagogue in Fustat. It contained nineteen thousand Hebrew and Arabic documents including lost fragments and manuscripts of the Talmud dating back to 870
ce
. Its discovery, and the work on its contents which is still going on in universities around the world has revolutionized historians’ understanding of ancient and medieval Jewish and Islamic life, has helped explain many obscure or corrupted Talmudic passages and thrown light on life and conditions in Egyptian communities. See Chapter 8.

18
See Fishman, 2011, p.72 and notes.

19
Talya Fishman suggests that towards the end of the
geonic
period, when the academies were struggling financially, sending
responsa
and legal guides to wealthy foreign communities was part of a proactive fund-raising strategy.

20
According to al-Qirqisani, Yudgahan’s followers assert that he was the Messiah; he did not die, they expect him to return at any moment. Their ascetism led them to abstain from meat and strong drink and to observe many fasts.

21
The distinctive practices of the Ananites, as opposed to other sects belonging to the pre-Karaite coalition, are detailed by al-Qirqisani (Nemoy, 1930).

22
Mechilta d’R.Ishmael, Ha
ḥ
odesh 5 on Deuteronomy 33.2.

23
Nemoy, 1930.

24
Nemoy, 1930.

25
Gil, 2004.

26
Quoted in Gil, 2004, p. 224.

27
Schur, 1995, p. 225.

28
Schur, 1995, pp. 247–8.

29
Stern, 2001.

30
For a full analysis and explanation of the technicalities behind the dispute see Stern, 2001.

31
Malter, 1921, p. 86.

32
Gil, 2004, pp. 228–33.

7

Coming of age

Rabbi Akiva said: Everything is foreseen yet freedom of choice is given.
1

The liberation of the Talmud

The Talmud may have been spawned in Babylon but its future lay far away. Rather like an adolescent, there came a time when its origins began to constrain it; it needed to get out in order to grow.

For centuries it had been declaimed, discussed and analysed in the academies. Even though every generation had something new to add, while it dwelt in its ivory towers the Talmud was content to remain an elite and complex work; a theoretical underpinning of the law rather than a legal manual. The majority of scholars were no doubt happy with that, and it mattered little to any one else. The Talmud existed, its students studied it, and that could have been the end of the story.

The fact that the story didn’t end there makes the Talmud, in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s terminology, a Black Swan.
2
Nobody imagined black swans could exist, until they were discovered in Australia. Similarly, nobody would have thought, in seventh-century Baghdad, that the Talmud could morph from a fiercely debated, self-contained work of scholarship into the minutely examined, core text of a complex, all-embracing and rigidly prescriptive legal system. That it would become a manual of life which prescribed every conceivable aspect of human existence,
3
from the most sublime to the seemingly mechanical. Regulating all human activity, from intense religious devotion through the
minutiae of social legislation to the correct way to wash one’s body or put on one’s shoes (the right one first then the left, removing them in the opposite order).
4

It’s hard for us to avoid projecting our modern perspectives back to an earlier time. Because the Talmud is acknowledged today as the final authority on Jewish religious law and practice, it is easy to assume that’s what it always was. But the way observers of the Talmud see it in the twenty-first century is shaped by the way it was used and interpreted throughout history. The status of the Talmud today bears very little relation to the vision of its original editors who, like all of us, could not see into the future.

The responses that Natronai and Amram wrote to distant communities marked the beginning of the Talmud’s unshackling from the Academy. But a complete uncoupling from the sanctum sanctorum would require more than that. The process which in time would lead the Talmud to influence kings and revolutionaries, to be adored and reviled, to be published in multiple editions and cast to the flames, was not an inevitable consequence of people in far-flung Jewish communities getting answers to their questions from the geonim in Baghdad. Any more than it was the result of Saadia’s victory in the calendar dispute, which to all intents and purposes ended the struggle between the Babylonian Talmud and its Palestinian counterpart.

The change in the manner in which the Talmud was perceived and used, its liberation from the academies of Babylon, came about largely by accident. It echoed the events of the seventh century, when the scholars of Babylon found that living in proximity to the savants of Baghdad made it so much easier for them to refine and develop their learning. This time, in North Africa, the equally serendipitous emergence of another city of Islamic culture would help their intellectual creation to reach new horizons.

The catalyst for the Talmud’s metamorphosis was the city of Kairouan, with whose scholars Pirkoi ben Baboi had corresponded. Set in the heart of the Maghreb region, which extended the width of North Africa from Morocco to Libya, Kairouan had been founded about fifty years before Baghdad by the rulers of the Umayyad dynasty. The legend is that when the first Muslim settlers arrived their leader ordered all the snakes and scorpions to leave. He had to
repeat his order three times, but eventually they left. From the next forty years no snake entered the city.

The twelfth-century cartographer Al-Idrisi describes Kairouan as ‘the greatest city in the Arab West, the mother of cities, the most populated, prosperous and thriving’.
5
The city has been a centre of pilgrimage since the ninth century and today its Great Mosque is considered the fourth holiest site in Islam.

Kairouan was one of a chain of trading centres established at the junctions of caravan routes by its commercially minded founders. Like their other trading hubs Kairouan was close enough to the sea to take advantage of the opportunity for maritime trade, yet sufficiently far inland to be safe from attack by vessels of the rival Byzantine Empire which controlled the Mediterranean. Goods would be offloaded in the seaport and swiftly transported the forty miles to depots in the city where they would be unpacked and stored.
6

In its heyday Kairouan was a bustling commercial and scholarly locus as splendid as any in the Islamic Empire, far surpassing anything its Byzantine foes could offer. Muslims, Christian and Jews walked its streets, traded in its markets and, untroubled by scorpions and snakes, swapped tales beneath the fountains in its squares. Dominated by the Great Mosque of Uqba, with its massive dome, paved courtyards, towers and intricately sculpted wooden pulpit, it is little wonder that the desert Berber tribes frequently cast a jealous eye on the city. With its sophisticated water storage and distribution system, comprising immense cisterns of up to 120 metres in diameter and a network of aqueducts, Kairouan rapidly shrugged off its arid, dusty setting to become a cosmopolitan centre, whose citizens paid heavily in taxes for the privileges they enjoyed.

Just as Baghdad had done, Kairouan acted as a magnet for the curious and the creative, for the enterprising and for pleasure seekers. It drew in traders, poets, intellectuals and artists. But its full value was realized in the wake of the Islamic conquest in 711
ce
of Al-Andalus, better known today as Spain.
7
The city acted as a natural and accessible connector enabling Spain to trade with the Mashriq; the area of Islamic domination to the east of the Mediterranean which we now call the Middle East.
8
And in the ninth century, after the Byzantine
Mediterranean ports had been captured, it also functioned as a north-south link, between the Mediterranean and the sub-Saharan region.
9
Indeed the city was so well connected that a legend asserts that a pot which had been placed in a well in Mecca surfaced in Kairouan, proving that water runs between Arabia and the Maghreb.
10

Most importantly for the future history of the Talmud, Kairouan functioned as a communication hub for the whole of North Africa and Southern Europe. Its position at the heart of a postal and trading network explains how the Talmud was able to develop in Kairouan in a completely different way from anywhere else in the vast Islamic Empire.

Eldad the Danite

Towards the end of the ninth century a mysterious, rather dishevelled character turned up in the bustling, baking, Jewish quarter of Kairouan. Calling himself Eldad, he claimed to be a member of the ancient Israelite tribe of Dan. Tongues began to wag. His claim was preposterous. Everybody knew that the tribe of Dan had been lost for over a thousand years. They, with the other nine tribes of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, had been taken into captivity by the Assyrian king, Sennacherib. Nobody had heard of them since. The events are documented in the biblical Book of Kings.
11
Jewish belief was that they would reappear and be reunited with their people at the end of time, but this wasn’t yet the end of time, and nobody in Kairouan knew what to make of Eldad. To astound them even further, Eldad came armed with a repertoire of fantastic stories, which we wouldn’t countenance today, but which were wholly believable in the streets and bazaars reminiscent of those that form the backdrop to Shaharazad’s tales and in which Sinbad’s adventures were recounted.

Eldad told his listeners that he had come from the other side of the River Sambatyon, a mythical African torrent which flowed so fast, hurling rocks and boulders as it went, that it was impossible to cross. The river only fell quiet as the sun set on a Friday evening, when the Sabbath began. Then it became as
peaceable as a desert oasis. But everyone knew that it was forbidden to cross a river on the Sabbath, and, since the torrent resumed the moment the Sabbath had departed, it was clear that no human could ever pass from one of its shores to the other. Yet Eldad maintained that his tribe dwelt on the far shores of the Sambatyon, and that he had traversed the river on his way to Kairouan.

Eldad told the people of Kairouan how he had been delivered from a shipwreck only to be captured by cannibals. His companion had been eaten but he had escaped. He told them of the fabulous people he had met, of tribes who make war each year with seven kingdoms and seven languages, of nations whose members regularly lived to see their great-great grandchildren, of peaceable lands where a young child could lead a flock of sheep for days in the wilderness without coming to any harm. The Kairouanites had no difficulty believing his stories. But alarm bells began to sound when he described the methods his people used to ritually slaughter their animals for meat. They didn’t conform to the time-honoured practices of the Kairouan Jews, practices which were stipulated by the Talmud. Was he a fraud after all?

The Kairouan Talmudists wrote to Zemach, the
Gaon
of Sura, informing him of Eldad’s arrival and his strange ritual practices. Their concern was for the veracity of the Talmudic account; was it possible that the Talmud was wrong, or that there were alternative methods of preparing meat that the Talmud scholars had overlooked? Zemach was not fazed. He replied that he had already heard of Eldad and that, whilst he was to be believed, nothing he recounted could undermine the validity of the Talmud. It was not surprising, he told them, that certain differences existed between the laws which Eldad knew and those contained in the Babylonian Talmud, for although the latter was indeed the correct and only interpretation of the Oral Law, Eldad’s tribe had been cut off for so long that they were bound to have got some things wrong.
12

Eldad the Danite disappeared as mysteriously as he had arrived. But his legends remained; they resurfaced in the fables of Prester John which circulated in twelfth-century Europe, and told of a Christian king who ruled over a nation not dissimilar to that from which Eldad claimed to hail.

The prominence of Kairouan

Kairouan’s contribution to the Talmud’s story was brief, but seminal. Its place at the centre of the Empire’s communications network facilitated a continual flow of correspondence between Baghdad and Kairouan. The
geonim
were able to correspond with communities across the Islamic Empire, which by now included those in Palestine, Egypt, Sicily, Morocco, Italy, and Spain. Baghdad didn’t even need to be in the loop, Kairouan’s postal links allowed remote centres to communicate directly with each other and created a flourishing industry for the city’s scribes, who copied Babylonian manuscripts and redistributed them to the Jewish centres.
13

Just as had happened with Baghdad, Kairouan became a home for intellectuals. A library to rival Baghdad’s House of Wisdom was established there. The ancient catalogue of books stored in the Kairouan mosque is the oldest in the Islamic world.
14
Public education for both men and women was commonplace. A study of tombstone inscriptions shows that Kairouan was home to a far higher proportion of people carrying out intellectual professions than was the case in Egypt’s great cultural heartland.
15
Had Kairouan not played such a critical role in the cultural life of the caliphate, the chances are that the Talmud would have had little or no impact there.

A popular legend in the Middle Ages recounts how four scholars, on a mission to raise funds for the Sura academy, set sail from Bari in Italy. Their boat was captured by pirates and the scholars put up for ransom. Jews in four separate Mediterranean cities raised funds to redeem them. One captive, Elhanan, was released in Alexandria where he became the leader of the Egyptian community. Another, Moses ben Hanoch, found his way to Cordoba where he rose to similar prominence. The third, Hushiel, became the outstanding scholar of Kairouan.
16
We don’t hear what happened to the fourth captive.

Most contemporary experts believe that the legend is untrue, or at very least historically inaccurate.
17
Accurate or not, its value is that it offers reasons, apocryphal or real depending on your point of view, for the emergence of the principal centres of Talmud learning in the Islamic world. It explains why, despite the widespread dispersion of the Jews throughout Europe and Asia, the Talmud only put down early roots in Italy, where the scholars embarked, and in the three centres where they ended up. It may have been heard of elsewhere, but in no other place were schools established for its study nor were meaningful questions asked about it. It seems that in general the Talmud represented little more than an academic activity that may have been fascinating to its students but which had little or no impact on ordinary lives. Much as many people feel about certain university courses today.

That was the way the Talmudic scholars in Baghdad had seen it too. Although it is quite clear from the writings of Pirkoi ben Baboi and Saadia, amongst others, that Babylon wished to be seen as the spiritual centre of the Jewish faith, we don’t find its scholars or teachers evangelizing to bring the Talmud to popular attention. The Talmud, in Babylon at least, was of the academy and for the academy; Talmudic scholars would happily base their rulings on it when responding to enquiries, but they weren’t particularly bothered about laying it out in front of the masses as an object of direct study. That’s what the Bible was for.