The Talmud (12 page)

Kairouan changed all that. In her penetrating study,
Becoming the People of the Talmud
, Talya Fishman explores how attitudes to the Talmud changed once people encountered it as a fixed, written text, rather than in Babylon where it still existed largely as an oral tradition. She shows how this change in attitude began in Kairouan, where the scholars set out to make the Talmud available to people who were not rabbis,
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and to use their extensive communication network to spread the word.

Explaining the Talmud

The turning point for the Talmud came towards the end of the tenth century. It was led by Hushiel whose arrival in Kairouan had been recounted in the legend of the four captives. Modelling themselves on Babylon, Hushiel and his colleague Jacob ibn Shahin each set up an academy in Kairouan. These were the first significant schools of Talmud study outside Babylon, and marked the end of the old country’s dominance. From this point forward the Talmud would be studied across the world according to the viewpoints of its local teachers, no longer anxiously awaiting decisions sent from afar. Baghdad was still venerated as the home of the Talmud, but its decline had begun, and would become more pronounced during the following generation.

We know very little about Hushiel and even less about Jacob.
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But we are far more familiar with the works of their sons, Hananel and Nissim. Hananel, according to the twelfth-century Spanish philosopher Ibn Daud, had nine daughters. He was supported by wealthy merchants in the city, to such a degree that when he died he left ten thousand golden dinars.
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Nissim had no children, and no wealth either.

Despite their different circumstances Hananel and Nissim were both revolutionaries. They may not have known it; in their eyes all they did was to continue to teach in their fathers’ schools and write commentaries on the Talmud.
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But nobody had done anything like it before, and they paved the way for hundreds
of commentators, scrutineers and analysts who followed in their wake. What made them so radical was that, rather than continuing the process of debate for its own sake, which had been such a prominent feature of the Babylonian academies, they set out to explain the Talmud to people who were trying to understand it. They were educators in Talmud rather than contributors to it. Large parts of their commentaries are still printed in standard editions of the Talmud today.

The sharp contrast between both commentaries and the Talmud itself is that the commentators try to reach a conclusion. Keen to provide practical guidance and therefore not content with the way the Talmud often leaves discussions open, both men give their views on what the legal rulings should be. They may not have known it but they were pioneers in a process of legal decision making that would find its way from Kairouan into the schools of Spain.

As Kairouan ascended Baghdad declined. One event did not cause the other but there was a connection between the two. We take our leave of Babylon with the appointment of Hai, its last great personality, as head of the Pumbedita Academy. Hai succeeded his father Sherira, whose letter to Kairouan provided so much information on the development of the Oral Law and the academies in Babylon.

Hai was renowned as both a legal authority and an educator. His academy drew students from across the world, including Spain and Germany, the two centres which were about to serve as the launching pad for the Talmud in the medieval world. He corresponded with people across the world, answering questions from communities that Kairouan’s communication network couldn’t reach. But Hai was the last of his kind; with his death in 1038 Babylon’s reign as the pre-eminent centre of Talmudic learning finally drew to a close.

Kairouan’s influence on the Talmud may have been seminal but the city never attained Baghdad’s prominence. It was always a hub, rarely a place to which other communities turned for guidance or instruction. When Bedouin tribes besieged and destroyed the city in 1057 its time had run its course; in the space of less than a generation the Talmud’s world changed yet again and both Baghdad and Kairouan ceased to play any part in its ongoing story.

The Golden Age of Spain

The Talmud alighted in Spain round about the same time as it landed in Kairouan. This is implied in the legend of the four captives and history bears it
out because, as we saw in the previous chapter, in the second half of the ninth century someone in Barcelona heard or saw a reference in it to a hundred daily blessings that were to be said daily. He wrote to the
Gaon
Amram in Babylon asking for further details. Yet despite this early interest, and notwithstanding Amram’s detailed reply, the Talmud didn’t really catch on as a subject of serious investigation until well into the dying days of Babylon, when the schools set up in Kairouan by Hushiel and Jacob ibn Shahin were already flourishing.

Life in Al-Andalus, as Spain was known in those days, held far more opportunities than anywhere else the Jews had lived. Arabic and Jewish culture flourished alongside each other. The two languages were similar in structure and vocabulary. Their grammarians learned from each other. Their poets competed to elevate their craft to ever more exalted levels of refinement, weaving sublime verbal tapestries from gossamer lexical threads, rarely shy of introducing unheard of grammatical forms or words never before spoken.

The first Spanish Jew to break through the cultural barrier and make it in Andalusian society was Hisdai ibn Shaprut. Born round about 915
ce
he trained as a doctor and practised in the court of the caliph in Cordoba. He caught the caliph’s eye in 940
ce
as a member of the team which translated into Arabic a Greek pharmaceutical treatise, which the caliph had been given by a visiting Byzantine dignitary. As was the way in those days the caliph promoted him to an administrative position alongside his medical duties. Hisdai was a shrewd political operator, he shot up through the ranks, was sent on various diplomatic errands and ended up as one of the caliph’s most senior ministers.

Hisdai scored many political and diplomatic successes in his career. But one encounter stands out above them all, even if we don’t fully know the details. The affair is so enmeshed in legend and speculation that even today we cannot uncover the full historical truth, though many have tried.
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The odd story of the Khazars

According to one of the many varying accounts, in 948
ce
Hisdai sent a messenger to Constantinople, where he met a fellow Jew. The man told him that he belonged to the entourage of King Joseph of Khazaria.
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He told him that the Khazars were an independent nation who dwelt in the region between the Black and Caspian Seas. They owed no allegiance to either the Islamic or Byzantine Empires, in fact their king and all his subjects were Jews. The messenger, whose name was Yitzhak bar Nathan, was astounded. He was a well-travelled man, the emissary of one of the highest placed ministers in Spanish society, yet he’d never heard of Khazaria and he had no inkling that an independent Jewish kingdom existed anywhere in the world.

Bar Nathan took word back to his employer who, it seems, had already heard rumours of this nation but had not known how to contact them. A correspondence ensued between Hisdai and King Joseph. We know this much from documents discovered in the Cairo
Genizah
in 1896.
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The correspondence describes two events which cemented Khazaria’s status as a Jewish nation. It first refers to a Jewish warrior who won a great victory for the Khazars. The warrior was proclaimed leader of the army and later become the founder of Khazar’s dynasty of Jewish kings.

The bellicose origins of Khazar’s Jewish dynasty are reinforced by a ninth-century account written by Christian of Stavelot in a monastery in Lorraine. Stavelot writes of Alexander the Great’s frustration at his inability to defeat the ‘peoples of Gog and Magog – those who are now called the Khazars’. Alexander prayed for them to be shut up in their mountain. His prayers were answered but, leaving nothing to chance, Alexander placed copper gates in front of the mountain to make sure its inhabitants could no longer trouble him.
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Stavelot, however, complains that by the time he is writing the Khazars were even
stronger than when Alexander confined them, that they were circumcised and practiced all the laws of Judaism.
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The Jewish warrior king may have been fearless in war but, from the second event described in the letter to Hisdai, it seems that he was less adept at spiritual inspiration. He managed to propagate Jewish practice throughout the land but many of his countrymen didn’t take it to heart. Eventually one of his descendants, Bulan, came under pressure from his Byzantine and Arab neighbours, who advised him it wasn’t wise for the Khazars to continue to adhere to the religion of such a downtrodden people.

Bulan, not one to be pressurized, resolved to make his own decisions. He called in Jewish, Muslim and Christian sages, and commanded each of them to explain to him why theirs was the religion to which his people should adhere.

The letter doesn’t name the sages that he summoned, but other sources make a stab at it, even if somewhat unreliably. The Byzantine emperor, so we are told, sent the theologians Cyril and Methodius. A Talmudist, Yitzhak Sangari, of whom we know very little, represented the Jews and Farabi ibn Kora spoke for the Muslims.

The three sages debated each other for several days but the king was unable to decide between them. Finally he asked Farabi ibn Kora, the Islamic
qadi
, which religion he would select if he was obliged to choose between the Christians and the Jews. The
qadi
said he would opt for the Jews. The king then asked the Christians which they would choose, if they had to decide between Islam and Judaism. They too replied that they would choose Judaism. That clinched it for the king; he declared that Judaism would continue to be the wisest choice for his kingdom.

Although the account of the conversion debate is apocryphal, there is little dispute that the Khazar nation did convert to Judaism, some time between the eighth and tenth centuries. According to King Joseph’s reply, one of Bulan’s descendants, King Obadiah, ‘established the Jewish religion properly and correctly’, bringing in Jewish scholars to teach the Bible, Mishnah and Talmud.

The Talmud in Spain

Hisdai didn’t just use his political skills to further the caliph’s interests. He also had his own agenda. He exploited tensions between the Umayyad caliphate in Spain and their Abbasid rivals in Babylon to create a similar division within the Jewish world. If Muslim Spain could be independent of the declining Babylonian caliphate, so could its Jewish inhabitants be autonomous from the Baghdad
geonim
. Hisdai brought scholars into Cordoba and provided the funds for their upkeep. He acquired high-quality manuscripts from Kairouan and appointed Moses ben Hanoch, one of the ‘Four Captives’, to head up a Talmudic Academy.

The Academy prospered under Moses’s charge and Hisdai’s patronage. Cordoba became a pre-eminent centre of Talmud study with students arriving from all over the world to study. When Moses died there were two candidates for his job, Hanoch his son, and Joseph ibn Abitur, a well-respected scholar whose interest in making education available to all had led him, at the caliph’s request, to complete the first translation of the Mishnah into Arabic. Hanoch had been raised by his father; the legend of the four captives recounts how Moses’s young wife had thrown herself into the sea to escape abuse at the hands of the pirates. Moses arrived in Spain alone, with his infant son.

Hisdai lent his weight to Hanoch’s candidacy and he was duly appointed. However, after Hisdai’s death Joseph’s supporters tried to re-open the question of the succession. The caliph weighed in and re-confirmed Hanoch in the post. At this point Joseph left the country. But when the caliph died some of his wealthy supporters bribed the new ruler to depose Hanoch and appoint Joseph. The new caliph obliged, but Joseph refused to return; arguing that he would not be a party to such shameful treatment of his rival. Hanoch kept the job, but his reputation had collapsed, he was considered to be a less-than-deserving benefactor of powerful patronage and never enjoyed public support in the way his father had.

Cordoba was destroyed in a series of Berber invasions around 1009–13. Amongst those who fled the city was Shmuel, one of Moses’s star pupils. Shmuel, who had also studied Arabic and the Qu’ran settled a hundred miles to the south, in Malaga, where he opened a spice shop. According to the account written in the twelfth century by Abraham ibn Daud (who had also given us the legend of the four captives), one of Shmuel’s customers was a servant in the court of the king’s secretary. Shmuel helped her to write letters on behalf of her master. The secretary was so impressed with the calligraphy and the lucidity of
language in the letters that he had Shmuel brought before him and appointed him as a clerk.

Shmuel became so indispensable to the secretary that on his death bed he confessed to the king that all the good advice he had given him over the years had in fact come from Shmuel. The king immediately appointed Shmuel to his staff, and from that point on his rise was meteoric. When a dispute broke out between the king’s two sons, resulting in one of them engineering the death of the other, Shmuel had already come down on the right side. The victorious son, Badis, appointed him vizier of Granada; a post he held for maybe thirty years. The Jews called him
HaNaggid
, Shmuel the Prince.

Shmuel never forgot his education. He may have been vizier of Granada but he was a Talmudist at heart. Ibn Daud lists him, alongside Hananel and Nissim of Kairouan, as one of the three great rabbinic scholars of his time.
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As Hisdai had done, he used his wealth to promote scholarship, Ibn Daud recording that: