Beyond Religious Borders: Interaction and Intellectual Exchange in the Medieval Islamic World

Chapter 5: Claims About the Mishna in the Epistle of Sherira Gaon: Islamic Theology and Jewish History

c h A p t e r 5 Claims About the Mishna in the Epistle of Sherira Gaon Islamic Theology and Jewish History tAlyA fIshmAn In an Aramaic Epistle of 987, Sherira Gaon, head of the rabbinic academy at Pumbeditha, responded to questions posed by Jews of Kairouan about the genesis of the ancient corpora of rabbinic tradition.1 Reconstructing the circumstances under which Mishna, Tosefta, Talmud, and Midrash were formed, Sherira described the pedagogic practices of earlier rabbis, traced intellectual lineages linking many generations of sages, and identified political and geographic developments that precipitated internal cultural changes. Sherira pointedly disabused his questioners of their assumption that the rabbinic corpora had begun as written works. Tradition, he emphasized, was transmitted orally through face-to-face encounters between masters and disciples , precisely the practice maintained in the geonic academies.2 Though not the first chronology of the rabbinic generations,3 the Epistle almost single-handedly shaped rabbinic culture’s subsequent understanding of its own literary foundations. Sherira’s late tenth-century document informed the vision of the rabbinic past purveyed in Rashi’s eleventh-century Talmud commentary4 and the historical survey of rabbinic literature set forth by Maimonides in the introduction to his twelfth-century legal code, the Mishneh Torah.5 Medieval Jewish writers eager to establish their bona fides prefaced their own works with updates of Sherira’s narrative. Whether they started their intellectual genealogies with Adam, Moses, or a later tradent, each inscribed his own teachers into the chain of tradition before describing 66 tAlyA fIshmAn the circumstances that had motivated him to undertake his own composition .6 In short, rabbis of many generations have found in Sherira’s Epistle an expandable template for filiating with the authoritative past. Yet some aspects of the Epistle had, at best, an inconsistent afterlife in subsequent rabbinic culture. Two of them, specific claims made by Sherira about the Mishna’s formation, are examined in the present study. One, advanced through a series of pointed remarks, is the assertion that the Mishna is something other than a conventional composition. According to Sherira, Rabbi Judah the Patriarch , the Mishna’s compiler, was the human agent of a divinely guided project. Among subsequent Jewish writings, this claim was perpetuated only by the twelfth-century thinker Judah Halevi7 and by kabbalistic writers down through the sixteenth century.8 Halakhic writers, on the other hand, ignored Sherira’s claim and, instead, valorized Gemara (in which the Mishna was absorbed). Though there was little overt disparagement of Mishna,9 its virtual absence from the rabbinic curriculum until the early seventeenth century is noteworthy.10 A second claim made by Sherira that left little or no cultural echo concerns a distinct shift that occurred in the process of the Mishna’s transmission. Up until the end of the tannaitic period, writes Sherira, masters imparted received teachings using whatever language they needed in order to convey the pertinent meaning; over the course of these generations, tradition was transmitted “freestyle .” It was not until the early third century that Rabbi Judah the Patriarch established a linguistically fixed formulation of Mishna, ipsissima verba. This chapter situates these two claims within a broader cross-cultural context in order to illuminate their pertinence, both conceptually and terminologically, to discussions that actively engaged Muslim theologians of Sherira’s time and place. Given the rich evidence of geonic immersion in the pan-religious discourse of tenth-century Baghdad,11 Sherira’s awareness of contemporaneous ideational debates is not surprising, but the proximity of these two claims to contemporaneous threads of discourse raises questions about whether Sherira had received them as traditions from rabbinic predecessors or was articulating them, for the first time, in response to intellectual provocations in his own environment. The Origins of Mishna and the Muslim Doctrine of Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān According to the Epistle, the production of Mishna was abetted by a number of rare circumstances—and above all, by the contribution of divine assistance. For Epistle of Sherira Gaon 67 one thing, Rabbi Judah the Patriarch (known simply as “Rabbi”), the agent of the Mishna’s standardization, was uniquely endowed: “Heaven bestowed upon Rabbi, at one and the same time, Torah and grandeur. For all those years, all those generations were subject to him. As they say, ‘From the days of Moses until Rabbi, we never found Torah and grandeur in one place.’”12 Beyond this, the...