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Did the Palestinian ge’onim “rule” in Egypt? Rethinking transregional Judaism in the early Middle Ages

Tue, December 18, 12:45 to 2:15pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Cityview 1 Ballroom

Abstract

Standard accounts of medieval Judaism divide the early Islamic Middle East into two gaonic “reshuyot”—broad geographic zones whose Jewish populations were subject to the administrative and normative authority of two competing transregional centers, the gaonic yeshivot of Iraq and the gaonic yeshiva of Palestine. This model informs how we understand the politics and organization of early medieval Jewish communities as well as the transmission and development of medieval rabbinic law and scholarship.

Recent scholarship has called into question the extent of gaonic power, demonstrating that the yeshivot depended on their transregional followers at least as much as they wielded authority over them. In this paper, however, I suggest rethinking the dual rashut model entirely. Specifically, I revisit the evidence for the best-documented aspect of this model—the Palestinian yeshiva’s administration of Jewish institutions in Egypt in the early eleventh century, the tail end of the period in which the reshuyot are supposed to have operated—and argue that this evidence does not clearly support the long prehistory that has been imposed on it. The Palestinian yeshiva’s claim to authority over Egypt’s Jews may more plausibly be understood as a novel and short-lived political development specific to the first decades of the eleventh century. There is no clear indication that the Palestinian ge’onim had asserted leadership over Jewish institutions in Egypt before this; moreover, the little we know about Judaism in tenth-century Egypt points primarily to Iraqi gaonic rather than to Palestinian gaonic influence on Jewish courts and legal practices throughout the region.

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