Book contents
- Worlds of Byzantium
- Worlds of Byzantium
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Preface
- One Worlds of Byzantium
- I Patterns, Paradigms, Scholarship
- II Images, Objects, Archaeology
- III Languages, Confessions, Empire
- Thirteen Byzantine Syriac
- Fourteen Greek Identity in the Sinai
- Fifteen Patriarchs, Caliphs, Monks, Scribes, and the Byzantinization of Jerusalem’s Liturgy
- Sixteen Byzantine Judaism in Early Islamic Palestine
- Seventeen Ethiopia
- Eighteen Armenia and Byzantium
- Nineteen Byzantine Georgia/Georgian Byzantium
- Twenty Conclusion
- Index
- References
Sixteen - Byzantine Judaism in Early Islamic Palestine
Rethinking the Gaonic Model
from III - Languages, Confessions, Empire
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 October 2024
- Worlds of Byzantium
- Worlds of Byzantium
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Preface
- One Worlds of Byzantium
- I Patterns, Paradigms, Scholarship
- II Images, Objects, Archaeology
- III Languages, Confessions, Empire
- Thirteen Byzantine Syriac
- Fourteen Greek Identity in the Sinai
- Fifteen Patriarchs, Caliphs, Monks, Scribes, and the Byzantinization of Jerusalem’s Liturgy
- Sixteen Byzantine Judaism in Early Islamic Palestine
- Seventeen Ethiopia
- Eighteen Armenia and Byzantium
- Nineteen Byzantine Georgia/Georgian Byzantium
- Twenty Conclusion
- Index
- References
Summary
Historians of Judaism often call the first Islamic centuries the “gaonic period.” The term alludes to the gaonic yeshivot – scholastic academies in Abbasid and Buyid Baghdad, as well as in Palestine, whose leaders helped to canonize the Babylonian Talmud. However, this essay argues that these yeshivot were not commensurate across regions. I revisit the early history of the Palestinian yeshiva and conclude that it developed long after its Iraqi counterparts, likely sometime in the tenth century. The essay closes by considering briefly how this thesis might help us begin to better understand the Palestinian rabbinic culture that preceded the yeshiva–a distinct form of rabbinic Judaism that thrived in Byzantine and Umayyad Palestine during the fifth to eighth centuries, before giving way to a new brand of gaonic rabbinism imported from the Abbasid heartlands.
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- Worlds of ByzantiumReligion, Culture, and Empire in the Medieval Near East, pp. 502 - 557Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024