394 fred astren
for medieval Jews, history remained an external, if not gentile way to see the world.
This negative attitude toward the study of history was affirmed by a most influential
rabbinic mind, Maimonides (d. 1204), who refers to history books as “senseless and
useless books, that cause sheer waste of time in vain activity” (Maimonides, 1948:
131; Baron, 1934–35). Nevertheless, in support of Jewish attentiveness to sanctifica-
tion and upholding God’s covenant, the rabbis took recourse to a quasi-historical
discourse that established their connection to the revelatory past and thereby their
hegemonic claims to authority within the Jewish community. To do this, the rabbis
posited that God not only revealed Himself to the Jews through the Hebrew Bible,
especially the Torah, but also through an additional oral revelation that was given to
Moses personally on Mt Sinai. This Oral Torah was in turn passed down through the
generations to later rabbis, tracing lineages of knowledge in literary works known in
the Middle Ages as “chains of tradition” (Astren, 2004: 40–64).
Far from the Mediterranean, near Troyes in the County of Champagne, the great
talmudic scholar Rabbi Jacob ben Meir Tam (d. 1171) of Rameru evoked this great
chain of tradition in a legal responsum to a query regarding certain activities that may
or may not be permissible on the Sabbath. In support of his legal position Jacob ben
Meir invokes many authorities whose works he consulted, including “the sages of
Bari, about whom it is said, ‘Torah shall come from Bari and the word of the Lord
from Otranto’” (Jacob ben Meir Tam, 1898–99: 90, responsa no. 46). In this claim of
a southern Italian rabbinic link in the transmission of the Oral Law, he paraphrases
Isaiah 2.3: “For out of Zion shall come Torah and the word of the Lord from
Jerusalem.” Not merely a playful misquotation, this verse has deep roots in Jewish
tradition, beginning with an intra-biblical paraphrase in Isaiah 51.4–5 and a mocking
paraphrase that in the Palestinian Talmud asserts the primacy of late antique Palestinian
rabbinic tradition over that of Babylonia (Segal, 2013; Palestinian Talmud on
Sanhedrin, ch. 1).
Jacob ben Meir’s evocation of rabbinic tradition in two cities in Apulia points to
Jewish life in southern Italy that goes back as early as the first century bce, and is well
documented in the catacombs and inscriptions at Venosa from the fourth through
sixth centuries (Rutgers, 2006: 499–508). Later, rabbinic scholarship in the region is
well attested for the tenth and eleventh centuries. Jacob ben Meir’s unspoken refer-
ences to Isaiah and the Palestinian Talmud direct the informed reader’s attention to a
Jerusalem-centric rabbinic world-view and the associated problem of religious author-
ity outside the Land of Israel. Jacob ben Meir connects his authority as a jurist in
Ashkenaz (northern France and Germany) to the rabbinic tradition that in the later
Middle Ages was widely held to be the most authoritative, that of rabbinic Jewish
Babylonia. Bari and Otranto stand as links in the chain of transmission.
Although merely an idea lying quietly behind Jacob ben Meir’s twelfth-century
claim for Ashkenazi rabbinic authority, the many halakhic, philosophical, liturgical,
and mystical works written by Jewish scholars of southern Italy are well known (von
Falkenhausen, 2012). Among these is an extraordinary eleventh-century text known
as the Chronicle of Aḥima‘aẓ (Megillat Aḥima‘aẓ), made up of both legendary and
historical narratives (characteristically unrabbinic) concerning the family of the author
and the Jewish communities of Calabria and Apulia (Bonfil, 2009).
One of the story cycles depicts the otherwise unknown figure of Aaron of Baghdad,
who is reported to have come to southern Italy sometime in the ninth century as an