396 fred astren
2009: 156). Thus, local Christian cultural and political forces were repositioning
southern Italy in relationship to its long-time Byzantine rulers at the same time that
Jews of the region were shifting their religio-cultural orientation away from the
authority of Palestine and toward Babylonia.
The two trajectories of the transmission of rabbinic authority thus far discussed,
from Babylonia to southern Italy and from southern Italy to Ashkenaz, were later
combined by the exponents of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz, a pietistic and mystical movement
of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Ashkenaz that seized upon Aaron of Baghdad as a
link in the transmission of ancient esoteric knowledge. Rabbi Eleazar ben Judah of
Worms (d. c. 1230) stated that Aaron transmitted his secret knowledge in Lucca,
“where he met” Rabbi Eleazar’s ancestor Rabbi Moses ben Kalonymus ha-Paytan
(“the liturgical poet”). Moses is described as “the first to emigrate from Italy” in the
early ninth century (Bonfil, 2009: 57). Notwithstanding that reports on the migra-
tion to Mainz of Kalonymus of Lucca and the Kalonymids are associated in legend
with Charlemagne in the ninth century and Otto II in the tenth century, the
Kalonymids in fact established themselves there in the early eleventh century (Grabois,
1966; Marcus, 1990; Toch, 1994; Stow, 1995).
The pietistic and mystical knowledge associated with Ashkenazi claims on Aaron of
Baghdad speaks to the astrological and esoteric interests of tenth- and eleventh-
century southern-Italian rabbis, a Jewish component of the Western reception of the
discourse of Hellenistic knowledge that was current in Muslim Baghdad in the ninth
and tenth centuries (Wasserstrom, 1993: 2002). For example, Shabbethai Donnolo of
Oria (d. c. 982) was one of the first commentators of Sefer Yeẓirah (“The Book of
Creation”), a Jewish text whose origins in the esotericism of the Baghdadi milieu
highlights the place of Mediterranean connectivity in the Jewish internal economy of
knowledge. Sefer Yeẓirah would later become one of the most important Jewish
mystical texts and fundamental to the development of kabbalah in Spain (Sharf, 1976;
Mancuso, 2010).
In a Spanish text contemporaneous with Rabbi Tam’s pithy claim to the rabbinic
legal authority of Bari and Otranto is an elaborate legendary narrative, uncharacteris-
tic of rabbinic rehearsals of the chain of tradition, that describes the transmission of
rabbinic authority from southern Italy to Spain. Rabbi Abraham Ibn Daud’s history
of tradition, Sefer ha-Kabbalah (written in 1161) begins with an historical observation
that explains the demise of the Babylonian rabbinic academies:
...it was brought about by the Lord that the income of the academies which used to
come from Spain, the land of the Maghrib, Ifrı̄qiyya, Egypt, and the Holy Land was
discontinued. The following were the circumstances that brought this about.The narrative goes on to describe a marauding fleet dispatched from ‘Umayyad
Córdoba that, “encountered a ship carrying four great scholars, who were travelling
from the city of Bari ... on their way to a Kallah.” Echoing Rabbi Tam’s evocation
of Bari as a fountainhead for the diffusion of rabbinic knowledge, the narrative
employs the Babylonian institution of the Kallah convention, an annual or
semi-annual rabbinic assembly, in order to associate Bari with Babylonia and its
religious authority. The commander of the Muslim fleet “captured the ship and
took the sages prisoner.”