jews 397
One of them was Rabbi Ḥushiel, the father of Rabbenu Ḥananel; another was Rabbi
Moses ... who was taken prisoner with his wife and his son, Rabbi Ḥanokh (who at the
time was but a young lad); the third was Rabbi Shemariah ben Rabbi Elḥanan. As for
the fourth, I do not know his name ... These sages did not tell a soul about themselves
or their wisdom. The commander sold Rabbi Shemariah in Alexandria of Egypt, [who]
proceeded to Fustạ̄ṭ where he became head [of the academy]. Then he sold Rabbi
Ḥushiel on the coast of Ifrı̄qiyya. From there the latter proceeded to the city of
Qayrawān, which at that time was the mightiest of all Muslim cities in the land of the
Maghrib, where he became the head [of the academy], and where he begot his son
Rabbenu Ḥananel. Then the commander arrived at Córdoba where he sold Rabbi
Moses along with (his son) Rabbi Ḥanokh. He was redeemed by the people of Córdoba,
who were under the impression that he was a man of no education. (Abraham Ibn
Daud, 1967: 46–47 [Hebr.], 63–65 [Engl.])This most Mediterranean of rabbinic legends offers a myth of origins for the
emergence in the eleventh century of strong regional Jewish communities in Egypt,
Ifrı̄qiyya, and Spain, each of which was becoming increasingly independent of
Babylonian rabbinic authority in the twelfth century. In this sketch of medieval Jewish
history divine sanction is more subtly represented than the undisguised miracles of
Aaron of Baghdad. Rather, it is expressed through the unlikely symmetrical outcome
of the narrative, which for the understanding reader could only have come about
through the unfolding of God’s will (G. Cohen, 1960–61).
The Tale of the Four Captives, recounted in a Spanish rabbinic text, naturally
focuses on Spain. However, with its acknowledgement of rabbinic leadership in Egypt
and Ifrı̄qiyya, the text demonstrates that its distinctive Spanish community (with its
own budding rabbinate) is only one among several Mediterranean Jewries, each with
a burgeoning local tradition. The narrative expresses—uncharacteristically in medieval
Jewish writing—a conscious historical sensibility, acknowledging both the rise of
regional Jewish communities and their leadership and the correlative decline of the
Iraqi Babylonian academies. This trans-Mediterranean perspective, narrowly limited
in this case to the history of tradition, belies much deeper and more broadly felt trans-
formations in Mediterranean Jewish communities. By the tenth century, the rise of
regional Jewish leaders, such as Rabbi Ḥanokh’s unacknowledged patron, the Jewish
courtier Ḥisdai ibn Shaprūṭ (d. 979), began the displacement of those rabbis and
elders who in previous generations would have provided financial and spiritual sup-
port for the Iraqi academies in exchange for titles, judicial guidance, and possibly
delegated authority. Eventually taking for themselves new titles, such as nagid or nasi
(M. Cohen, 1980), these men were symptomatic of the rising intellectual and admin-
istrative self-sufficiency of large regional Jewish communities across the Mediterranean
and beyond (Ben-Sasson, 1997; Rustow, 2008). This era of Mediterranean Jewish
history is marked by regionalization, characterized by rabbinic cultures that were
increasingly anchored by the text of the Babylonian Talmud to the exclusion of the
Babylonian academies. That is, authoritative text was eclipsing authoritative institu-
tions (Fishman, 2011).
These rabbinic myths of origins, found in eleventh- and twelfth-century texts,
locate themselves on the historiographical terminator between the less well under-
stood early Middle Ages and the period after 1000, when Jewish communities were
transforming themselves along lineaments that subsequently would become widely