rabbis in the east (70 to 1000 ce) 265
outstanding knowledge of the Talmud was prerequisite for the role, and
most reached this position only after a lifetime moving up through a
series of lower positions in the academies. They wielded considerable
secular power among Babylonian Jews generally as well as religious
authority over rabbinic Jews worldwide. For those like Sherira who
believed that they belonged to a tradition which stretched back cen-
turies in an unbroken line, it was tempting to imagine that the academies
at the end of the first century had been much the same as the great insti-
tutions of their own time. In fact much had changed over the intervening
900 years.^4
Sherira himself was aware that the tradition he had inherited had
been the product of change over the centuries, if only in the sense that
he and his contemporaries assumed that rabbis of earlier generations
had greater authority than those of more recent times. Thus the teachers
of the tannaitic period who had produced the Mishnah were accorded
higher status than the amoraim whose discussions between the early
third century and the sixth century make up the bulk of the teachings
recorded in the two Talmuds. As for the savoraim (‘expositors’) believed
(at least by the eighth century) to have been responsible for the final
editing of the talmudic text, they were accorded so little status by Sher-
ira’s time that most of their teachings were preserved anonymously. The
savoraim remain shadowy figures for modern scholars, even though it is
certain that the discussions of earlier rabbis recorded within the Bab-
ylonian Talmud were edited by some person or persons with considerable
authority, not least because many discussions conclude with comment
by an anonymous voice (the stam) either deciding the issue raised in the
talmudic argument or, not infrequently, declaring teyku (‘let it stand’),
to denote that the problem remains unresolved. It is rather odd, in light
of the immense prestige of the Babylonian Talmud in later rabbinic
Judaism, that this voice is unidentified in the talmudic text itself and
was apparently unknown to succeeding rabbinic generations.^5
Sherira was also aware that the centres of the rabbinic tradition he
recorded were all located in Jewish populations either in Mesopotamia
or in the eastern Mediterranean, especially Palestine. The rabbinic texts
produced in the first half of the first millennium refer to Jewish life within
only a limited geographical compass (essentially the land of Israel, Bab-
ylonia and ‘Syria’, conceived as an ill- defined region north of Palestine).
The rabbis expressed no interest in the Mediterranean Greek- speaking
Jewish communities (see Chapter 12), let alone the more distant dias-
pora in Ethiopia or India. Babylonian rabbis succumbed on occasion to