rabbis in the east (70 to 1000 ce) 273
in the local yeshivah which is first mentioned as a centre for talmudic
scholarship in Rome at this time. At least in rabbinic circles, study of
Judaism in Rome was evidently now carried out in Hebrew and Ara-
maic rather than in Greek. By contrast, the great academies of Germany
and France, which were to prove so influential in the development of
rabbinic Judaism from the eleventh century, were still in the tenth cen-
tury embryonic, until the influence of R. Gershom b. Judah, who died in
1028 ce, placed the Mainz academy at the centre of the study of tal-
mudic thought in northern Europe.^14
Rabbinic society by the end of the first millennium had well-
established rules of social control, not least the herem (‘excommun-
ication’). In its original biblical meaning, to condemn someone to herem
was to invoke destruction, but within rabbinic Judaism the herem was
a mechanism through which a rabbinic court could ordain the ostraciz-
ing or shunning of those deemed to have violated the norms of the com-
munity. As rabbinic Judaism spread, and with it the authority of rabbis
from distant places, so did the possibility of a ban on those whose share
in the community was essentially a notional belonging to the whole of
Israel. Two such bans attributed to Rabbenu Gershom b. Judah illus-
trate the fracturing of rabbinic authority by the end of the first millen-
nium. On the one hand, the herem bet din (‘ban of the court’) gave
authority to local courts over all those who passed through a comm-
unity: ‘If a man passes through a community where there is a ban of the
court and he is summoned to court under the ban in the presence of
proper witnesses, even if he be in the market place, the ban is upon him
until he repairs to the court to plead his case.’ On the other hand, we
have noted (Chapter 10) that the ban which prohibited polygamy (con-
ventionally, but probably incorrectly, also attributed to Rabbenu Ger-
shom) was taken as authoritative throughout the Jewish world in
Germany and France but ignored by the Jews of Islamic lands.^15
Both the subjects and the mode of rabbinic discourse had developed
greatly in the thousand years between the time of Yohanan b. Zakkai
and Rabbenu Gershom. Within the academies, immense effort was
expended on teasing out the minutiae of legal rulings derived originally
both from the Bible and from custom. Tracing the development of this
halakhic discourse over the generations is bedevilled by the practice,
common in the talmudic texts, of ascribing to an earlier rabbinic teacher
a view which – so the compiler imagined in light of that teacher’s known
views on other subjects – he would have adopted when faced with an