jews 395
exile from Babylonia (by this time, Islamic Iraq). In the narrative, he disembarks from
a ship that miraculously arrived at Gaeta only a day after setting sail from Jaffa. In
Gaeta he reverses a sorceress’ transformation of a man who had been turned into a
donkey. He then travels to Benevento, where he releases another man from the world
of the living so he might return to the dead after having been kept alive artificially by
means of an amulet. In Oria he establishes a yeshiva (academy), and there presides
over a court of law following procedures like those of the ancient Sanhedrin that
governed in Jerusalem before the destruction of the Temple in 70 ce. His juridical
activities include the imposition of death sentences and ordering the biblical ordeal of
the sota (or bitter waters) for the determination of the guilt or innocence of a woman
accused of committing adultery. Aaron would later go on to become an advisor to the
Muslim ruler of Bari, and eventually return to the East, ending his exile (Bonfil, 2009:
240–247, 250–256, 278–281).
Although the Aaron narratives make no explicit claim about the transmission of
rabbinic authority, Aaron’s Baghdadi origins and authoritative actions leave no
doubt about the narrative’s intent to link the family of Aḥima‘aẓ to Babylonian rab-
binic authority. Corroborating the timing and content of this narrative with evi-
dence for the introduction of rabbinic Judaism into southern Italy is difficult.
The late antique catacomb inscriptions from Venosa, so important to the study of
southern-Italian Jewish history, do not permit easy identification of rabbinic
Judaism. However, the increased use of Hebrew writing beginning in the ninth
century, the purported time of the legendary Aaron, suggests the rabbanization of
southern-Italian Jewry (Noy and Horbury, 1992, 150–183; Simonsohn, 1974). It
is significant that eleventh-century southern-Italian folklore offers parallels to both
the chronicle’s narrative claims to religious authority and the text’s eleventh- century
redaction, including the legend of the transmission of medical knowledge to the
flourishing medical school of Salerno (Conrad et al., 1995: 139) and legends
explaining the arrival of the Normans in southern Italy (Joranson, 1948). Especially
noteworthy are the many legends surrounding the conspiratorial westward transla-
tion in 1087 of the relics of St Nicholas to Bari, which had recently been conquered
by the Normans (Geary, 1990: 94–103). These comparisons remind us that the
seemingly timeless rabbinic necessity for claiming inner-Judaic continuity with the
past should not necessarily be divorced from local conditions. In this case, commu-
nities in transition and the establishment of new institutions in this contested,
diverse, and demographically-changing axis of the Mediterranean required narra-
tives of origin with links to an authoritative past.
In a different register, the narrative association of Babylonian rabbinic authority
with the family of Aḥima‘aẓ in eleventh-century Capua marks the contemporaneous
supersession of Babylonian–Jewish tradition in southern Italy over that of Palestine,
which had held sway there for centuries. This turn away from Palestinian tradition by
Jews who had been subjects of the Byzantine Empire entailed turning toward the
Islamic world, mainly by way of nearby Ifrı̄qiyya (modern-day Tunisia), where the
major Jewish community of Qayrawān included influential Babylonian congregations
and sustained strong ties to the Babylonian academies. It is noteworthy that in nearby
Benevento the Lombard “national church” of St Sophia was emerging as a significant
religious and scholarly center whose rise to regional importance represented a break
with the political and religious hegemony of Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia (Bonfil,