rabbis in the west (1000– 1500 ce) 313
the rabbinic discussions recorded in the Babylonian Talmud which the
Karaites so vehemently denied, was to expand hugely in its reach, pro-
fundity, complexity and variety. The process can be traced in much of its
bewildering detail because, despite the emphasis on the orality of the
Torah, a large proportion of halakhic discussion found its way into texts
written down for the benefit of Jews in distant places. As a result,
halakhic developments often took a quasi- epistolary form through the
transmission of responsa in much the same way as the development of
Christian theology by correspondence between churches in the early cen-
turies of Christianity. Some of these texts survive in their original form in
fragments in the Cairo Genizah. Others were copied and kept for use by
Jewish communities throughout the Middle Ages, ending up in the col-
lections of humanist scholars now deposited in the libraries of universities.
Yet others were preserved in the archives of monasteries and cathedrals,
where the ambivalent attitude of Christian librarians to such Jewish
learning led sometimes to the accidental preservation of Hebrew texts in
the bindings of other works. The complex process of disengaging such
texts and identifying their nature in libraries across southern Europe,
especially Italy and Spain, is a task only recently begun.^2
What kind of work was written by rabbis in these centuries? The
Karaites had specifically rejected the authority of the Talmud, and rab-
binic scholars were to respond with commentaries on the talmudic text,
building on the exegetical culture which had begun in the ninth century
with the biblical commentaries of Saadiah. Already in the first half of
the eleventh century Hananel b. Hushiel in Kairouan produced a suc-
cinct summary in Hebrew of the halakhah to be found in each page of
the Talmud, clarifying difficult sections of the argument. His contem-
porary in Kairouan, Nissim b. Yaakov b. Nissim ibn Shahin, produced
in Arabic commentaries on many talmudic themes. But their efforts
were to be dwarfed in influence by the line- by- line talmudic commen-
tary of the great rabbinic scholar R. Shlomo Yitzhaki, better known as
Rashi, in Troyes later in the century, and by the supplements to his work
by numerous Tosafists (authors of tosafot, ‘additions’) from the twelfth
to late fourteenth centuries who sought to improve Rashi’s work and
solve apparent contradictions both in his commentary and within the
text of the Talmud itself (see below).^3
Commentaries on the Talmud emerged from study of the halakhah
for its own sake, but the processes involved in living according to the
halakhah also provoked a large literature in the form of responsa. We
have already seen how the responsa of the geonim in Babylonia