Sherira Gaon - His Circular Letter

His Circular Letter

Sherira has become famous by a letter of his addressed to the community of Kairouan, which letter is the chief source for the history of the Talmudic, post-Talmudic, and geonic periods. Jacob ben Nissim of Kairouan addressed, in the name of his community, a number of questions of historical interest to Sherira, inquiring especially into the origin of the Mishnah and the sequence of the redactions, the origin of the Tosefta, and the sequence of the Talmudic, post-Talmudic, and geonic authorities.

Sherira clearly and lucidly answers all these questions,throwing light upon many obscure passages of Jewish history. This historical responsum, which is composed half in Aramaic and half in Hebrew, reveals Sherira as a true chronicler, with all the dryness and accuracy of such a writer, though his opinions on the princes of the Exile belonging to the branch of Bostanai, as well as on some of his contemporaries, are not entirely unprejudiced. As narrator of the history of Halakhah in the course of the first millennium. The literary topoi of his historical account have some parallels to the Islamic historical genre – the ṭabaqāt. As a chronicler, he exposes monumental documented information about the rabbis and the Babylonian yeshivot. Apparently, he also refers to some mythical imagery while reconstructing the chronology of the Halakhah as a profound historical picture.

This letter is included in the Ahimaaz Chronicle, but it has also been edited from manuscripts by B. Goldberg, in "Ḥofes Maṭmonim" (Berlin, 1845) and under the title "Iggeret Rab Sherira Gaon" (Mayence, 1873); also by J. Wallerstein, under the title "Sherirae Epistola," with a Latin translation and notes (Breslau, 1861). The best edition of this letter prior to 1900 is that by Adolf Neubauer, in "Medieval Jewish Chronicles". The best modern source for the letter is the edition of Solomon Schechter, in which the French and Spanish recensions are printed side by side. Most later editions are based on one or other of these.

Another letter by Sherira, also addressed to Jacob ben Nissim of Kairouan (included in the "'Aruk," s.v. "Abaja"), deals with the various titles given to the Talmudic sages, as "Rabban," "Rabbi," "Rab," and "Mar," and explains why some sages are simply mentioned by their names, without the addition of any titles.