The Epistle of Rav Sherira Gaon was penned by its author, Sherira b. Hanina, in 987. While articulated as a response to a rather simple set of questions put forth by Jacob b. Nissim, the leader of the Jewish community in Qayrawān, Sherira’s extensive response—roughly 15,000 words long—is anything but simple. In it, Sherira recounts a history of the transmission of rabbinic knowledge and of rabbinic institutions, culminating in his own leadership of the Pumbedita academy, then located in Baghdad. In this talk, I will argue that Sherira’s highly influential reconstruction of the Mishnah’s creation is a specific product of his Islamicate context, of his own self-perception, and of the precariousness of his Babylonian academy as new centers of Jewish study cropped up in the Mediterranean world towards the close of the millennium.

Dr. Yitz Landes (he/him) is Assistant Professor of Rabbinic Literatures and Cultures at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. His research focuses primarily on the premodern transmission of Jewish knowledge, vis-à-vis the history of rabbinic education and the history of the Jewish book. Additionally, Dr. Landes works on the history of scholarship into Ancient Judaism; on Jewish-Christian relations in Antiquity; and on the development of Jewish ritual and liturgy, topics he addressed in his first monograph, Studies in the Development of Birkat ha-Avodah (The Mandel Institute for Jewish Studies, 2018).