Evolution of Torah: Muslim Spain and North Africa
Establishing Torah Culture (Season 2, Episode 2)
The legal culture of Muslim Spain and North Africa from the ninth to the thirteenth century focused on making the Talmud accessible through practical applications of Geonic interpretations. This episode follows two scholars: Rabenu Hananel ben Hushiel whose approach is one of the earliest known attempt to provide a systematic commentary on the Talmud and that of Rabbi Isaac Alfasi (the RIF) whose work superseded Hananel’s within two generations. This period in general and the Rif’s work specifically kicked off the period of the Rishonim.
Show Notes
Bios
- Rabbi Hananel ben Hushiel (Rabenu Hananel, 990 – d. 1050) – He was one of the first post geonic rabbis. His commentary on the Talmud which was cited by Rabbi Isaac Alfasi, one of Rabbi Hananel’s students
- Shmuel Hanagid (993 – 1055) – He was a poet, statesmen, and scholar. Hanagid means chief and Shmuel was the vizier of Granada under two kings, which allowed him to advocate for Jewish communities throughout the region.
- Rabbi Isaac Alfasi (the Rif, 1013-1103, seen in this portrait from the JTS Library) A student of Rabbi Hananel, he expanded the work of his master with the Halahot, an abridged Talmud focused on the practical applications of law.
Transcript
[Music]
Announcer Welcome to Season two of the Evolution of Torah, a podcast with Professor Rabbi Mordecai Schwartz. In this season, establishing rabbinic culture, Professor Schwartz traces the development of medieval Jewish legal literature through a journey to four key centers of learning across North Africa and Europe. This is episode two, which takes us to Muslim Spain and North Africa.
Rabbi Mordecai Schwartz The Academy in Kairouan, what is northern central Tunisia today, was the center of Jewish learning from the 9th to the 11th centuries. Those who lived under Islam had a methodology that highlighted the practical legal outcome of textual analysis of the Talmud, and they are treated as a separate unit. This is where we will begin in today’s episode of the podcast. We will cover Muslim Spain and North Africa. The commentary of Rabbi Hananel ben Hushiel, who died in 1055 or 1056 and was the son of the Rabenu Hushiel that we mentioned in the last podcast is generally known to those who study the Talmud as Rabenu Hananel. And his commentary on the Talmud is the earliest known that has survived in its entirety. According to the Legend of the Four Captives, Rabenu Hananel’s father, Rabenu Hushiel, was one of the four scholars ransomed having come from southern Italy. He was rescued by the community of Kairouan. He headed the academy there, and his son, Rabenu Hananel, was likely born there. Upon Rabenu Hushiel’s death, Rabenu Hananel inherited his father’s position. Rabenu Hananel’s commentary covers the Talmudic orders of Moed, which deals with Shabbat and holidays, Nashim which addresses laws of marriage and divorce, and Nezikin which handles torts and damages. A few separate tractates that have practical relevance: Brachot about prayers and blessings, and Hullin on the ritual slaughter of animals for consumption and what we call today kashrut, dietary laws. All of his commentaries are in our possession. Rabenu Hananel’s commentary was known for centuries solely through quotations in the writings of others and made its way onto the standard printed page of the Talmud only in the 19th century.
Thousands of fragments of Rabenu Hananel’s commentary were found in the Cairo Geniza, and that attests to the commentary’s popularity at the time. There were a few other important Talmud commentaries in the period, but we have very little of them. The most famous of these other commentaries was written by Rabenu Shmuel Hanagid, and we do have some small portions of it. Rabbi Shmuel Hanagid, who lived in Spain in Granada, really deserves his own full podcast. He was the vizier of Granada under two Berber kings and led a series of successful military campaigns on their behalf. We have many of his letters. He is supposed to have written a full commentary on the Talmud, but it exists only in a fragmentary form and is seemingly focused on giving interpretations only to specific, challenging Talmudic passages. And while Shmuel Hanagid’s students may have written a commentary to most of the Talmud, we don’t have any of it. And it is only known from citations and lists of books found in the Cairo Geniza. Having said that, the truth of the matter is that despite the popularity of Rabenu Hananel’s commentary during his lifetime and shortly after, within two generations, his commentary was superseded by the incredibly important figure, Rabbi Yitzhak Alfasi, who put an end to the period of the Geonim and began the period of the Rishonim.
Now I want to thank my student, current rabbinical student Reuben Yolen, for preparing much of the next section on Rabbi Alfasi. I’m going to refer to Rabbi Alfasi through the whole section here, both as Rabbi Alfasi sometimes and other times I’ll use his traditional appellation, which is the Rif. Based in Rabbi Avraham ibn Daud Sefer HaKabbalah, scholars came to the consensus that the Rif was born in 1013. After a series of conflicts in North Africa, he went to Spain at the age of 75 in 1088, where there he became the head of the yeshiva in Lucena and died in 1103, a very advanced age for the period. There is a debate over the place of his birth. Many Rishonim describe him as being from Fez. There are scholars today who favor the position that this is a mistake based on his name, which is Alfasi, and that it’s really just a family name. He’s actually called Ibn Alfasi, the son of the one from from Fez in many places. Ibn Daud and others describe him as being from Qal’at Hammad, which is in present day Algeria. Although Ibn Daud names Rabenu Hananel as one of the Rif’s teachers, there is doubt as to the truth of this claim because in his great work, which we will shortly discuss, he does not cite him with the honorifics that you would expect from a student talking about their teacher.
I’m going to give you an overview of the Rif’s great work, the Halachot. The Rif follows the order of the Talmud and he keeps much of the original language in the Talmud. It’s really a shortening, or an abridgment of the Talmud, and he includes only those sections of the Talmud that he deems relevant in post-Temple times. Often when people first encounter the Halachot of the Rif, they think what they’re looking at is a page of the Talmud. It has much of the same language, and even in the printed editions, it’s set up in a way with the commentaries around it that makes it look a lot like the Talmud. Last season I talked about a Geonic code called Halachot Gedolot, which is also an abridgment of the Talmud, but it’s a different kind of abridgment. It really only includes rulings. That’s not what the Rif does. The Rif gives you the parts of the Talmud necessary to understand the basis of the legal decision. So he’ll include some of the back and forth in the Talmud in a particular section, so you can see why it is that he’s making his decision. He includes frequent discussions of his methodology when it leads him to disagree, for instance, with Rabenu Hananel or other predecessors of his. You might hear in traditional circles that Alfasi does not include any narrative material in his work, no aggadah. But this is not true. The Rif actually does include aggadic sources, narrative sources when he wants to encourage his reader to adopt certain kinds of admirable character traits or to behave in a certain way that doesn’t necessarily have a halachic basis, but that he thinks is a good way to behave.
The Halachot draw heavily from Rabenu Hananel’s Talmud commentary. Although the Rif cites him anonymously more often than he does not. He also includes material by name or without mention from Geonic works as well as Geonic responsa and other commentaries. From the structure of the Halachot and the sources it brings, it’s clear that the main purpose of the work is to provide legal decisions and also to demonstrate how to arrive at those decisions. To that end, the Rif created a methodology that was partially based on the Geonic approach to the Talmud, but was also original.
Let’s talk about the Rif’s methodology. Rabenu Hananel often defers to the decisions of post-Talmudic authorities, Geonim, explicitly stating that he does not have the authority to override them. The Rif relies on his own analysis of the text, even if it leads him to contradict what the Geonim said. This presupposes an assumption that the Talmud is universally authoritative, but post-Talmudic authorities are not, and using one’s own powers of reason to analyze the text is ultimately the best method to reach a true understanding of Torah and mitzvot. In his analysis of the text, the Rif relies on close readings of the Talmud, his own logical reasoning and the proper application of principles of adjudication. He tends to follow the plain meaning or what we call pshat of the Talmud and rejects qualifications, really in positional interpretations. Okimtayot a given statement within the text, unless he thinks that they’re rooted in the language of the text, even when the qualification of an apparent contradiction is necessary. What I mean by that, that he’ll accept a passage that is contradictory rather than trying to interpret that contradiction out of existence. He seeks to root it in the language of the text, and he rejects qualifications and in positional interpretations of his predecessors that aren’t rooted there. For instance, the Talmud on Brachot 48A says that you can include a child in the grace after meals, the invitation to the grace after meals, as long as they understand to whom the blessing is being said, that is to say to God. The Geonim restrict this. They say that only a child over the age of 13 can be included in that ritual. But the Rif concludes that since the language of the Talmud permits any child to do so, so long as they understand who the blessing is being said to, that means any child of any age can be included in the ritual, so long as they understand who the blessing is intended to go to.
Let’s talk about some of his influence, because the Rif had a great deal of influence. Of Alfasi’s many students, the most prominent is probably Rabbi Yosef Ha-levi Ibn Migash, who we traditionally call Ri Migash. He became his successor and took over the yeshiva at Lucena. Now the Ri Migash taught someone named Maimon, Rabbi Maimon ben Yosef. That name Maimon might be familiar to you because he’s the father of the Rambam, of Maimonides. In the Mishneh Torah, the Rambam’s great code, he quotes Alfasi anonymously, stating Alfasi and Ibn Migash his opinions with the words, “My teachers have decided.” Now there’s no direct source confirming Ibn Migash as Maimonides teacher, but he certainly was Maimonides’ father’s teacher.
By the second third of the 12th century, the Halachot of Alfasi had become the basis upon which halakha was studied throughout the countries along the Mediterranean coast. Toward the mid-13th century, authorities in Germany and France recognized the Rif as an authority. The Rosh composed his own halachot based on Alfasi’s Halachot. Rabbi Yosef Karo made Rabbi Alfasi, the Rif, one of the three pillars in his decisions that he eventually would include in the Shulchan Aruch. Therefore, the Halachot really is the link between the works of the Geonim and those of the Rishonim.
I have focused today on the two most important rabbis of North Africa and Spain leading up to Maimonides, Rabenu Hananel and the Rif, Yitzchak Alfasi. And the next episode will deal with France in the Middle Ages. I didn’t cover the Rambam, Maimonides in this episode. I will cover Maimonides in the fourth episode of the podcast, which will be an episode dedicated only to him and to his works.
Announcer Thanks for listening to the Evolution of Torah with Professor Mordechai Schwartz. It was recorded at by Christopher Hickey, and produced by Ellie Gettinger, with editing assistance from Sarah Brown. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. For those who want to dig a little deeper, visit jtsa.edu/podcasts where you’ll find sources, archival material and more in the evolution of Torah. Show notes along with links to all of JTS podcasts, exploring Jewish texts, history, culture and experience.
