146 Book Reviews

Uziel Fuchs The Geonic : The Attitude of Babylonian to the Text of the Babylonian Talmud (Jerusalem: Herzog Academic College—Research Authority and World Union of , 2017), 562 pp. ISBN 978-965-92115-3-1.

The role that the Geonim played in transmitting the Babylonian Talmud to a wider audience, and effectively to the entire Jewish diaspora, is both crucial and little-understood. Self-proclaimed heirs to the Talmudic enterprise, they nevertheless lived in a very different world to that of the whose dis- cussions fill the Talmud. The surrounding culture was Islamic, rather than the Persian culture of the Amoraim, creators of the Babylonian Talmud. Their pri- mary language was Arabic, although they proudly held on to their memory of . Institutionally, their academies ( and , both located in Baghdad by the tenth century) were far larger and developed than those of the Talmudic era. The geographic reach of the Geonim extended far beyond that of their antecedents, as they maintained extensive and intensive correspondence with nascent Jewish communities in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. The sent by the Babylonian Geonim in answer to questions from distant communities are the richest and most prominent aspect of their heri- tage. It is there that they express their thoughts, beliefs and hopes, and reading the responsa carefully is the closest that modern scholars can come to witness- ing how the Babylonian Talmud was studied and understood in the Geonic academies. In his book The Geonic Talmud, Uziel Fuchs has opened up those responsa to a host of new and significant insights, all of which cluster around the question “what was the Talmud during the time of the Geonim?” Fuchs combed the responsa of the Geonim for statements reflecting their awareness of textual variance within the Talmud. As he points out (chapter 4), the overwhelming majority of those statements were written by Sherira or his son Hai (or: Hayya) Gaon, at the very end of the classic Geonic period. While this fact limits the applicability of the conclusions that emerge from the book, it also sharpens their focus and enhances their historical accuracy. The attitude of the Geonim towards the text of the Talmud is a particu- larly important issue because of the vexed question of orality. Many scholars believe that the Babylonian Talmud was created over the course of several centuries, without being set to writing. In fact, some of the Geonim asserted that even in their own times, hundreds of years after the Talmud had been redacted, it was still studied orally within the Geonic academies. The impli- cations of the Talmud being transmitted orally for the first five centuries of its existence are immense. It calls into question the feasibility of applying to the Talmud philological methods developed for classical literature, which was

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/1872471X-11311020 Book Reviews 147 committed to writing at a much earlier stage of its development. The cultural ­ramifications—for the standing of the Talmud within early medieval Jewish culture, and in comparison with the neighboring cultures of Christianity, Islam and Zoroastrianism—are also highly significant. Yet the sources for un- derstanding and tracking the ways in which the Talmud was transmitted dur- ing the last centuries of the first millennium remain murky. Fuchs grapples with the sources, subjecting them to a dispassionate and sophisticated read- ing, and reconsiders them in light of the cases in which the Geonim explicitly considered variant readings of the Talmudic text. His conclusion—that dur- ing the Geonic period, the Talmud was known both as an oral and a written composition—is fittingly nuanced and emphasizes the enduring complexity of the issue. To my mind, The Geonic Talmud is, in fact, two books (if not three). The first 180 pages are a wide-ranging and meticulous discussion of Geonic attitudes towards the Talmud and their historical significance. Fuchs strikes an admira- ble balance between large questions—Were written books used in the Geonic academies? How did the Geonim think about the text of the Talmud?—and painstaking analysis of each word and sentence in the sources. He rejects no- tions popular among generations of scholars, demonstrating, for example, that there is no basis for claiming that Sura and Pumbedita possessed different tex- tual versions of the Talmud. The second part is a corpus of Geonic discussions of specific Talmudic pas- sages, arranged to follow the order of the Talmud itself. This section, which occupies the bulk of the volume, will become an invaluable tool for any schol- ar or student of the Talmud seeking Geonic discussions pertinent to a given Talmudic passage. Each discussion appears under the heading of the folio of Talmud to which it relates, followed by the name of the Gaon who authored the discussion, a reference to the primary and secondary sources from which the discussion was published, the discussion itself and a scholarly analysis of its meaning, and a bibliography of earlier scholarly treatments of the Geonic source. The text at the center of each discussion is provided according to the best available manuscripts, and several of the texts are published here for the first time. In short, this section is both rigorously accurate and practically useful. The third “book” that I hinted to earlier appears in the footnotes. Fuchs has spent many years studying the scholarly literature of critical Talmud, and his command of that corpus is almost unrivalled. The opinions of many scholars appear here on the basis of their classes at the Hebrew University, where Fuchs studied for many years. The respect with which he considers the opinions of earlier scholars, coupled with his willingness to dismiss long-held assumptions

European Journal of Jewish Studies 13 (2019) 143–148