PURITY OF LINEAGE IN TALMUDIC BABYLONIA

Aharon Oppenheimer Tel Aviv University

The Jewish Diaspora in Babylonia in the Talmudic period, i.e. the IIIrd–Vth century ce, left its mark on the Jewish people in its own generation and for generations to come. During the Talmudic period, this Diaspora community began to take over the position of the Land of Israel as the leading Jewish centre. Babylonia was the only large Diaspora community which was sited outside the borders of the Roman Empire, and the conditions of life there – political, religious, economic and social – were generally comfortable. This was why Jews fleeing from the First Revolt (66–70 ce), the Diaspora Revolt in the time of Trajan (115–117) and the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–135/6) found their way to this community. It was in the yeshivot (= academies) of Babylonia between 200–500 ce that the Babylonian Talmud was created, based on the Mishnah redacted by Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi. It is this Talmud, and not the Jerusalem Talmud written in the Land of Israel, which has been, and is still, the authority for halakhic rulings up to the present day. It was this Babylonian Talmud, more than any other work, which was the formative influence on the Jewish people throughout the generations: it influenced its patterns of thought; its way of life; its relations with the world around it; its laws and regulations etc. The Jews of Babylonia in the Talmudic period (around 220–500 ce) saw themselves as responsible not only for the heritage of Jewish halakhah, but also as the faithful guardians of the purity of Jewish lineage. This guardianship was carried out through meticulous care in arranging marriages, including the rejection of people with various disqualifications. The Jews of Babylonia took care not to include in their community any proselytes whose conversion was not according to halakhah. They would also exclude priests who had been born to women who were disqualified from marrying a priest (such as divor- cees); non-Jewish slaves who had not been legally freed and mamzerim (= bastards) and so on.1

1 Qv: H.L. Poppers, “The Déclassé in the Babylonian Jewish Community”, Jewish Social Studies 20, 1958, 153–179. 146 aharon oppenheimer

Tradition ascribed this extreme care to the days of Ezra the scribe, who would not go up from Babylonia to the Land of Israel “until it was made like the purest of fine flour”.2 This subject of the purity of lineage by its nature required searches into the lineage of the parents and grandparents of a person for many generations. But it was not only in the field of genealogy that the Babylonian Jews sought their roots as far back as the earliest days of the Jewish Diaspora in Babylonia. It was just the same in the case of the lineage of the Exilarch. The first Exilarch known to us by name was Huna, a contemporary of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi. It is reasonable to suppose that the office of Exilarch was created in the days of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, or a few generations earlier. But the writers of the traditions did not rest until they had related the Exilarchs to the Royal House of David, creating an artificially continuous list of names of Exilarchs from the family of David himself up to Huna.3 Unique to Babylonia was their preference for ancient synagogues with historical associations, over other synagogues. Tradi- tion claimed that the Shekhinah (= Divine Presence) was to be found in two of these synagogues from the time of the Exile in the days of the First Temple. And one of these – the synagogue of Shaf ve-Yatev in Nehardea – was claimed to have been built with stones and dust from the First Temple itself brought with them by the exiles.4 It has been demonstrated that the claims for the existence of a dynasty of Exilarchs from Second Temple times, like the presence of synagogues whose roots go back to the days of the Babylonian exile, do not stand up to investigation and are not authentic. They do, how- ever, reflect the aim of Babylonian Jewry to show that the two central institutions of the Jewish people – the kingship and the Temple – had been transferred from the Land of Israel to Babylonia.5 In a similar way, the way the rabbis of Babylonia fenced themselves off with regard to the purity of lineage was not just because of their

2 BT Qiddushin 69b and parallels. 3 Seder Olam (ed. Neubauer) 73–75. See also: L. Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt, Frankfurt a. M. 18922, 142–147; J. Liver, The House of David, Jerusalem 1959, 41–46 (Hebrew); M. Beer, The Babylonian Exilarchate, Tel Aviv 19762, 11–15 (Hebrew). 4 BT Megillah 29a; Iggeret of Rav Sherira Ga’on (ed. Levine) 72–73; and see A. Oppen- heimer, “Babylonian Synagogues with Historical Associations”, id., Between Rome and Babylon, Tübingen 2005, 394–401. 5 See the two works cited in the previous footnote.