I said this in Assif yesterday 29 June 2019, as part of our learning series on Golden Ages in Jewish History.
"The beginning and ends of Golden Ages are invisible to the people that live in them. It’s only from far away can we see a moment when one age ends and another begins somewhere else.
In fact, a Golden Age only looks golden from a distance. On the ground, people are dealing with in-fighting, jealousies, famines, droughts, persecutions and fall-out from battling empires. On the ground, people are putting mezuzahs on their doors, going to shul, saying prayers, doing business, lighting Friday night candles, having Pesach Seders, paying taxes and raising their children.
Then as now.
The only reason I am calling this period between the 4th century and the 10th century, in a place that is today called Iraq, a Golden Age, is because of what came out of it. Cities with names like Sura, Nehardea, Pumbedita and Mehoza are dust today, but they once housed Jewish scholars who together created a glittering edifice that still stands. It is a magnificent laboratory of thought that has no match in history.
Those named and unnamed scholars produced an exquisite and self-confident system called the Babylonian Talmud. And that is the tradition we live within today.
This Golden Age started as the best things must, with an end. Once upon a time, in the 4rd century ACE, the Roman governors ended the powers of the Sanhedrin. (The Sanhedrin was the Jewish court and ruling body in Israel until that time). So, because of Roman persecution, Israel which had until then controlled the Jewish calendar for the whole Jewish world, and had produced the mighty Mishnah and the Jerusalem Talmud declined, and Jewish centre of the world moved to Babylon.
Babylonian Jews still faced Jerusalem when they prayed, but they considered their tradition superior to the traditions of their fellows living in Israel. Top of the pile in Babylon was the Reish Galuta or Exilarch who was responsible for community-specific organizational tasks such as running courts, collecting taxes, providing financing for the Talmudic Yeshivot, and financial assistance to poor. They were headed by the Rosh Metivta. The Yeshivot ran kallahs or study sessions for hundreds of people during two months of the year. (I imagine they were like Limmud because they were very crowded) These were led by the Rosh Kalla. There were also judges who were called dayane di baba (Judges of the gate) because traditionally justice was meted out before the gates of the city.
There is a lovely piece of evidence for their way of life that lies unused today in our siddurs. The yakum Purkan prayer was written in Babylon during this period. I’m fond of it for what it says about the people who prayed for these things; what it says about who they are and what matters to them…
May salvation from heaven, with grace, loving-kindness, mercy, long life, ample sustenance, heavenly aid, health of body, enlightenment from above, and a living and abiding children, that will not break with, nor neglect any of the words of the Torah, be granted unto the teachers and rabbis of the holy community, who are in the land of Israel and in the land of Babylon; unto the heads of the Kallahs, the Roshei Galuta, the heads of the Yeshivot, and the judges in the gates, and all their students, and all the students of their students…”
How can you not love people who pray for enlightenment from above? In the prayer, you can see the civic leaders that formed the centre of the Jewish world at the time.
But as we know, things fall apart and the centre does not hold. Around the 10th centuries the Golden Age of Babylon started to draw to a close. The Babylonian community rich in scholarship and culture, no longer globally dominated Jewish life. The centre of the Jewish world was splintering and rerouting from the Babylon to North Africa and Europe. But the jewel produced in this period continued to shape what was to come.
The Babylonian Talmud and the means to study it and be changed by studying it, came to define what it meant to be Jewish by every generation, everywhere afterwards, whether they knew it or not.
There is a story told by Abraham Ibn Daud in his Sefer ha-Kabbalah, written in 1161. It may not be literal but it is true.
It tells of a boat carrying four great Babylonian rabbis. (In my mind they are each holding the whole Babylonian Talmud) The boat is captured by a pirate. They are each sold by the pirate to Jewish communities around the world– one in Kairouan in North Africa, one rabbi and his son, are ransomed in Cordova, Southern Spain and one in Alexandria, Egypt. The identity of the fourth captive and the place where he was redeemed is not stated. They all take with them the means to teach others what they have inherited from their Babylonian tradition.
They do their jobs well because today while there are only eight Jews left in Iraq, there are 15 million Babylonian Jews alive today, including all of us here.
Shabbat Shalom.
