Baghdad under Samuel ben Ali: the last great academy of the East

By this time Babylonia was no longer what it had been. The office of exilarch, traced to the house of David, had broken off about 1175; the geonic days of Sura and Pumbedita were past. But the academy at Baghdad stood, and at its head for thirty years stood Rabbi Samuel ben Ali.

What that meant in practice is attested by an outsider. Rabbi Petachiah of Regensburg recorded: in all Assyria, in Damascus, in the towns of Persia and Media and in Babylonia there is no judge but one appointed by Samuel. This struck the Ashkenazi traveller more than anything else he saw: he had come from where a community holds together by consent, and he found a community that has authority.

In the same house was a learned daughter. Petachiah saw how she taught: the listeners outside, she within, at a window, unseen. The sources have not kept her name—she is called Bat ha-Levi.

And from here too began what would later be called the Maimonidean controversy. Samuel ben Ali wrote glosses on the Mishneh Torah and objected to Maimonides on the resurrection of the dead and the world to come; with Maimonides' student Rabbi Joseph ben Judah he disputed the same directly. In answer Maimonides wrote the Treatise on Resurrection. Forty years later the same argument will break out in Provence and end with books burned—but it began here, in the lifetime of the man argued about, and it was led not by an enemy of learning but by the head of the last great academy of the East.

After him almost nothing written by a Babylonian head of an academy survives: he is the only one whose writings have reached us.