Rav Hai Gaon and the end of the age of the Geonim
With the death of the last of the great Geonim, Babylonia ceased to be the chief address of the law. The centre scattered to Spain, Kairouan and the Rhine.
Rav Hai, son of Rav Sherira, headed Pumbedita for some forty years and was the last Gaon whose answers were accepted as binding everywhere, from Spain to Yemen. He died in 1038 at the age of ninety-nine; there was no one to head the academy after him.
The causes of the decline were older. The Baghdad caliphate was weakening and breaking up, trade and money were moving west, and with them the support of the academies: the Geonim lived on the voluntary offerings of communities, and as those communities grew rich in their own right they raised scholars of their own. Books did the rest: while the law lived in a Gaon's spoken answer one had to ask Babylonia; once it was set down in a code—Alfasi's Sefer haHalakhot, then Maimonides' Mishneh Torah—asking was no longer necessary.
Tradition fixed the turning point in the tale of the Four Captives: a ship carrying four scholars from Babylonia was seized by pirates, each was ransomed in a different city—Córdoba, Kairouan, Egypt—and each founded a yeshiva there. Historians take the story for a late parable, but the parable states the matter rightly: one centre gave way to several.
From this point the age of the Rishonim begins.
Sources
Rishonim
- Abraham ibn Daud, Sefer haQabbalah, on the Four Captives — the parable of one centre giving way to several schools
Basis: documents and evidence.
People and places
Pumbedita · Sura · Rav Hai Gaon · Rif—Rabbi Yitzchak Alfasi · Kairouan · Cordoba