Rav Yose (Savora) רב יוסי

In 4260 Ravina died, and the Epistle of Rav Sherira Gaon draws a line here: "sof horaah"—the end of ruling. Thereafter begins an age with no tractate of its own and almost no names: the Savoraim. Their work was not to decide but to finish: they laid the disputing voices into a text, wrote the connective passages, put questions where the thought broke off—and the Talmud became readable.

Rav Yose is the first of them by name: he headed Pumbedita and died, by Rav Sherira's reckoning, in 4274. Medieval commentators ascribe whole stretches of text to the Savoraim—the opening of tractate Kiddushin, for example—and they are known by style: where the Talmud explains its own arrangement, it is usually they who speak.

Of the Savoraim themselves we know exactly as much as Rav Sherira wrote in 4747, half a thousand years later. That must be remembered: the age that made the Talmud a book has reached us in a single letter.

The years are taken from the Epistle of Rav Sherira Gaon—the letter of 4747 (987), the only source in which the age of the Savoraim is set out by name and year. There is no other testimony, and that should be kept in mind.