Palestinian Gaonate

The Palestinian Gaonate was the chief talmudical academy and central legalistic body of the Jewish community in Palestine during the middle of the ninth century, or even earlier, till its demise during the 11th-century. During its existence, it competed with the Babylonian Gaonate for the support of the growing diasporic communities. The Egyptian and German Jews particularly regarded the Palestinian geonim as their spiritual leaders. The history of the gaonate was revealed in documents discovered in the Cairo genizah in 1896. Sparse information is available on the Palestinian geonim prior to the middle of the ninth century. The extant material consists essentially of a list in Seder Olam Zuta relating all the geonim to Mar Zutra.

In the middle of the ninth century, the Palestinian academy was transferred from Tiberias to Jerusalem. It was forced to move to Tyre, Lebanon in 1071; authority was later transferred to Fostat, Egypt. The Academy of Palestine had probably ceased to exist before Palestine was conquered by the Christians, but the tradition of the Palestinian gaonate seems to have survived at Damascus, for Benjamin of Tudela (c. 1170) says that the teachers of Damascus were considered as the "scholastic heads of the Land of Israel."

Prior to the middle of the 9th-century, information about the geonim of Palestine is listed in Seder Olam Zuta which links all the geonim to Mar Zutra (and thereby to the Davidic line). But fragments found in the geniza contradict the list, claiming that a member of the priestly family headed the academy in Tiberias in the middle of the 8th-century. Evidence of the academy in Palestine existing during the lifetime of Hai Gaon, the last Babylonian gaon, is from a mention of Josiah the ḥaber being ordained at the "holy yeshiva of Palestine" in a document dated 1031. A postscript to a small chronicle dating from the year 1046 says that Solomon ben Judah was then the "head of the Academy of Jerusalem". Three generations of the descendants of this Solomon ben Judah were heads of the Palestinian academy, and bore the title of "gaon." A work of one of these geonim of Palestine, the Megillat Abiathar, which was discovered by Schechter in the genizah of Cairo, and gives a very clear account of this interesting episode in the history of the Jews of Palestine.

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