Geonic Responsa
composition: range-uncertainauthorship: traditional
Heads of the Babylonian academies answer legal questions sent by post from communities across the Mediterranean, and in doing so make the Talmud the operative law of the Jewish world.
- law settled by correspondence across a dispersed community
- Talmudic debate converted into operative ruling
- the authority of two academies extended by post across three continents
- a genre begun here and never subsequently broken
Questions arrived from Qayrawan, Fustat, Spain and elsewhere; answers went back by the same routes and were copied and preserved locally, many surviving through the Cairo Geniza. The responsa establish how Talmudic discussion, which frequently records disagreement without deciding, is to be applied in practice, and they carry the authority of the Babylonian academies to communities that had never seen them. The genre continues without interruption to the present.
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