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Iggeret Rav Sherira Gaon אגרת רב שרירא גאון
The classic account OF the transmission — a geonic responsum that is itself the earliest systematic history of how the Mishnah and Talmud came to be. It is meta to the rest of this atlas: many redaction claims on other entities here cite it. Included as the chain's own act of self-documentation, and as this atlas's deliberate stopping point.
I. Who
- Hebrew
- אגרת רב שרירא גאון
- Also known as
- The Epistle of Rav Sherira Gaon
- Era
- geonim
II. When
- Traditional
- written 4747 AM (987 CE)
- Academic
- 987 CE
- Precision
- exact
IV. What
- Language
- Babylonian Aramaic (with Hebrew)
- Redaction
- A responsum of Rav Sherira Gaon of Pumbedita, answering the community of Kairouan; survives in a "French" and a "Spanish" recension that diverge on key wording.
- Structure
- A single long epistle: first the history of the Mishnah, baraitot, and Talmud and how they were composed; then a year-by-year chronicle of the Babylonian academies and their heads from the amoraim through the savoraim to the geonim of his own day.
V. How do we know
| Claim | Evidence | Confidence | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| The epistle answers questions sent from Kairouan — "How was the Mishnah written... and how were the baraitot written, and how was the Talmud written, and how were the savoraim ordered after Ravina..." — which its opening section quotes verbatim.
Confidence is for what the text itself states and asks. |
tradition | ★★★★★ | |
| Its core historical theses: Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi arranged the six orders of the Mishnah with fixed wording; hora'ah accumulated until Rav Ashi and Ravina; and the savoraim followed without adding hora'ah — the framework this atlas's Mishnah (Mishnah) and Talmud (Talmud Bavli) entities rely on. | tradition | ★★★★☆ | |
| The letter is dated to 987 CE and survives in two recensions — the "French" and the "Spanish" — which famously diverge on whether Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi committed the Mishnah to writing; historians generally judge the French recension closer to the original.
The recension divergence is the textual root of the later Rashi–Rambam disagreement over when the Mishnah was written down.
|
reconstruction | ★★★★☆ |
|