The founding of the Sura academy
Date
219CE
219 CE
After studying in Palestine, Rav returned to Babylonia and founded a study house at Sura: for the Babylonian sages, the beginning of their equality with the Land of Israel.
Sourced narrative
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9 statements
Jews had been in Babylonia since the Exile of 586 BCE, but little is known of their history in the centuries that followed. After the third century CE the region began to stand out as a major rabbinic center. The turn shows in the career of Rav Abba, known simply as Rav. According to rabbinic sources he was born in Babylonia, went to study in Palestine like other Babylonian sages, and was reportedly ordained there by Judah ha-Nasi. Around 219 he came back and opened at Sura, a trading town on the banks of the Euphrates, a study house (bet midrash) that would become one of Babylonia's great academies. Later Babylonian sages saw this return as the moment they began to regard themselves as equals of the Land of Israel (Bava Kama 80a).
02Why emigrate
Many other sages emigrated to Babylonia, probably because life in Palestine was growing harder: sages martyred in the Bar Kochba Revolt, a 'de-Judaized' Judea, the economic downturn of the third century and Christianization, which produced a Christian majority by the fifth century. Babylonian independence is already detectable in the second century, when the sage Hananiah, who emigrated after the Bar Kochba Revolt, tried to regulate the calendar from Babylonia, a direct challenge to Palestinian supremacy. The threat of excommunication was enough to stop him, but the episode foreshadowed the Babylonian sages' self-confidence.
03More authentic than the Palestinians?
The Babylonian sages could not deny Palestine's central place, but they claimed nearly equal standing. They boasted of older biblical roots: Babylonia had supposedly held the Garden of Eden and been Abraham's homeland, arguably the place where Jewish history began. It was also a land of exile, but, they said, its Jews had zealously kept their lineage pure, without intermarriage; those of doubtful descent had supposedly returned to Palestine with Ezra (Qiddushin 69b). Some may have thought themselves even more authentic than their Palestinian colleagues. As with Yohanan and Judah, Rav's portrayal may not be accurate, but it shows how the Babylonian sages saw themselves: without breaking with Palestine, whose figures they esteemed, they claimed comparable authority and developed a rabbinic culture of their own.
04Sura and Nehardea
The turn shows in the career of Rav Abba, known simply as Rav. According to rabbinic sources he was born in Babylonia, went to study in Palestine like other Babylonian sages, and was reportedly ordained there by Judah ha-Nasi. Around 219 he came back and opened at Sura, a trading town on the banks of the Euphrates, a study house (bet midrash) that would become one of Babylonia's great academies. Later Babylonian sages saw this return as the moment they began to regard themselves as equals of the Land of Israel (Bava Kama 80a). In the third century Samuel directed the Nehardea academy in Babylonia and was a friend of the Persian king Shapur I; his controversies with Rav are central to the Babylonian Talmud. He is responsible for a long-lived political principle in Jewish tradition: 'the law of the land is the law', that is, the laws of the society Jews live in bind them and at times even override Jewish law.
Context
The rabbis of Palestine were at a disadvantage under a Christianized empire that pressed for conversion and imposed discrimination, confiscation of synagogues and bursts of violence. The Jews of Babylonia lived in a more receptive environment, with a more stable communal structure under the exilarch, and it was there that rabbinic culture took the form that, by the end of antiquity, would direct Jewish life. There were trade routes and much traffic between the two empires: soldiers, diplomats, traders and intellectuals, such as the Athenian philosophers who took refuge at the Sasanian court after their academy closed in 529. Jews were important intermediaries, and their movement between Palestine and Babylonia was crucial for the transfer of rabbinic culture.
§ 01Geography
Where it happened
§ 04Network
Connections
§ 05Bibliography
Further reading
Jeffrey Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
The Babylonian Talmud in its cultural milieu · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 153
§ 06Apparatus
Sources on this page
- 01Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 141; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 141; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 520; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 147inspect
- 02Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 141inspect
- 03Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 141inspect
- 04Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 141; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 141inspect
- 05Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 141; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 141inspect
- 06Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 141inspect
- 07Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 147; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 147inspect
- 08Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 140inspect
- 09Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 129; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 129inspect
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