Muslim Traditions Concerning Medinan Jewry As A Source For Jewish History

Western scholars disagree about whether Talmudic literature reflects the lives of Jews in the Roman-Byzantine period. The Talmudic-Rabbinic literature was written between the third and fourth centuries in the Land of Israel and in Babylonia until the fifth century. The Talmuds leaves a lacuna of halakhic sources between the sixth and ninth centuries in Babylonia, and between the fifth and ninth centuries in the Land of Israel. All that we have from the latter region at this time is several fragments from the Cairo Geniza and mainly, parts of a book known as the Book of the Ma‘aśimand perhaps a broader literature of the same name and some other problematic literature. The article intends to fill part of this lacuna by examining the Jews of Medina (or another Diaspora in the Middle East) in the seventh-eighth centuries. Recent research demonstrates that these Jews were Talmudic-Rabbinic in nature in almost every aspect. Based on numerous Islamic sources, it compares the descriptions of the Medinan Jews, halakhic practice with the Rabbinic literature. Our findings show that their Halakhah was oriented to the Land of Israel and at least in some cases, integrated with it as it existed in the seventh century ce, and not with the Babylonian Halakhah that gradually became hegemonic in the Diaspora from the ninth century onwards.