Halakhot Gedolotהלכות גדולות
Sura (Babylonia) · 760
בה
Baal Halakhot Gedolot (Bahag)
Baal Halakhot Gedolot (Bahag)
800 CE–875 CE · Geonim · Babylonia
Shimon Kayyara was a Babylonian halachist of the early Geonic period — most scholars place him in the first half of the ninth century (some traditions, the eighth) — known by the title Bahag, 'the author of the Halakhot Gedolot.' His Halakhot Gedolot was among the very first comprehensive codes of Jewish law after the Talmud, organizing the vast Talmudic material by subject and including a celebrated enumeration of the 613 commandments that later authorities debated for centuries. Though he lived in the academies of Babylonia, he was never formally appointed a Gaon. (Authorship has occasionally been ascribed instead to Yehudai Gaon, but tradition and most scholarship credit Kayyara.)
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Stop 1 of 1800–875Wrote
BabyloniaבבלBabylonia — Geonic period
What they did here
Lived and taught within the rabbinic academies of Babylonia, where he compiled the Halakhot Gedolot — one of the first comprehensive post-Talmudic codes of Jewish law.
About Babylonia
Babylonia (the region of Mesopotamia, in central and southern Iraq, between the Tigris and Euphrates) was the great center of Jewish life and learning for well over a millennium. Following the Babylonian exile, it became home to a large Jewish population; in the Talmudic period its academies at Sura, Pumbedita, and Nehardea produced the Babylonian Talmud, and in the subsequent Geonic period (roughly the seventh to eleventh centuries) the Geonim of Sura and Pumbedita were the foremost halachic authorities of the Jewish world.
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Baal Halakhot Gedolot (Bahag)’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.