רב האי גאון

Rav Hai Gaon (4699/939–erev shevi’i shel Pesach 4798/1038) was rosh yeshiva of Pumbedita and the last of the Geonim — son of Rav Sherira Gaon and son-in-law of Rav Shmuel ben Chofni, gaon of Sura. His father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather had all sat as geonim of Pumbedita before him. He helped his father run the yeshiva, and in 4746/986 was made av beit din of Pumbedita, carrying the geonut in practice together with his aged father. When Rav Sherira was niftar at a hundred, in Tishrei 4766/1005, the seat passed to him, and on that Shabbat the kehillah closed the haftarah of Shlomo’s accession by setting Rav Hai’s name into the pasuk in place of Shlomo’s — Hai upon the throne of Sherira his father, his kingdom firmly set. The Ramban called him the equal of most of a Sanhedrin. English sources know him as Hai ben Sherira.

In his father’s last years the two were informed against to the caliph al-Qadir, charged with ties to lands at war with the Arabs; both were jailed and their property seized. Rav Hai was cleared, but Rav Sherira was held guilty, and his health was broken by it. The Jewish center in Bavel had begun to come apart a century before he rose to the geonut, yet he and his father kept Pumbedita central for some hundred and forty years more. Rav Shlomo ben Yehuda, gaon of the yeshiva of Yerushalayim, sent his sons to learn there, and Rav Shmuel HaNagid of Sefarad and Rav Nissim Gaon of Kairouan turned to him with their questions.

He wrote more teshuvot than any other gaon by a wide margin — thousands of them, coming to a third of all the geonic responsa in our hands. Questions reached him from Ashkenaz, Sefarad, the Maghreb, India and Ethiopia, and he answered each in the language in which it had come — Hebrew, Aramaic or Arabic. He wrote no single code of all the dinim of the Talmud, but gave each subject its own work: Sefer HaMekach VehaMimkar on sales, put into Hebrew by Rav Yitzchak Albargeloni; Sefer HaMashkon on mortgage; Mishpetei Shevuot on oaths; and works on shetarot and on tefillin. He held the halacha follows the Bavli against the Yerushalmi, and taught that a dayan must be armed with five: Mikra, Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmud, and she’elot u’teshuvot.

He upheld minhag to its fullest, establishing that where the Talmud gives no ruling the received custom governs, yet he set himself against the abuses of his day, among them the refusal of honorable burial to those under cherem. He told the chachamim of Kairouan that popular wonder-tales are empty, and wrote of many aggadot that they were said as mashal or by way of exaggeration. Rav Shmuel HaNagid wrote a great kinah on his passing. Binyamin of Tudela, some hundred and thirty years later, records his kever beside those of his father Rav Sherira and Rav Saadia Gaon at Sura.