Isaac Alfasi

Ruled that where the two Talmuds disagreed the Babylonian one prevailed; he headed the academy of Lucena and composed a digest of Jewish law a century before Maimonides.

The Babylonian Geonim's influence over the diaspora was formidable. A sign of their success: Isaac ben Jacob Alfasi (1013 to 1103), a rabbinic sage in North Africa, ruled that where the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds disagreed, the latter would take precedence. The Palestinian Talmud stayed an authoritative source, but today 'the Talmud' means the Babylonian one.1 Through most of the medieval and early modern centuries, until the Jewish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century revived interest in his philosophy, people knew Maimonides mainly for the Mishneh Torah ('repetition of the law'). He was not the first medieval rabbi to compile a full digest of Jewish law: a century before, Isaac Alfasi, who headed the rabbinic academy at Lucena near Córdoba, had done the same.2