ABSTRACT
This essay examines the accounts of the Oral Torah put forward by the tenth- and eleventh-century heads of the Baghdadi Talmudic academies. Their presentations, among the earliest systematic descriptions of the late antique rabbinic tradition, sought to uphold the authority of the ancient rabbis in matters of Jewish law and to justify the place of the Baghdadi schools themselves as the heirs to the rabbis. After demonstrating that the narratives of revelation proposed by these authors share many features with contemporaneous Islamic accounts of revelation to Muḥammad, this essay considers the ways in which Jewish tradition of this period may be considered “Islamic,” insofar as both Jews and Muslims were competing members of a single society that shared many assumptions about the nature of prophecy, the challenges of revealing the divine will in human language and the pitfalls inherent in the interpretation of ancient texts.
