Q&A: Maimonides’ Rulings — According to the Jerusalem Talmud or the Babylonian Talmud?
Maimonides’ Rulings — According to the Jerusalem Talmud or the Babylonian Talmud?
Question
Hello Rabbi,
Is it true that most of Maimonides’ rulings are based more on the Jerusalem Talmud than on the Babylonian Talmud? (That’s what one Torah scholar told me.)
Answer
Not true. Writers of halakhic rules say that there is a principle regarding Maimonides that sometimes he rules in practice according to the Jerusalem Talmud (as opposed to most of the medieval authorities and halakhic decisors, who always follow the Babylonian Talmud). But in my estimation, it is not true that this is the majority of cases in Maimonides.
Discussion on Answer
Hello Uzziah. I haven’t researched the topic itself. My claim was that even the writers of those rules meant the principle I wrote here, and not that Maimonides usually rules like the Jerusalem Talmud.
I understood that this was the questioner’s intent as well. If the claim really is that Maimonides generally rules like the Jerusalem Talmud, then clearly that has no basis.
But even the writers of those rules, who claimed that this is so in a minority of cases in order to resolve difficult rulings—it seems they were mistaken. That’s what people thought 400 years ago, not what we know today.
(In parentheses: it seems to me that understanding Maimonides’ rulings is one of the only Torah fields—if not the only one—in which you find a phenomenon of theories becoming outdated, like in the natural sciences.)
A huge and fascinating topic.
The Vilna Gaon wrote in several places (in his glosses to the Shulchan Arukh) that Maimonides’ way is to incline after the Jerusalem Talmud.
The case I know is the ruling that a convert brings first-fruits and recites the declaration, following the ruling of the Jerusalem Talmud in tractate Bikkurim, against the plain sense of the Mishnah and the Babylonian Talmud that follows it.
Rabbi Shaul Lieberman researched the subject extensively (in the book “Halakhot of the Jerusalem Talmud for Maimonides”) and concluded that Maimonides did indeed often rule like the Jerusalem Talmud.
Here is the book, which was discovered in the Cairo Geniza and which, according to Lieberman, was composed by Maimonides:
https://www.otzar.org/wotzar/book.aspx?198458&
It seems to me that those rules were invented before the discoveries of the twentieth century (and even a bit earlier, in the Netziv’s commentaries on the She’iltot), which shed new light on the way Maimonides learned the Babylonian Talmud—for example, the large body of Geonic teaching that was uncovered, and the works of Rabbis Benedict, Kapach, and Rabinovitch.
My impression is that in almost all cases Maimonides works out perfectly well according to the Babylonian Talmud—if you just get up to date with what happened from the Netziv onward, and don’t stay stuck in the era of the writers of those rules.
And besides, Maimonides himself, in the introduction to the Mishneh Torah, gives preference to the Babylonian Talmud.