Simeon Kayyara, also spelled
Shimon Kiara (
Hebrew:
שמעון קיירא), was a Jewish-Babylonian
halakhist of the first half of the 8th century.
[One of the Jewish sages of Yemen appends the date of the Halakhot Gedolots composition by Simeon Kayyara, saying that the book was written in the 1,054th year of the Seleucid Era, being equivalent to 4,503 anno mundi (= 743 CE).] Although he lived during the
Geonic period, he was never officially appointed as a Gaon, and therefore does not bear the title "Gaon".
Rabbinic sources often refer to Kayyara as Bahag, an abbreviation of Ba'al Halakhot Gedolot ("author of the Halakhot Gedolot"), after his most important work.
Name
The early identification of his surname with "Qahirah," the
Arabic language name of
Cairo (founded 980), was shown by Solomon Judah Loeb Rapoport
[ Teshuvot ha-Ge'onim, ed. Cassel, p. 12, Berlin, 1848] to be impossible. Neubauer's suggestion
[ M.J.C. ii, p. viii] of its identification with Qayyar in
Mesopotamia is equally untenable. It is now assumed that "Kayyara" is derived from a common noun, and, like the Syro-Arabic "qayyar," originally denoted a dealer in pitch or wax.
[ Jewish Encyclopedia article for Simeon Kayyara, by Richard Gottheil and Max Schloessinger.]
Halakhot Gedolot
According to both medieval authorities like
Geonim Sherira Gaon and Hai ben Sherira, and modern scholars like
Abraham Epstein, Kayyara is the author of
Halachot Gedolot (הלכות גדולות), a work on Jewish law dating from the Geonic period. However, others have attributed the work to
Yehudai Gaon.
-
Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture, Yale 1998
Its bibliography:
-
A. Epstein, in Ha-Goren, iii. 46 et seq.;
-
A. Harkavy, Teshubot ha-Ge'onim, pp. xxvii., 374 et seq.;
-
J.L. Rapoport, in Kerem ?emed, vi. 236;
-
Schorr, in Leopold Zunz Jubelschrift (Hebr. part), pp. 127 et seq.;
-
He-haluk, xii. 81 et seq.;
-
Weiss, Dor, iv. 26, 32 et seq., 107, 264;
-
Brüll, in his Jahrb. ix. 128 et seq.;
-
Grätz, Gesch. v. 234;
-
idem, in Monatsschrift, vii. 217 et seq.;
-
S. T. Halberstam, ib. viii. 379 et seq., xxxi. 472 et seq.;
-
I. Halevy, Dorot ha-Rishonim, iii. 200 et seq.;
-
see also the bibliography of the article Yehudai Gaon.
