Salmon ben Jeroham

Origins and early life

Salmon ben Jeroham, known in Arabic as Sulaym ibn Ruhaym, was a Jewish scholar of the mid-tenth century who left Iraq or Persia for Jerusalem and joined the Karaite circle known as the Mourners of Zion, who settled in the city to fast and pray for its restoration.

Work and career

He was a Karaite, that is, a Jew who held that Scripture alone binds and rejected the authority of the rabbinic oral law, and he remained Jewish all his life. His best known work is the Book of the Wars of the Lord, a Hebrew poem in nineteen alphabetic cantos attacking Saadia Gaon, the head of the Babylonian academy of Sura and the foremost Rabbanite of the age; Karaite tradition even held that Salmon had once been Saadia's teacher, a claim the sources themselves present as tradition rather than fact.

He also wrote Judaeo-Arabic commentaries on Psalms, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther and the Song of Songs, several of which survive and have been edited from Cairo Geniza and Firkovich manuscripts. His commentaries matter beyond the Karaite Rabbanite quarrel because they preserve early readings, Arabic translations of biblical Hebrew, and a running record of tenth-century Jerusalem Jewish life. He is a primary witness to the great schism of medieval Judaism, and modern scholarship reads him alongside Saadia rather than merely against him.