Who was the Shimusha Rabba?

When the Shimusha Rabba is mentioned, it’s usually in connection to a rare, alternative form of tefillin. Lesser known is the source for this method, a short halakhic work on tefillin from the period of the Geonim, possibly from the earlier part of the period to which relatively few sources attest. The gaonic-era author is unknown and consequently both the author and the work (as well as the type of tefillin the work describes) are referred to as Shimusha Rabba.

Shimusha Rabba tefillin

Shimusha Rabba tefillin, based on the text that has come down to us, differ in several respects from the standard tefillin that accord with Rashi. First, the Shimusha Rabbah suggests a different ordering for the scrolls inside the tefillah shel rosh (the box that is placed on the head). According to this understanding, the order of the scrolls begins on the wearer’s right, in contradistinction to both Rashi and Rabbenu Tam, who order the scrolls with respect to the wearer’s left (though each does so differently). Like Rashi, the scrolls in the Shimusha Rabba tefillah then follow the order in which they appear in the Torah, meaning that Shimusha Rabba tefillin are the inverse of Rashi tefillin.¹ The Shimusha Rabba also requires a minimum size of two fingers’ breadth for the boxes, and prescribes precisely the location and number of tagin (decorative crowns) that should be written by the scribe on the scrolls inside the tefillin.

Attribution and transmission

The attribution of Shimusha Rabba to R’ Sar Shalom Gaon is late.² The Shimusha Rabba was copied by Rosh (Asher b. Yechiel, mid-13th-14th cen.) in the section on tefillin in his Halakhot Ketannot, a book of rulings not otherwise included in Piskei ha-Rosh. Shimusha Rabba is also mentioned or cited by other Rishonim,³ including (not surprisingly) the Tur,⁴ but also, inter alia, Semag,⁵ the Eshkol, ⁶, Kol Bo,⁷ Machzor Vitry,⁸ and Tosafot.⁹ It is within Rosh’s Halakhot Ketannot that Shimusha Rabba was preserved and later printed. Halakhot Ketannot, including Shimusha Rabba, is now printed in standard editions of Shas, with the section on tefillin appearing at the end of Menachot. In some editions, there is a brief line introducing the work, ostensibly by Rosh: ועתה אכתוב הלכות תפילין הנמצאים על שם גאון ז”ל ונקרא שימושא רבא (“And now I will write the laws of tefillin that are found in the name of a gaon, which are called Shimusha Rabba“).

Shimusha Rabba appears in at least one genizah fragment of Halakhot Gedolot.¹⁰ Its Aramaic appears to be a dialect common to other gaonic works, including Seder ‘Olam Zuta and the Sheiltot.¹¹

Most references to Shimusha Rabba by Rishonim concern tefillin, although a few seem to indicate that Shimusha Rabba covered other topics.

Yehudah b. Barzillai’s hassagah to Shimusha Rabba

Interestingly, Rosh also copied below Shimusha Rabba the hassagah (critical gloss) of R. Yehudah b. Barzillai al-Bargeloni (“of Barcelona,” late 11th-12 cen.), which originally appeared in a section, no longer extant, of the latter’s halakhic compendium Sefer ha-‘Ittim. (The fragments of Sefer ha-‘Ittim that have come down to us pertain to the laws of Shabbat.) The highly critical remark suggests that the Shimusha Rabba is not the work of a gaon, but transmitted, with obvious mistakes, by a student recording the remarks of his teacher. He writes:

ואנו תמיהנו טובא על שמושא רבא דכתבי הכא מיהו כתבינן ליה הכא כדאשכחנא יתיה בנוסחאות עתיקי אע”פ שיש בו קצת הוראות נכונות ומינייהו טעות ומינייהו אין הלשון שלו מכוון כלל שיש בו טעיות הרבה

“We have doubted a great deal regarding what Shimusha Rabba records here, although it was written thus when we found it in old texts; although there is in it a few correct rulings, still among them are errors and words that are not at all clear, which have many errors in them.”

R. Yehudah b. Barzillai goes on to point out that the Shimusha Rabba confuses Tannaitic and Amoraic teachings.

A mixed reception

R’ Yehudah b. Barzillai was not alone in his critical evaluation of Shimusha Rabba. Machzor Vitry, for instance, says of Shimusha Rabba: אין לסמוך על דבריהם במקום שתלמוד שלנו חולק עליהם (“Their opinions are not to be relied upon in the places where our Talmud disagrees with them”).¹² At the same time, Rabbenu Tam cites the Shimusha Rabba affirmatively, and its value was generally accepted where it did not contradict the Talmud. The Shimusha Rabba is cited many times in the Beit Yosef. In his responsa, Rema miFano (R. Menahem Azaryah of Fano, 16th-17th cen.) endorses the Shimusha Rabba as an alternatively transmitted, authentic tradition which preserves many Kabbalistic ideas relating to tefillin. ¹³ It is in this connection that the use of Shimusha Rabba tefillin is usually undertaken in our times.

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Image credit: The opening of the Frankfurt, 1720 edition of Rosh’s Halakhot Ketannot. Public domain.

1. There’s a helpful schematic of each of the four types of tefillin on the website Keter Shem Tob.
2. According to Y. D. Eisenstein in Otzar Yisrael (republished in Daat), the remark appears in Nachal Eshkol, Part 3, p. 84, although I did not find it there, where the discussion is unrelated. Nachal Eshkol is the controversial nineteenth-century commentary by R. Dr. B. H. Auerbach to the twelfth-century Provençal halakhic code the Eshkol. Certainly the Eshkol, and to a lesser extent the strange story of the Nachal Eshkol, are deserving of their own treatment, but in brief: The Nachal Eshkol was controversial not so much in itself, but because it was appended to a massively expanded version of the medieval Sefer ha-Eshkol which Auerbach, a leader of mid-nineteenth-century German Orthodoxy, claimed to have copied from a unique manuscript. The manuscript never surfaced and the authenticity of the expansions of the Eshkol was challenged by Shalom Albeck. Albeck was himself a fascinating figure, active in Judaic scholarship but outside of Wissenschaft circles—he was eulogized by Chayyim Tchernowitz. Albeck put out his own edition of the Eshkol, edited by his son Chanock Albeck, a noted Israeli scholar. It is Albeck’s version that is published in the Bar Ilan Responsa database.
3. It is also cited by R. Se’adyah Gaon in his Sefer ha-Mitzvot, Pos. Comm. 2
4. Tur, Orach Chayyim 32, 36.
5. Semag, Pos. Comm. 2 and 22.
6. Sefer ha-Eshkol 94a-b.
7. Kol Bo 21: 54, 58, 62.
8. See below, n. 11.
9. On Yoma 71b s.v. ייתון בני עממי׳; Berakhot 60b, s.v. אשר קדשנו במצותיו וצונו להניח תפילין; Menachot 34b, s.v. והקורא קורא כסדרן.
10. Cam T-A F11.2, FGP C112525 (note the FGP record number in the NLI catalog is no longer current).
11. J. N. Epstein considered this to be a post-Talmudic eastern Aramaic; see his “Notes on Post-Talmudic-Aramaic Lexicography,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s. 5, no. 2 (1914): 233-51. However, it is possible that the differences are attributable to diglossic factors (the use of different registers or degrees of linguistic formality; see Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal, “Reconsidering the Study of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic: Five Decades after E. Y. Kutscher and His Influential Methodology,” Zeitschrift Der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 163 (2013): 341–64.
12. Machzor Vitry, Hilkhot Tefillin 514 (in the edition of S. Hurwitz (Berlin, 1898), p. 645).
13. Rema miFano, Shu”t siman 107.