This is a book that has been copied and translated from manuscripts held in the British Museum by Rabbi Hermann Gollancz.
Rabbi Hai Gaon was the last of the Geonim of Pumbeditha. With him the era of the Geonim came to an end. The Geonim were the brilliant Talmudic scholars who headed the great Yeshivos of Sura and Pumbeditha that lasted for nearly 450 years. The Geonim, who flourished in Babylonia from about 590CE to 1040CE were the successors to the Rabbanan Seburai, who in turn succeeded the Amoraim after the completion of the Talmud Bavli. Hai Gaon was the son of his equally famous father, Rabbi Sherira Gaon, head of the Yeshiva of Pumbeditha (a small town near present-day Baghdad, the capital of Iraq).
Rabbi Doctor Hermann Gollancz was born in Bremen, Germany. He was the eldest son of Rabbi Samuel Marcus Gollancz, who was Rabbi of the Hambro’ Synagogue in London from 1854 to 1899. He was educated at Jews’ College and University College London. He graduated in Classics and philosophy in 1873 and was awarded his MA in Hebrew, Syriac and German in 1889. In 1892 he succeeded Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler as minister at the Bayswater Synagogue, where he remained for 51 years.
In 1897 he received his Rabbinic Diploma – Hatarath Horaah – from Rabbi Saul Horowitz of Tiesmienitz, at a time when the British Chief Rabbinate discouraged “Ministers” from becoming “Rabbis” – only the Chief Rabbi was supposed to be a real Rabbi.
In 1902 he was elected Goldsmid Professor of Hebrew at University College London. On his retirement from University College in 1923, he donated his considerable collection of Judaica to the college and was made Emeritus Professor. In the same year he was knighted, the first British rabbi to receive the honour.
Jewish Miscellanies 