Babylonian academies over all Jewish communities, and thereby undermine the diaspora's attachment to Eretz Israel. Only the legal code as laid down in the Babylonian Talmud was a reliable basis for practice of the oral law throughout the world. Any custom (minhag) which disagreed with the Babylonian rabbinical canon he considered a "custom of apostasy", which he imagined Edom/Rome had imposed on the Jews of Palestine. It has been suspected, in this last regard, that the virulence of his censure stems from anxiety over the rise of the Karaites – some of whose positions had been inflected by Palestinian usage- who refused to accept the oral teachings encoded in Babylonian rabbinical texts. The Karaites, for example, considered fasting on the Sabbath laudable, just as Italian Jews since late antiquity allowed the practice on particular occasions. In the latter instance, this may reflect the persistence of a residue of popular Palestinian traditions of piety notwithstanding strictures against the practice issued by authoritative rabbis. Pirqoi ben Baboi frowned on any such deviation from what was established Babylonian practice. These perceived abuses extended to the scrolls of the Torah produced in Palestine, which, he stated, were written on vellum prepared by Gentiles in disregard for halakhic stipulations on their proper production. A fragment of Pirqoi ben Baboi's appears to contain, in the form of a quotation, the earliest extant reference to Pirkei De-Rabbi Eliezer, and plays some role in arguments for dating that work. The historical context of Pirqoi's critique In ancient Greece, a distinction developed between súngramma (σύγγραμμα) and hupómnēma (ὑπόμνημα), namely an authorized copy of a book and the private notes made on it. With the rise of Hellenism, this discrimination influenced Palestinian rabbis when they in turn drew a sharp line of demarcation between the Tanakh scriptural corpus, and extra-biblical oral teachings, ascribing greater importance to this Oral Torah than to the written Torah. According to one source, the Pesikta Rabbati, God turned town Moses' request at Sinai that the Oral Torah be written down: he did so to avoid a repetition of what would happen with the Old Testament, i.e. be translated into Greek and allow gentiles other than Jews to proclaim themselves 'children of Israel'. For much of the Geonic period, the Talmud was conserved primarily in oral transmission. In his letter, Pirqoi ben Baboi remonstrated with the Kairouan community arguing that it was not sufficient to cite