powerful taboo. The scholars frequently vindicated the Abbasid Caliphate which followed, and the new dynasty had empowered rule by Islamic jurists (fuqahā). Extrapolating from this, Talya Fishman wonders whether there is not some broad connection between this phenomenon in Islam and the remonstrations made by Yehudai Gaon and, later, Pirqoi ben Baboi. Jews outside of Eretz Israel called their Palestinian brethren Shami or 'Damascenes', and the Babylonian school's hostility to Palestinian traditions might be embedded in a broader cultural battle, in which the Abbasids found themselves in rivalry with the Syro-Palestinian communities, in Umayyad territories to their west, around the Mediterranean. Prayer Pirqoi ben Baboi was particularly concerned with prayer orthodoxy. He quotes his teacher Yehudai Gaon for an halakhic ban on non-Talmudic blessings, stating that unless a blessing is in the Talmud it may not be uttered, or modified even in a single letter. The Palestinian Jewish creation of piyyut came under intense fire as the geonic scholars strove to exercise their hegemony in terms of a correct halakhically defined liturgy. This remonstrance by the circle of Yehudai Gaon was shrugged off by the community in Palestine with their traditional dismissal: minhag (custom) nullifies halakha (minhag mevattel halakhah: מנהג מבטל הלכה). Like Yehudai Gaon, he was opposed to the recitation of the Shema in the Kedushah. Historically this innovation arose when, Jacob Mann opined, Heraclius, breaking a promise he had made to the Jews, wrested sway over Palestine from the Sassanian Persians and their former Jewish allies, and proscribed recitation of the daily Tefillah and Shema. Since they were allowed only to congregate in their synagogues on the morning of the Sabbath to recite the Amidah and associated piyyutim, the Hazzan or precentor adopted the subterfuge of smuggling the banned prayer in, intoning the first and last lines of the Shema in such away as to slip by the eavesdropping of government officials monitoring the session. Pirqoi ben Baboi repeated his stance of Yehudai Gaon that the raison d'être for such a novel practice had vanished with the Muslim conquest of Palestine, and the overthrow of Byzantine rule. Therefore, it was necessary to remove the Shema from the kedushah of the Shacharit Amidah, since under Arab rule it was now possible to return to the normal prayer practices in place prior to Christian Byzantium rule. Pirqoi ben Baboi nonetheless did not require that the Shema be removed from the