Hanina bar Hama

Who was Hanina bar Hama?

Hanina bar Hama was a Jewish Talmudist, halakist and haggadist frequently quoted in the Babylonian and the Jerusalem Talmud, and in the Midrashim.

He is generally cited by his prænomen alone, but sometimes with his patronymic, and occasionally with the cognomen "the Great". Whether he was a Palestinian by birth and had only visited Babylonia, or whether he was a Babylonian immigrant in Palestine, cannot be clearly established. In the only passage in which he himself mentions his arrival in Palestine he refers also to his son's accompanying him, and from this some argue that Babylonia was his native land. It is certain, however, that he spent most of his life in Palestine, where he attended for a time the lectures of Bar Ḳappara and Ḥiyya the Great and eventually attached himself to the academy of Judah I. Under the last-named he acquired great stores of practical and theoretical knowledge, and so developed his dialectical powers that once in the heat of debate with his senior and former teacher Ḥiyya he ventured the assertion that were some law forgotten, he could himself reestablish it by argumentation.