Overview
Abraham ibn Daud composed Sefer ha-Qabbalah, the Book of Tradition, to defend the historical legitimacy of rabbinic Judaism against Karaite criticism. The chronicle constructs a continuous chain of authorized teaching from antiquity through the geonim and into the Jewish academies of Iberia. Its famous account of four captured scholars explains how learning supposedly moved westward, though historians do not treat the narrative as literal evidence in every detail. The work combines polemic, chronology, biography, and communal memory. It became a foundational example of medieval Sephardic Jewish historiography.
