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The Gemara relates: When Ravin ascended from Babylonia to Eretz Yisrael, he stated this halakha, including Rav Naḥman’s interpretation of the baraita, in the presence of Rabbi Yirmeya. Rabbi Yirmeya said: Foolish Babylonians! Because they dwell in a dark land, they state halakhot that are dim. Did they not hear that which Rabbi Ḥiyya bar Abba says that Rabbi Yoḥanan says: That mishna is dealing with the animals themselves, not their wool, and the dispute between the first tanna and Rabbi Yosei is with regard to a case where one examined the flock and did not find the blemished animal?
Five times a report of Babylonian learning reaches R. Yirmeya in the Land of Israel and is met with the same sentence: "Foolish Babylonians! Because they dwell in a dark land, they say dim halakhot."
We read our daf setting it beside four parallel occurrences and the wider talmudic archive of Palestinian contempt and Babylonian reply and asks what kind of act such an insult is. Drawing on the scholarship of Lieberman, Neusner, Weiss Halivni and Boyarin, and on the sociology of intellectual fields, We propose six propositions toward a theory of inter-scholarly rivalry: that rivalry presupposes a shared currency; that insults fix exchange rates between competing kinds of scholarly capital; that geography is conscripted to do the work of proof; that the sharpest border guards are those who have crossed the border; that the temper of a rivalry is set by its brokers; and that the archive belongs to the survivor, who, if confident enough, preserves the insult. The governing fact is that every one of these taunts survives only because Babylonians recorded it.