Amram bar Sheshna or Amram Gaon (Jewish Babylonian Aramaic: עמרם בר ששנא or Hebrew: עמרם גאון;[1] died 875) was a gaon or head of the Academy of Sura in Lower Mesopotamia in the ninth century.

[2] He is the author of about 120 responsa, most of which were published in Salonica in 1792 in a collection entitled Sha'arei Tzedek, touching almost every aspect of Jewish jurisprudence.

[3] It is characteristic of Amram's method to avoid extreme stringency; thus he decides that a slave who has embraced Judaism but desires to postpone circumcision until he feels strong enough for it, is not to be hurried.

His siddur, which was made familiar by the many excerpts quoted from it by the medieval liturgical writers, and which served as the model for Saadia's and Maimonides' own prayer texts, was published complete for the first time in Warsaw, in the year 1865 under the title Siddur Rav Amram Gaon.

The second part containing the selichot and pizmonim for the month of Elul, for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, is certainly not the work of Amram, but appears to belong to a much later period.

But not much weight can be attached even to portions of the book which are specifically given under the name of Amram; many of the explanations are certainly not by him, but by the editors who appended his name to them, speaking of him in the third person.

Evidence for this is: The Siddur Rav Amram was originally sent to the communities of Spain, in response to a request for guidance on the laws of prayer.

Conversely, the Siddur Rav Amram was a major source used in the standardization of the nusach Ashkenaz, which was already akin to the old European family.

For this reason, to a modern reader the wording of the Siddur Rav Amram appears far closer to an Ashkenazi than a Sephardi text, a fact which misled Moses Gaster[10] into believing that the Ashkenazi rite was based on the Babylonian while the Sephardic rite was essentially Palestinian.