It competed with the talmudic academies in Babylonia (Lower Mesopotamia) to support the growing diasporic communities.
The extant material consists essentially of a list in Seder Olam Zutta relating all the geonim to Mar Zutra.
Fragments found in the Cairo Geniza contradict the list, claiming that a member of the priestly family headed the academy in Tiberias in the middle of the 8th century.
[9] The av beit din, the president of the court, ranked next to the gaon, and that another member of the college, called "the third" (ha-shelishi), held the third highest office.
[10] He died shortly thereafter and was buried in Galilee, near the old tannaic tombs, a large concourse of people attending the burial.
Ben Daniel succeeded in having his authority recognized by the communities along the Palestinian and Phoenician coasts, Tyre alone retaining its independence for a time.
The nagid Meborak, to whom ben Daniel owed his elevation, called a large assembly, which deposed him and reinstated Abiathar as gaon in Iyar of 1094.
In 1031 Masliah ben Solomon ha-Cohen, a son of Solomon ben Elijah, addressed from the "gate of the Academy of Fustat" a letter to a man named Abraham in which he gives his whole genealogy, adding the full title of "gaon, rosh yeshivat geon Ya'qov," to the names of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.
The Academy of Palestine had probably ceased to exist before the Christians conquered Palestine, and its head, the gaon Maṣliaḥ, went to Fustat, where there was an academy that had seceded from the authority of the Eretz Yisrael rabbinic Leadership Institute at the time of the Egyptian exilarch David ben Daniel.
In 1111, the same Elijah purchased at Fustat Chananel ben Chushiel's commentary on the Book of Joshua, which subsequently fell into the hands of his cousin, the gaon Maṣliaḥ.