Rav Chanina of Syria or of Sura?

In yesterday’s daf (Kiddushin 79a), we encounter a seemingly new Amora:

וְאָמַר רַב חֲנִינָא מִסּוּרְיָא: מַאן תְּנָא חָבִית – רַבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן הִיא, דְּגַבֵּי מִקְוֶה נָמֵי סְפֵיקָא מְשַׁוֵּי.

The Gemara continues its analysis of the baraita: And Rav Ḥanina from Syria says: Who is the tanna that taught the halakha of the barrel? It is Rabbi Shimon, who with regard to a ritual bath also considers it as a matter of uncertainty rather than as definitively impure. Therefore, there is no contradiction between the baraita and the mishna.

but really, he is the admittedly rare Rav Chanina of Sura. The yud is spurious. We can see this from the parallel in Niddah 2b:

א"ר חנינא מסורא מאן תנא חבית ר"ש היא דלגבי מקוה נמי ספקא משוי ליה

The Gemara answers: Rabbi Ḥanina of Sura says: Who is the tanna who taught the halakha of the barrel? It is Rabbi Shimon, who, with regard to a ritual bath also considers it as a matter of uncertainty, rather than as definitely impure. Therefore, there is no contradiction between the two halakhot.

For some reason, this Niddah parallel (or Kiddushin) doesn’t show up in Sefaria’s Related Texts. They use Dicta’s algorithm for finding parallel texts, but I guess the shorthand for א”ר and the different spelling of Sura, or the shorthand for ר”ש messed up any matchup.

The Steinsaltz / Koren English translation of “Syria” matches up with Rav Steinsaltz’s Hebrew interpolated commentary. He doesn’t fix it up, but leaves the word מסוריא as it appears in the Talmudic text.

Artscroll gets it right:

The brackets in the footnotes denote a second editor’s pass. This often brings in additional scholarly information. Since this justifies the change from the written Syria to the correct Sura, perhaps earlier printed editions actually have Syria in the English as well. (I didn’t check.)

Besides referring to Seder HaDoros for this emendation, we have access to Hachi Garsinan, where we can see that only the printings have Syria, while the manuscripts have Sura. Thus, the printings:

vs. the manuscripts:

Note that Munich has the apostrophe, so we can understand a possible progress from Sura → abbreviated Sur’ → expanded Surya.

And just to show the manuscript with the correct text, here is an image of Vatican 110:

Now, I actually covered Rav Chanina of Sura in the past in an article. You can read the summary (and find a link to the article) here:

It may give a hint to his character, hermeneutic approach, and when he lived in terms of scholastic generation. I didn’t mention our sugya, though did mention the Niddah 2b parallel. Presumably this was because searches for the name didn’t turn up our sugya.