Rabbis as Legal Experts in the Roman East - Snippet

12 RABBIS AS LEGAL EXPERTS IN THE ROMAN EAST Yair Furstenberg 1. Introduction The rabbinic movement, which developed after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E ., saw itself as a successor of the Pharisees, one of three major “sects” (alongside the Sadducees and Essenes) that were active in Judaea during the Second Temple period and offered competing modes of Torah observance. The rabbis adopted some facets of Pharisaic ideology, such as the notion of oral tradition, and they explicitly identified with Pharisaic positions in legal matters (m. Yad. 4:4–6). However, in addition to these ideological connections, scholars have claimed some form of institutional continuity between the Sanhedrin, imagined as the pre-70 Jerusalem high court, that was controlled – according to this view – by proto-rabbinic figures, and two rabbinic institutions that presumably governed Jewish society after 70, the Great Court in Yavneh (Jamnia) and the patriarchate. According to this narrative, later generations of rabbis managed to transfer these institutions of Jewish leadership from Judaea to Galilee after the Bar Kokhba revolt (132– 136 C .E .). Their activity is considered to have culminated in the compilation of the Mishnah, the corpus of authoritative rabbinic law brought about by R. Judah the patriarch. According to this narrative, the third and fourth centuries saw a growing rift between the two branches of rabbinic governing institutions in Palestine, the rabbinic academy and the patriarchate, due to the latter’s cultural assimilation until the final abolishment of the patriarchate at the beginning of the fifth century. Although this narrative of institutionalized rabbinic leadership was prominent among historians up to the last decades of the twentieth century (eg Safrai 1974), this approach is now generally dismissed (see Hezser 1997: 185–239; Schwartz 2001a: 103–28; Lapin 2012: 38–97). This account is based primarily on a harmonized selection of mostly later rabbinic sources and does not take into account the deep political and social ruptures following the two revolts against Rome. The image of an all-encompassing rabbinic authority over Jewish society does not fit nonrabbinic evidence, both literary and material. It overlooks nonrabbinic Jewish practices and disregards the standards of Roman administration (Schwartz 1999: 210). In fact, such a reconstruction is not even compatible with what emerges from a close examination of contemporary rabbinic traditions. On the whole, these sources portray a much more restricted image of rabbinic activity and authority. DOI: 10.4324/9781315280974-15 185