INTRODUCTION

This chapter focuses on the rabbis. The rabbis (rabbi in Hebrew/Aramaic is an honorific title meaning ‘my master’; the term was already used as a substantive noun in antiquity, but rabbinic literature usually calls its protagonists sages – hakhamim – or elders – zeqenim) were a group centred in northern Palestine, the remaining centre of Jewish population after the devastation of Judaea in 135. The origins and role of the rabbis are obscure and controversial despite the survival of a large quantity of rabbinic literature. The rabbis were unusual or even unique as a provincial group, since they were elite or sub-elite preservers, rationalizers and elaborators of a recalcitrantly unromanized but very much altered local tradition transmitted in its original Semitic languages. As such they have much to teach about the possibilities and limits of cultural resistance in the Roman Empire. The following pages are dedicated to the tasks of explaining the controversy about them, piecing together what we can know about their origins, coalescence as a group, and role. In my view, little can be known, but that little points mainly to the rabbis’ limitations as authorities and cultural role models. What we know about Jews in Palestine outside rabbinic circles points to their imbrication, at long last, in the political, social and cultural environment of the eastern Empire. Things began to change by the later third century; most of the evidence for this change concerns the rise of a dynasty designated in rabbinic sources nesi’im (singular, nasi; ‘prince’, see above on Bar Kokhba’s use of the title) and in Roman law-codes, patriarchs. Like the rabbis, the patriarchs are largely without close parallel in the Roman Empire but there is no doubt that in the fourth century they were transformed from a venerable rabbinic family into important imperial officials of senatorial rank; this tells us something about larger changes in the eastern Empire on the eve of christianization.