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8 - The origins and development of the rabbinic movement in the Land of Israel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Hayim Lapin
Edited by
Steven T. Katz
Hayim Lapin
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Maryland
Steven T. Katz
Affiliation:
Boston University
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Summary

INTRODUCTION

The emergence of the rabbinic movement was epoch-making, although perhaps only in retrospect. For the period covered in this chapter, between 70 ce and the middle decades of the fourth century, rabbis in Palestine appeared to be a numerically small group of religious experts with limited influence. Less external evidence exists for comparison in Babylonia, but the same appeared to be true there as well. The “rabbinization” of Jewish communities in Palestine, Babylonia, and elsewhere, confirmed by the early Middle Ages, is difficult to trace because it occurred in obscurity, but in terms of rabbinic literature it was quite a productive period between the last people whom the texts cite or mention by name (some time after 350 ce in Palestinian texts; after 500 in Babylonian texts) and the documents preserved in the Cairo Genizah (of which only relatively few are as early as the ninth century).

Recent generations of historians have learned to disentangle the question of rabbinic origins from the history of the Second Temple period. Less uniformly, they have begun to revise their views of the centrality of the rabbinic movement in reshaping the Jewish community in Palestine in the years after the suppression of the Judaean Revolt and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 ce. The historiography of the rabbinic movement is almost entirely dependent upon rabbinic literature, a literature fundamentally uninterested in historiography (in a conventional modern sense) even as it regularly deploys “history” (for example, accounts of events or personalities) for its own ideological purposes. Reconstructions based on rabbinic stories of specific events in which one can discern the motivations and interests of the primary actors are therefore problematic, and the stringing together of multiple stories into a coherent historical narrative compounds the problem. Rather than attempt this method, the following discussion uses a rather coarse chronology, retaining, for present purposes, the conventional distinction between the “tannaitic” and “amoraic” periods (that is, approximately pre- and post-dating the early third century), and only tentatively proposes developments within those periods.

Keywords

Aramaic literacyMishnahrabbinic literatureRabbinic movementRoman period Palestine
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The Cambridge History of Judaism , pp. 206 - 229
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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