THREE

RABBIS AND PATRIARCHS ON THE MARGINS

I

N PART 2 I aim to provide a description of a society that disintegrated
under the impact of an imperialism sharpened by the failure of the two
Palestinian revolts. In this part I will give close attention to the interpreta-
tion of evidence because my view of the history of Palestine from 135 to c.350
is revisionist and requires argumentation. My thesis is that the core ideology
of Judaism, as described in the previous section, ceased, after the two revolts,
to function as an integrating force in Palestinian Jewis hsociety. T he interme-
diaries of the Torah lost not only their legal authority but also their status as
cultural ideals. Indeed, if there was anything at all holding Palestinian Jewish
society together, it may have been no more than an attenuated sense of a
common past, a mild feeling of separation from their neighbors that the latter,
who had shared memories of their own, may have conspired to maintain.
Finally, some Jews, probably a very small number (among them were the
rabbis) still insisted on the importance of the Torah, of Judaism, in their sym-
bolic world, and these Jews, convinced of their elite status, tried to insinuate
their way into general Palestinian society. Although marginal and to some
extent turned in on themselves, the rabbis and their congeners nevertheless
played a role, peripheral and weak though it was, in sustaining among some
Jews some sense of separation.
But it would be misleading to focus attention only on the rabbis and implic-
itly suppose the rest of the Jewish population either to have been basically
inert, quietly waiting to be convinced or, alternatively, under the temporary
religious control of some nonrabbinic group of intermediaries of Tora h(of
whom there is scarcely a shred of evidence)—in short, to construct a history
of the Jews between 70 and 350 (or even 640) around the story of the rise of
the rabbis, whether they are thought to have risen ex nihilo or after a battle
of exegetical wits wit hinferior Tora hsc holars.^1 In chapter 3, I try to explain
why a rabbinocentric account is inadequate. I will argue that even though the
rabbis established a foothold in urban and suburban Palestine in the course
of the third century, and the grandee who led them, the patriarch (ornasi),
by the middle of the fourth had become a very estimable figure indeed, the
rabbis did not have any officially recognized legal authority until the end of
the fourth century. Even then it was severely restricted and in any case not

(^1) As even the most responsible and serious historians have trouble avoiding; see, e.g., S. Cohen,
From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, pp. 214–31.