RABBIS AND PATRIARCHS ON THE MARGINS 111There is general agreement, however, that the political impact of the Destruc-
tion should be seen mainly as an internal Jewish problem.^19 I would like to
explain why I think that this view and the various more current refinements
of it are wrong, without attempting to produce a full history of the rabbinic
movement or the patriarchate.^20
The legal and administrative implications of direct Roman rule must be
taken seriously. First, when the Romans annexed a province, they subjected
it to Roman law and entrusted all legal and political authority in the province
to the Roman governor and his staff, and to the local city councils. They did
not recognize the autonomy of the local population (except, of course, of the
citizen bodies of the Greek cities, in a very tenuous way), and they did not
appoint intermediaries between the “natives” and themselves—the main char-
acteristics of the old client-kingship system, which by the later first century
was an unambiguous failure. It is thus counterintuitive to think that the Ro-
mans granted official status to the patriarchs and their rabbinic prote ́ge ́s after
70 or 135.^21
To be sure, the government did nothing to prevent Jews from patronizing
their native legal experts for advice and arbitration. Yet by failing to recognize
their jurisdiction, they made them effectively powerless to compete with the
Roman courts and the arbitration of Jewish city councillors and landowners
for most purposes. We may in a general way compare the Palestinian situation
with the deleterious effects on the native priesthood of the (far less radical)
Severan reforms of the ancient nome system in Egypt: the transformation of
the old nome capitals into more or less normal Greco-Roman cities, in which
bot hpolitical power and religious aut hority were concentrated, apparently
seriously undermined the financial well-being of the rural temples and the
authority of their clergy.^22 For Palestine, even G. Alon, who always ascribed to
the rabbis absolutely as much power and popularity as the most romantically
sentimental reading of rabbinic literature would allow, admitted that in the
(^19) See my review of D. Goodblatt,JJS47 (1996): 167–69, for full discussion. It is only fair to
point out that I contributed to what I now regard as an elementary error in myJosephus.
(^20) Several large studies of the patriarchate have recently been published: Goodblatt,Monarchic
Principle; M. Jacobs,Die Institution des Ju ̈dischen Patriarchen(Tu ̈bingen: Mohr, 1995); K. Stro-
bel, “Ju ̈disches Patriarchat, Rabbinentum, und Priesterdynastie von Emesa: Historische Pha ̈no-
mene innerhalb des Imperium Romanum der Kaiserzeit,”Ktema14 (1989): 39–77 (published
1994); L. Levine, “The Status of the Patriarch in the Third and Fourth Century: Sources and
Methodology,”JJS47 (1996): 1–32; S. Schwartz, “The Patriarchs and the Diaspora,”JJS 50
(1999): 208–22.
(^21) These points are discussed in greater detail in my review of Goodblatt and in “Patriarchs
and the Diaspora.”
(^22) See R. Bagnall,Egypt in Late Antiquity(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp.
261–68, for an account of the decline of the temples; the connection with the Severan reform is
my own. For a different approach, see Frankfurter,Religion in Roman Egypt, especially pp.
37–82.