RABBIS AND PATRIARCHS ON THE MARGINS 113estingly backward-looking legal categories as purity and priestly gifts.^26 This
prestige was not confined to Judaea but extended in a limited way even to
Galilee and the Palestinian coastal cities. The Bar Kokhba revolt and the
consequent massacre in Judaea were probably responsible for the fact that the
rabbis of the middle and later second century, the main objects of Cohen’s
study, were characterized by a practically sectarian involution: they were un-
concerned wit hand of no concern to Jews outside t heir own pietistic circles.
Gamaliel’s son, Simon, enjoyed correspondingly little general prestige.
Around the beginning of the third century, for reasons long the object of
speculation and still unknown, the position of the patriarchs and rabbis began
to change—a change most scholars follow rabbinic literature in attributing
partly to the activities of the patriarch Judah I. He somehow became a wealthy
landowner, well-connected in the increasingly prosperous Galilean cities and
even, the Talmudim claim (or rather fantasize), in the Roman imperial
court.^27 He or his son may have been the famous Jewish “ethnarch” referred
to by Origen as behaving regally, to the point of executing criminals—though
without imperial authorization. It was probably in this period, too, that the
patriarchs began to claim Davidic ancestry.^28 Cohen argues that around 200
rabbinic judicial activity broadened to include issues of interest outside rab-
binic circles, like civil law and Sabbat hobservance. Apparently, rabbinic judi-
cial prestige was growing again, perhaps in part because the rabbinic move-
ment left its rural Galilean exile for the cities, mainly Sepphoris and Tiberias,
but also Caesarea, Scythopolis–Beth Shean, and Lydda.
The move to the cities also had significant financial implications for the
patriarchs and rabbis. It connected them to long-distance trade networks and
so was a necessary precondition for the loosening of their dependence on the
Galilean countryside.^29 Patriarchs and rabbis could now more easily establish
(^26) I would like to thank Cohen for letting me see this fundamental essay, an excerpt of which
was published as “The Place of the Rabbis.” The full essay was written in 1983 and has now
appeared inCambridge History of Judaism, 3: 922–90. See also C. Hezser, “Social Fragmentation,
Plurality of Opinion, and Nonobservance of Halakhah: Rabbis and Community in Late Roman
Palestine,”JSQ1 (1993–1994): 234–51.
(^27) See Levine, “Patriarch,” 654–59; note the “historicism” of the surprisingly influential article
of M. D. Herr, “The Historical Significance of the Dialogues between Jewish Sages and Roman
Dignitaries,”SH22 (1971): 123–50.
(^28) See Goodblatt,Monarchic Principle, pp. 141–75.
(^29) I would hesitate to suggest that this is reflected in Judah I’s alleged deathbed instruction
that he not be eulogized in the villages (because of disputes, the Talmud explains, not as helpfully
as one would wish), Y. Ketubot 12:3, 34d–35a. For the routine character of interprovincial com-
mercial contacts in the high and later Roman Empire (especially for such relations between
Palestine and Egypt), see Bagnall,Egypt in Late Antiquity, p. 108. On the urbanization of the
rabbis, H. Lapin, “Rabbis and Cities in Later Roman Palestine: The Literary Evidence,”JJS 50
(1999): 187–207, supercedes previous discussions.