114 CHAPTER THREEcontacts outside Palestine; with a certain amount of hard selling and help
from wealthy and sympathetic diasporic Jews and Roman officials, such con-
tacts were slowly transformed into recognition of the authority of the patriarch
and his prote ́ge ́s, who were not all rabbis, by at least some Diaspora communi-
ties.^30 Evidence for the mechanism of this development is nonexistent, but
one possibility, which I do not intend to be exclusive, may be suggested.
I will argue below that in the second and third centuries the Jewish commu-
nities in the Diaspora experienced a decline comparable, and related, to the
disintegration of Palestinian Jewish society in the same period. But this decline
was never complete. Some communities escaped the effects of the diaspora
revolt of 115–117, and had enough demographic bulk and institutional den-
sity to continue functioning, if probably in a weakened state. Suc hcommuni-
ties occasionally needed to petition the government in connection with prob-
lems raised chiefly by the conflict between their municipal obligations and
those of Jewish law. The evidence for such a conflict is abundant in the first
century, as we know from the writings of Josephus and Philo, and again in
the fifth century, when it was one of the main issues in the legislation about
the Jews in the Theodosian Code, 16.8. Though it is far sparser in the second
and third, it is even then not wholly nonexistent (see chapter 6).
Petitions to the emperor were most likely to be heard if presented by a
large pressure group, especially if it was represented by a well-born and well-
connected grandee.^31 Thus, the Jews of the Diaspora cities had a better chance
of a hearing if they presented themselves at court as “the Jews” (which is how
they always appear in the Theodosian Code) and enjoyed the advocacy of a
noble intermediary than if they were merely, say, “the (eminently ignorable)
Jews resident in Laodicea Combusta.” In the first century, the Jews of the
cities had often received such help from members and agents of the Herodian
family. If the patriarchs now assumed the role of Herodian-style advocates
for Diaspora communities, they would have acquired political leverage (and
enhanced fund-raising potential) there, not to mention visibility in the impe-
rial court (is this the reality behind the fictional tales of the meetings of “An-
toninus and Rabbi”?) and renown at home.^32
Whatever the mechanism of the patriarchs’ diasporic rise, it is surely sig-
nificant that for the third century the Palestinian Talmud reports rabbinic
fund-raising trips abroad, some of them presumably on the patriarch’s behalf.
(^30) A rabbiniclocus classicusboth for the activities of patriarchal representatives abroad and for
rabbinic hostility to some of these representatives (ilen demitmenin biksaf, as the rabbis call them:
“those appointed for money”), is Y. Bikkurim 3:3, 65 c-d.
(^31) See Jones,LRE, 1:357–65.
(^32) An isolated homily may ascribe such a role to the patriarchs, though it seems to be referring
to Palestine, not the Diaspora; see Levine, “Jewish Patriarch,” 659. For more on conditions in
the Mediterranean Diaspora in the second and third centuries, see part 3, chap. 6.