RABBIS AND PATRIARCHS ON THE MARGINS 115It also reports patriarchal exercise of authority over judicial appointments. One
obscure passage is sometimes thought to contain an early reference to the
collection of the so-calledaurum coronarium—the patriarchal tax—said later
to have been exacted mainly from the Diaspora, but the silence of rabbinic
literature apart from this passage probably indicates that in the third century
it had not yet made its transformation from gift to exaction.^33 Other stories
describe the classically patronal behavior of the patriarchs of the third cen-
tury—the morning greetings by bands of clients and competition among the
latter for access to their patron, and even gangs of toughs being employed as
a “private army”.^34 The rabbis were among the beneficiaries of patriarchal
patronage, especially as recipients of appointments as judges and religious
functionaries, mainly in Galilee, but also in the cities of Arabia, Phoenicia,
Syria, and perhaps even farther afield.
In the same period the rabbis likely worked to acquire influence indepen-
dent of patriarchal patronage. There is no reason to think that all or even most
of the rabbinic fund-raising trips abroad mentioned in the Palestinian Talmud
were undertaken on behalf of the patriarch.^35 Of special interest as a particu-
larly blatant and problematic case of rabbinic hard selling is the account of a
fund-raising trip to Emesa (Homs, in Syria) ostensibly on behalf of widows
and orphans but in fact on behalf of the rabbis themselves, a piece of mischief
of which one opinion quoted in the Talmud approves, ex post facto!^36 The
(^33) See Y. Sanhedrin 2:6, 20d = Genesis Rabbah 80:1 (ed. Theodor-Albeck, pp. 950–53), a
sermon apparently attacking the fiscal rapaciousness of Judah II, though other interpretations are
possible—see below; otherwise, rabbinic sources say nothing about patriarchal taxation, except
for some minor involvement in the municipal taxes of Tiberias, primarily as possessing the author-
ity to exempt rabbis from the obligation to pay them; see the discussion of Levine, “The Jewish
Patriarc hin T hird Century Palestine,” inANRWII 19.2 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1979), pp. 671–
74, disregarding his unwarranted conclusion on the bottom of page 673; and see Goodblatt,
Monarchic Principle, pp. 136–41. Why scholars have always posed the issue in the most extreme
way, “when did the patriarchs acquire the authority to impose taxes?” instead of positing a gradual,
halting, and uneven development from solicitation of gifts (implied by the very termaurum
coronarium), I do not know. Onaurum coronarium, see F. Millar,The Emperor in the Roman
World(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 140–42.
(^34) See Y. Shabbat 6:9, 8c; Y. Yoma 8:5, 45b (Germans); Y. Horayot 3:2, 47a = Y. Sanhedrin
2:1, 19d–20a (“Goths”). Rashi, ad B. Berakhot 16b, already speculated (because such gifts were
common in medieval France?) that these Goths were “Antoninus’s” gift to the patriarch, and
remarkably enough this is reported as fact by Avi-Yonah,The Jews of Palestine(Oxford: Blackwell,
1976), pp. 59, 120, who also followed Rashi in regarding these slaves (?) as a private army. Levine,
“Jewish Patriarch,” p. 681, uses a turn of phrase whose meaning is not obvious: “(The patriarchs)
employed gendarmes, but no army.” For discussion, see Jacobs,Die Institution, pp. 43–44. On
the employment of gangs by landowners, see P. Garnsey and G. Woolf, “Patronage of the Rural
Poor in the Roman World,” inPatronage in Ancient Society, pp. 152–67; and in the same volume,
K. Hopwood, “Bandits, Elites, and Rural Order,” pp. 171–85.
(^35) See Goodblatt,Monarchic Principle, p. 140.
(^36) Y. Megilla h3:1, 73d.