128 CHAPTER THREEstriking that some Diaspora communities (we do not know how many) actually
submitted, voluntarily, to the patriarchs and came to think of their gifts as
obligatory and perhaps even to allow patriarchal interference in their internal
governance. But we should be careful not to exaggerate the extent of imperial
privilege or patriarchal power.
In sum, I have been arguing that rabbis and patriarchs rarely wielded much
formal authority. Even the patriarchs, whose history is usually written in con-
stitutional terms, enjoyed mainly the informal prestige accruing to any great
and wealthy patron with a far-flung network of important dependents, and
very briefly succeeded in transforming this hard-wonauctoritasinto formal
status and legal jurisdiction (which is not to deny the possibility that some
Jews were impressed by their dynastic pretensions). The rabbis, for their part,
never attained so high a level of official recognition, but they too, both as
clients of the patriarchs and in some cases as small-scale patrons in their own
right, enjoyed a certain prestige. Neither patriarchs nor rabbis, however, had
much impact on the lives of Palestinian Jews. The patriarchs’ main interest,
especially in the fourth century, was in maintaining their ties in the Diaspora;
they had little to gain from interfering in the lives of Palestinian Jews, though
the latter did show them the deference due grand figures, and they are likely
to have acquired a strong voice in local politics and, as suggested above, influ-
ence over the local Jewish urban elites. As for the rabbis, they too were recipi-
ents of deference due experts in Torah, but mostly they affected the lives of
Palestinian Jews by serving as or advising rural religious functionaries—
judges, schoolteachers, Torah readers, and the like. They seem rarely to have
served such functions in Upper Galilee or the Golan; even nearer the rabbinic
centers, in the villages of Lower Galilee, they were employed only by those
few villages that wished, and could afford, to do so, and probably somewhat
more frequently in the fourth century than in the third. There they were
functionaries rather than authorities—not therefore necessarily without in-
fluence, since functionaries can transform service into control. But, as far as
we are aware, whatever influence they had was ideologically compartmental
and geographically restricted.