266 A History of Judaism
local patriotism about the religious aura acquired by their homeland
through their devout scholarship, but for these rabbis, as for all Jews,
biblical notions about the special role in Judaism of the land of Israel
(see Chapter 4) retained their force.
The Temple might no longer be standing, but the rabbis still imag-
ined a world in which the most sacred place on earth was the Holy of
Holies. The rest of the land of Israel might be less holy than the Temple
or the city of Jerusalem, but the land of Israel nonetheless far exceeded
the rest of the world in sanctity, not least because many religious duties,
such as the tithing of agricultural produce, were incurred only there.
Rabbis debated whether there was a religious duty to reside in the land
(although Babylonian rabbis self- evidently decided for themselves that
any such duty could be outweighed by other considerations, such as the
learning to be gained in the Babylonian academies).
The rabbis also debated the land’s precise boundaries, which were
unclear in the biblical texts, as we have seen (Chapter 4). Defining the
frontier was of considerable importance to those, like the inhabitants of
Rehov, who lived close to the eastern border and needed to know, for
instance, which local fields could in good conscience be farmed in a sab-
batical year. The rabbis only gradually between the second and fifth
centuries ce settled on a boundary formula. Their chosen formula was
based partly on the description of the land in Numbers and partly on
contemporary demographics, so that regions on the borders with a
mixed population, like Caesarea, were deemed to be part of the land of
Israel only if the majority of the population was Jewish.^6
In the aftermath of 70, a group of rabbinic sages who had survived the
war settled in Yavneh, a small town on the coastal plain of Judaea south
of the provincial capital Caesarea, to continue their studies under the
leadership of Rabban Yohanan b. Zakkai. The small study group around
Yohanan, meeting in the upper storey of a house or in a vineyard near a
pigeon house, arrogated to themselves the attributes of a court of law.
We do not know how many other Jews paid any attention to its delib-
erations, but it is likely that it increased in influence over the following
decades with the rise to authority within the movement of Rabban
Gamaliel II, the grandson of the Gamaliel who had taught St Paul.
These early rabbinic academies were more like a circle of disciples
around a master than a formal institution, but it is probable that for
legal decisions the sages organized themselves as they imagined the