rabbis in the east (70 to 1000 ce) 267
proceedings of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem had operated when the
Temple still stood:
The Sanhedrin was arranged like the half of a round threshing- floor so
that they all might see one another. Before them stood the two scribes of
the judges, one to the right and one to the left, and they wrote down the
words of them that favoured acquittal and the words of them that favoured
conviction. R. Judah says, ‘There were three: one wrote down the words of
them that favoured acquittal, and one wrote down the words of them that
favoured conviction, and the third wrote down the words both of them
that favoured acquittal and of them that favoured conviction. Before them
sat three rows of disciples of the Sages, and each knew his proper place.’It was taken for granted that, as in the schools of the sages before 70,
difficult issues within these small academies could be decided by votes:
They vote only in a large place. And they vote only on the basis of a trad-
ition which someone has heard. [If] one speaks in the name of a tradition
which he has heard, and the rest of them say, ‘We have not heard it’ – in
such a case, they do not take a standing vote. But if one prohibits and one
permits, one declares unclean and one declares clean, and all of them
declare, ‘We have not heard a tradition on the matter – in such a case they
rise and take a vote.^7
From Yavneh groups of sages moved in the early second century ce
the small distance to Lydda, and after the Bar Kokhba war of 132– 5 to
Usha in Lower Galilee and then to Tiberias and Sepphoris further east.
The relationship between sages can be deduced from the early traditions
about which rabbis transmitted the teachings of which teachers, and
occasionally by stories such as the narrative from the Mishnah which
eventually found its way into the Passover Haggadah: ‘It is related of
Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Joshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, Rabbi Akiva,
and Rabbi Tarfon that they once met for the Seder in Bnei Brak and
spoke about the Exodus from Egypt all night long, until their disciples
came and said to them: “Masters! The time has come to say the morn-
ing Shema!” ’^8
It is probable that in Palestine rabbinic teaching and learning remained
situated within such small disciple groups down to at least the fourth
century, when the Palestinian Talmud reached its final form. The disciple
circle was the standard form of a philosophical school in antiquity and
such informality allowed for the emergence of local centres of rabbinic