268 A History of Judaism
learning in Byzantine Palestine. Such, for instance, was the cluster of
pupils around R. Hoshaiah in third- century Caesarea, where the sages
were more exposed to the influence of the non- Jewish population of
Palestine than in Galilee, which was almost entirely settled by Jews.
Hoshaiah lived in Caesarea at the same time as the Christian theologian
Origen, with whom he may indeed have had contact, but by whose
ideas he does not seem to have been directly affected.^9
As we have seen in Chapter 7, in the second to fifth centuries ce
Christians were much more affected by their relations to Judaism, as
they worked out their basic theology and puzzled out the role of the Old
Testament within it, than Jews were affected by Christianity. But Chris-
tianity may have affected Palestinian rabbis in more subtle ways. It is
possible that the lack of references in the Palestinian Talmud to any
discussions of Palestinian amoraim after the mid- fourth century, almost
two centuries before the last amoraic teachers attested in the Babylo-
nian Talmud, and the apparent lack of editing of the text may relate to
the strains of rabbinic academies operating within a Christian Roman
empire, but it is hard to reconcile such an explanation with the apparent
prosperity of the Jewish communities which commissioned and financed
the fine Palestinian synagogue mosaic floors dated to the fifth and sixth
centuries, of which a good number have been excavated over recent
decades (see Chapter 10). More plausibly assigned to relations with the
majority Christian culture in the fifth and sixth centuries is the greater
engagement of Palestinian rabbis than their Babylonian counterparts
with the biblical text. Such engagement led, in the fifth and (probably)
the sixth centuries, to the production of many rabbinic commentaries
(midrashim ) on narrative sections of biblical books, such as Genesis
Rabbah (completed probably in the fifth century ce) and Leviticus
Rabbah. The midrashim to Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesi-
astes and Esther seem all to have been compiled in Palestine between the
fifth and seventh centuries.
By the early third century the rabbinic movement in Palestine recog-
nized the leadership of one of their number as a quasi- monarchical ruler
within the Jewish community. R. Judah haNasi, the compiler of the
Mishnah, is the first sage to whose name the later tradition affixed the
permanent title nasi, ‘prince’. It is uncertain whether earlier figures of
authority within the movement, such as Rabban Gamaliel II, held either
the title or the same role within Jewish society, but the rabbis recorded
a series of nesi’im through the third century, and Roman legal sources,
which refer to the nasi as ethnarches in Greek and patriarcha in Latin,