284 A History of Judaism
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and the place he is visiting. But such toleration within the rabbinic com-
munity was not universal. So, for instance, a certain Pirkoi b. Baboi, a
Babylonian scholar, in c. 800 ce composed in Hebrew a polemical letter
to the Jews of North Africa and Spain in which he mounted an intense
attack on the customs of Palestinian rabbinic Jews. He decried their
practices, when he believed them contrary to halakhah, because they
lacked authority as a result of Palestinian tradition being disrupted by
Christian persecution.^26
By the time of Pirkoi the number of Jews engaged in rabbinic study
must have risen into the thousands, in contrast to the handful of sages
who had clustered around Yohanan b. Zakkai in 70 ce. Their impact on
the wider Jewish community had correspondingly greatly increased.
The somewhat solipsistic concerns of rabbinic authors were with the
religious lives of adult male rabbinic Jews like themselves, for whom
study in the academy was an integral part of piety. For the most part
other Jews, characterized as ammei ha’arets, ‘people of the land’, mean-
ing essentially ‘lax’ or ‘lay’, were simply ignored. In Babylonia, where
the large rabbinic academies seem to have operated in a self- sufficient
bubble in the amoraic period, indifference could sometimes express
itself as antagonism (often in exaggerated rhetoric):
Our Rabbis taught, ‘Let a man always sell all he has and marry the daugh-
ter of a scholar, for if he dies or goes into exile, he is assured that his
children will be scholars. But let him not marry the daughter of an am
ha’arets, for if he dies or goes into exile, his children will be ammei
ha’arets.’ ... R. Eleazar said, ‘An am ha’arets, it is permitted to stab him
[even] on the Day of Atonement which falls on the Sabbath.’ Said his dis-
ciples to him, ‘Master, say to slaughter him [ritually]?’ He replied, ‘This
[ritual slaughter] requires a benediction, whereas that [stabbing] does not
require a benediction ... Greater is the hatred wherewith the ammei
ha’arets hate the scholar than the hatred wherewith the heathens hate
Israel, and their wives [hate even] more than they .. .’ Our Rabbis taught,
‘Six things were said of the ammei ha’arets : We do not commit testimony
to them; we do not accept testimony from them; we do not reveal a secret
to them; we do not appoint them as guardians for orphans; we do not
appoint them stewards over charity funds; and we must not join their
company on the road.’It is hard to know how much of this vituperation was intended to be
taken seriously.^27