rabbis in the east (70 to 1000 ce) 285
In the Mediterranean world, a closer relationship between rabbis and
other Jews in the same centuries may have been in part a product of
intervention by the Christian Roman state from the end of the fourth
century ce, when emperors, intent on the imposition of Christian ortho-
doxy, began to categorize all their subjects in religious terms. Having
decided that Jews, unlike pagans, should be allowed to continue in their
‘error’, they devolved authority to the Jewish patriarch (nasi ) in Pales-
tine to control the synagogue communities of the diaspora as well as the
homeland, as in a law promulgated by the emperors Arcadius and
Honorius on 1 July 397:
The Jews shall be bound to their rites; while we shall imitate the ancients
in conserving their privileges, for it was established in their laws and con-
firmed by our divinity, that those who are subject to the rule of the
Illustrious Patriarchs, that is the Archisynagogues, the patriarchs, the pres-
byters and the others who are occupied in the rite of that religion, shall
persevere in keeping the same privileges that are reverently bestowed on
the first clerics of the venerable Christian law.The patriarch may well have intervened in the affairs of non- rabbinic
communities in the eastern Mediterranean a century earlier, for an enig-
matic inscription from a synagogue in Stobi in Macedonia dated
probably to the third century stipulates an enormous fine to be paid to
the patriarch by anyone found to have violated the financial terms
agreed between the donor of the synagogue site and the community. But
it is only from the fifth century that it is possible to trace an increased
use of Hebrew rather than Greek in funerary inscriptions as far west as
Italy, and a scattering of individuals named on inscriptions specifically
as ‘rabbi’ or ‘ribbi’, as in an epitaph of the fourth or fifth century ce
from Brusciano in Campania which proclaims ‘Peace. Here lies the
rabbi Abba Maris, the honoured one.’ It is of course possible that the
term ‘rabbi’ was being used, even in the fifth century, simply as a mark
of honour for a Jewish teacher, as it had been for Jesus in the first cen-
tury, regardless of his relationship to the sages in the academy of
Palestine or Babylonia, but, as more and more such inscriptions are
published, such scepticism has come to seem less plausible.^28
Already in the first century, the sages were faced with the need to deal
with fellow Jews who were not just outside the rabbinic fold but, in rab-
binic eyes, heretics. How, for instance, were the sages after 70 to relate
to Sadducees or Essenes, to say nothing of Jewish Christians? It is strik-
ing, as we have noted (Chapter 7), that the tannaim as recorded in the