THE RABBIS AND URBAN CULTURE 175Conclusion
Despite the evidence for their integrationist ambitions, and for some flexibil-
ity, rabbis were nevertheless marginal. I have been arguing that with the pro-
gressive centralization of the Roman Empire in the first century, the Jewish
polity, which imposed and maintained and depended to some extent for its
legitimacy on the core Jewish ideology discussed in part 1 and mediated be-
tween the imperial state and the Jewish subject, failed. With its failure, Juda-
is mshattered. There may have been little groups apart fro mthe ones that
latercoalescedastherabbiswhichtriedtokeeptheTorahaliveafterthefailed
revolts of 70 and 135, despite its loss of constitutional status. There are, for
example, tantalizing hints about a priestly group at Sepphoris in the third
century and even later. But of all these conservative groups, the rabbis seem
to have been the most successful.
But even theywere not dominant. In fact, noself-consciously Jewish group
was—only the Romans and their local agents, the city councillors, almost all
of who m may have been of Jewish origin. In other words, in the wake of
the revolts, Jewish society disintegrated. In practice, Palestinians of Jewish
background in the second through fourth centuries had two core ideologies
to chose fro m(to use a series of crude but heuristically serviceable meta-
phors).Themoreinfluential,authoritative,and,itmustbeemphasized,even
religiously compelling was the ideology of the Greco-Roman city, culturally
Hellenic,religiouslypagan,ostensiblynonparticularistic,renderedprestigious
byitsassociationwiththepeaceandprosperityofthehighempire,andproba-
bly reconcilable, if only with difficulty, with retention of a variety of other
mildly discredited ethnic identities. A citizen of Caesarea might be a proud
Roman citizen, too, but also a Jew, a Samaritan, a Christian, or a Syrian, in
addition to thinking of himself as being in some sense Greek. If he took his
municipal responsibilities seriously, though, his Jewishness or Christianity
would necessarily have been attenuated, for the public life of the city was
pagan to the core.
What Palestinian Jews had (but most other co-opted nations lacked) was
the sense, which some of them had partly internalized, that life ought to be
lived differently, a sense embodied in the rabbis, who preserved a profoundly
altered but still recognizable version of Judaism. The rabbis were not author-
ized by the state and had little glamor after the revolts. Nevertheless, to the
extentthatsomeprobablyverysmallnumberofJewshadinternalizedJudaism
inafairlycomprehensiveway,withmanyothersretainingalooserattachment
to it, the rabbis did have a few followers and probably slightly larger numbers
of occasional supporters. This loose periphery of supporters is likely to have
consisted of people who in most respects lived normatively Greco-Roman
livesandwhoseJewishnesswasstrictlycompartmentalized(e.g.,perhapsthey