During the first millennium C.E., Rabbinic Judaism expanded and devel-
oped from the religion of a small Jewish scholarly elite into the dominant
form of Judaism worldwide. To be sure, the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism
as normative Judaism worldwide was neither inevitable nor immediate. It
took rabbinic leaders more than eight centuries to establish their teachings
as the sole standards of Jewish belief and practices. Moreover, for all their
scholarly and pedagogic efforts, the rabbis would most likely not have suc-
ceeded had broader political developments not intervened on their behalf,
particularly the Islamic conquest of the Jewish world that began in the sev-
enth century. Even aided by such developments, it still took the rabbis an
additional two or three centuries to impose their brand of Judaism across
the diaspora.
Until the fifth or even sixth century C.E., Rabbinic Judaism defined the
lives of the Jewish intellectual elite; the beliefs and practices of the mass of
Jews remained comfortably outside the realm of the rabbis. Even the redac-
tion and dissemination of the Mishnah (a summary of oral traditions) at the
end of the second century C.E. and the Babylonian Talmud at the beginning
of the sixth century, important steps in the crystallization of Rabbinic
Judaism, reflected in their time at best a partial victory. Rather, it is more
accurate to see the rise of Rabbinic Judaism as a tortuous path to Judaism
itself, aided by circumstances whose endpoint was, for several centuries, far
from certain.
The early rabbis saw themselves as the intellectual and spiritual heirs of
the Pharisees, and with good reason. The rabbis embraced the conceptual
framework, content, and exegetical method of the Pharisees’ oral tradition of
law, and expanded this tradition steadily from the first century C.E. onward.
They embraced the Pharisaic emphasis on personal prayer, the centrality of
the synagogue, and many of the Pharisees’ core beliefs: an afterlife, the bal-
ance between free will and predetermination, divine reward and punishment,
resurrection of the dead, and messianic redemption at the end of time. The
rabbis, moreover, internalized the accommodating political outlook of the
Pharisees, adapting it to life in the diaspora.
Chapter 3