THREE

RABBIS AND PATRIARCHS ON THE MARGINS

IN PART 2 I aim to provide a description of a society that disintegrated under the impact of an imperialism sharpened by the failure of the two Palestinian revolts. In this part I will give close attention to the interpretation of evidence because my view of the history of Palestine from 135 to c.350 is revisionist and requires argumentation. My thesis is that the core ideology of Judaism, as described in the previous section, ceased, after the two revolts, to function as an integrating force in Palestinian Jewish society. The intermediaries of the Torah lost not only their legal authority but also their status as cultural ideals. Indeed, if there was anything at all holding Palestinian Jewish society together, it may have been no more than an attenuated sense of a common past, a mild feeling of separation from their neighbors that the latter, who had shared memories of their own, may have conspired to maintain. Finally, some Jews, probably a very small number (among them were the rabbis) still insisted on the importance of the Torah, of Judaism, in their symbolic world, and these Jews, convinced of their elite status, tried to insinuate their way into general Palestinian society. Although marginal and to some extent turned in on themselves, the rabbis and their congeners nevertheless played a role, peripheral and weak though it was, in sustaining among some Jews some sense of separation.

But it would be misleading to focus attention only on the rabbis and implicitly suppose the rest of the Jewish population either to have been basically inert, quietly waiting to be convinced or, alternatively, under the temporary religious control of some nonrabbinic group of intermediaries of Torah (of whom there is scarcely a shred of evidence)—in short, to construct a history of the Jews between 70 and 350 (or even 640) around the story of the rise of the rabbis, whether they are thought to have risen ex nihilo or after a battle of exegetical wits with inferior Torah scholars.1 In chapter 3, I try to explain why a rabbinocentric account is inadequate. I will argue that even though the rabbis established a foothold in urban and suburban Palestine in the course of the third century, and the grandee who led them, the patriarch (or nasi), by the middle of the fourth had become a very estimable figure indeed, the rabbis did not have any officially recognized legal authority until the end of the fourth century. Even then it was severely restricted and in any case not limited to rabbis. As for the patriarchs, they acquired much of their influence precisely by relaxing their ties to the rabbis and allying themselves instead with Palestinian city councillors, wealthy Diaspora Jews, and prominent gentiles.

Both rabbis and patriarchs were probably convinced that they had a right to exercise legal authority over the Jews by virtue of belonging to the class of scribes/Torah experts (furthermore, some of them were priests), a class empowered by the Torah itself. Yet in the wake of the Destruction and the Bar Kokhba revolt, and the imposition of direct Roman rule in Palestine, the Torah and its representatives lost their institutional position and much of their prestige, and they and their successors spent the rest of antiquity struggling to restore them. For the rabbis, the struggle did not finally succeed until the rise of Islam, at earliest. The patriarchate’s meteoric rise in the fourth century predetermined its meteoritic fall in the early fifth. Indeed, even the restoration of the Torah to the center of Jewish life in late antiquity (to be discussed in part 3 of this book), though it may have set the stage for the official empowerment of the rabbis in the seventh century and following, occurred largely independently of rabbinic influence and in many places generated varieties of Judaism that were strikingly nonrabbinic. We need, therefore, to keep the rabbis to one side if we wish to understand the character of Jewish society between 70 and 640—a fortiori between 70 and 350.

If not the rabbis, then who? Rather surprisingly, no one, for there was not really any Jewish society to lead. In chapter 4, I will discuss seriatim various bodies of evidence—autonomous bronze city coinage, other archaeological finds, some rabbinic accounts of the public life of the Palestinian cities, funerary inscriptions from Tiberias, and inscriptions and art from the necropolis at Beth Shearim. All this material is mutually confirmatory in indicating that Jewish Palestine between c.100 and 350 scarcely differed from any other high imperial provincial society. All legal authority and political power were in the hands of the Roman state and its local representatives, and the cultural norms, even in the countryside, were overwhelmingly set by the elites of the Palestinian cities, including such “Jewish” cities as Tiberias, Sepphoris, and Lydda. These norms were pervaded by pagan religiosity and were basically shared by imperial Greek cities generally.

Part of the evidentiary foundation of my thesis is the pagan iconography that is so common in high imperial Palestinian art and decoration. Much of this material has long been familiar, though the recent excavations at Sepphoris have considerably added to the corpus. But it has also long been conventional to juxtapose it with the iconography of the necropolis at Beth Shearim and of the Palestinian synagogues, which mixes pagan and Jewish elements, and furthermore to see the whole complex of material through the prism of rabbinic prescriptions and presuppositions. Many scholars have sought to provide judaizing interpretations of the pagan material or, where that seemed implausible, to dismiss it either as trivial ornamentation or as non-Jewish. And yet the evidence, including, surprisingly, that from rabbinic literature, is quite uniform in regarding the Jewish cities of Palestine and their rural satellites as characterized by a predominantly pagan public life, though rabbinic and Christian literature nevertheless regard the cities as having simultaneously been in some sense Jewish. We perhaps need to assume that some Jews retained a sense of being Jewish if only to understand how northern Palestine could have become Jewish in a strong sense after 350. We can only speculate about the character of its Jewishness before that date; for now it may prove instructive to try to imagine Judaism, or rather the disintegrated shards of Judaism, surviving as a nonexclusive religious option in a religious system that was basically pagan.

Thus, the Jewish core (the most important component of which was the rabbis), as far as we know, was a part of the system. It was not very important sociopolitically (though probably increasingly influential with time) but functioned quite significantly in providing for the Jews a cultural option radically different from the Greco-Roman norm. How did the rabbis, who needed to take seriously the Pentateuch’s horror of strange gods, cope with the basically pagan society in which they lived, even when they lived in Jewish cities like Tiberias and Sepphoris? In chapter 5, I will argue that the peculiar formalism of rabbinic legislation about paganism, whereby the rabbis defined, or rather misprised, a pervasive cultural norm as consisting exclusively of acts of worship directed at fetishes, was the rabbis’ accommodative mechanism—an error that fortunately allowed them to live and function in the cities without whose resources they would have dwindled to sectarian insignificance.

Changes

With the outbreak of the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66 C.E., five centuries of imperial support for the Temple, the Torah, and their human representatives, the priests and scribes, came to an end. Though the hope of some Jews for their imminent revival ended only with the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135, the centralizing and integrating tendencies of the Roman Empire made such a revival unlikely from the start. Throughout the Near East in the late first and early second centuries the emperors were replacing quasiautonomous local rulers, the “client kings,” with Roman officials, establishing “colonies” (cities with more or less Greco-Roman constitutions and in some cases a citizen body that also enjoyed Roman citizenship and so favorable tax status),² imposing direct taxation, and introducing judges (primarily the governors and their staff) who ruled by complicated, largely ad hoc mixtures of Roman, Greco-oriental, and local law.3

Most of the little principalities the Romans annexed had no special ethnic self-consciousness that we are aware of, and their former rulers had usually come from elsewhere. No one apparently had ever identified himself as a “Chalcidian” or an “Agrippan” or a “Minor Armenian.”⁴ These principalities are probably best compared to the grand estates of early modern Ukraine or Ireland, before the rise of nationalism, ruled by foreign (Polish or English) lords. The lords simultaneously protected and exploited the peasants, with the help of intermediation by their relatives, wealthy natives, and outside administrators. Some autonomy may have been sometimes granted to such local institutions as churches, but pressure on them and their priests was constant and relations often tense or worse.

When the Romans annexed the ancient counterparts of such places, little in them, one might have thought, initially changed: the former rulers, Judaeo-Idumaean descendants of Herod, and various Ituraean, Nabataean, and sub-Seleucid grandees, disappeared or were absorbed into the Roman senatorial aristocracy, and the mediating class was altered by the introduction of Roman officials. But rich natives retained their importance, and the cities in these areas, as well as the temples and their priests, continued to enjoy a nervous and limited freedom (surely much more than the Catholic churches of Ireland and the Orthodox ones of the Ukraine).⁵ Only rarely can we trace the cultural effects of direct Roman rule, in part for lack of evidence and in part because they were usually subtle, mostly by-products of the more immediate administrative, social, and economic changes. The local rulers had in any case been mediators of Hellenistic culture and had administered and judged in accordance with standard types of Greco-Oriental convention and law inherited from their Seleucid predecessors. In these respects, the Romans scarcely differed.

But the two new provinces in which the effects of direct Roman rule can be traced more comprehensively—Judaea and Arabia—tell a slightly different story, of a more energetic imperialism. Admittedly, these provinces were unusual in other ways, too. Provincia Arabia had been the Nabataean kingdom, situated at the very fringes of the Hellenistic world, never fully part of it.6 Its people, or some part of them, had come to have a distinctive identity. Their rulers were designated not simply as “kings” (no subjects required—like the Seleucids and their Herodian and Syrian epigones) nor as kings of a particular land, like the Ptolemies of Egypt. They were malkei Nabatu—kings of (the “nation” of) the Nabataeans—and rahmei amhon—lovers of their people. The Babatha archives, whose papyrus documents span roughly thirty-five years, twenty-five of them under the new regime (after 106), show how quickly and dramatically some things (e.g., legal and administrative rhetoric) changed with the arrival of the Romans.⁷

We are incomparably better informed about the new province of Judaea (renamed Syria Palaestina after the Bar Kokhba revolt), which included not just the old district of Judaea but all the inland districts and coastal cities of Palestine. Here the changes resulted from (1) the imperial policy of integrating the empire’s eastern fringe and (2) the failure of the two Jewish revolts. The revolts account for the fact that from the early second century until the middle of the third, this very small province hosted two Roman legions.⁸ The effects of their presence were complex. No doubt many loathed the arrogance and violence of the soldiers and resented the obligation to provide them with food and lodging on short notice: these at least are common complaints in rabbinic literature, and there is no reason to disbelieve them.⁹ However, the legions were surely responsible for the spurt in road construction after 69, which among other things eased exchange between city and country and between Palestine and its neighbors, and the effect on the local economy of the presence of approximately 10,000 cash-rich troops, though incalculable, was probably not negligible.10 A complicating factor for the present purposes is that neither legion was stationed in Jewish territory, though the VI Ferrata, in Legio-Capercotna (Kefar ‘Othnai), was only some twenty-five kilometers from Sepphoris by a new road. Until the mid-third century legionary detachments and auxiliary units were scattered around the country. The mounting prosperity of Palestine, including Jewish Palestine, in the second and third centuries, which may have culminated in a partly trade-fueled boom of the fourth through sixth, would have been impossible without direct Roman rule.

But Palestine’s prosperity mounted only gradually, and as far as some Jews were concerned was insufficient compensation for Roman depredation. At first, the consequences of the failed revolts were the most pressing concern of these Jews. Many people had died or been enslaved; many others had fled. Ancient writers provide amazingly high numbers for casualties and prisoners, which are as always best ignored.¹¹ There is, however, no reason to doubt the extent of the depopulation and dislocation they imply, especially in Judaea proper, which had been the center of both revolts. Idumaea and Peraea were less affected, Galilee and Golan least.

Probably everywhere, though, the failure of the revolts had led to disaffection with and attrition from Judaism.¹² 4 Ezra, an apocalyptic book composed in the late first century, gives an idea of the gloom prevailing among some of the literate elites and subelites of Jewish Palestine after 70. What point is there, the author argues, in trying to observe an unobservable covenant when God rewards our efforts by destroying us? His response, according to one of the less implausible modern interpretations—a kind of submission to fate accompanied by a defiant assertion of the covenant’s enduring validity—is likely to have consoled some people, or the book would not have been read and copied; and one can, with a little empathetic imagination (an imperfect tool but not therefore to be wholly neglected), grasp the appeal of surrender in the immediate aftermath of the destruction.13 But it cannot have satisfied everyone, and those whom it failed to satisfy will have reacted with panic, despair, and finally abandonment of Judaism.

Other Jews greeted the end of the rule of the Temple and Torah as their emancipation and rushed openly into the waiting embrace of the paganism of the Greco-Roman cities of Palestine and elsewhere: Josephus may allude disapprovingly to such people, and they may be the real historical types behind Martial’s stable of burlesque Jewish and crypto-Jewish actors, poets, and deracinated urban debauchees.¹⁴ Furthermore, these may be among the people said by Suetonius to have been especially affected by Domitian’s harsh exaction of the Jewish tax. This notice in the work of the imperial biographer and the coin of Nerva celebrating the easing of the collection procedure may indicate that such Jews were numerous.¹⁵ Similarly, an enigmatic rabbinic passage (T. Shabbat 15[16]:9) says that many Jewish men who had submitted to epispasm, the surgical restoration of the foreskin, were recircumcised in the days of Bar Kokhba; the most plausible explanation is that their epispasm was to enable full and unembarrassing participation in pagan municipal life, and that their subsequent recircumcision was forcible.16 For still others, the mere fact of dislocation—the destruction of native villages, the violent deaths of family members, resettlement in coastal Greek cities or Galilean or Golanite towns and villages—must have eroded adherence to a way of life that no longer seemed validated by common sense.¹⁷ Were these among the ancestors of the pagan and Christian villagers of Palestine mentioned by writers of the fourth century and later, and so prominent in the archaeological record? Or perhaps rather (or also) of the Jewish villagers of the Palestinian Talmud and the distinctively Jewish part of late antique Palestinian archaeology?

For many, or even most, Palestinian Jews, especially those outside Judaea proper, the revolts had caused less drastic disruptions.¹⁸ Here the main changes, aside from an influx of Judaeans of unknown extent, were produced by the collapse of the central institutions—no more pilgrimages, no enforced deference to representatives of the Temple and Torah, no obligatory gifts to the priests. Whatever formal constitutional authority the Torah and its interpreters had had was now abrogated; authority resided almost exclusively in the Roman government and its representatives.

Rabbis and Patriarchs after 135

There is serious disagreement among Jewish historians concerning the effects of the Destruction and the Bar Kokhba revolt on the Jewish leadership. For some, there was no significant discontinuity: the Pharisees had exercised the predominant influence on Jewish religious life before 70, and their spiritual descendants, the rabbis, continued to do so afterward. For others, the Pharisees were an insignificant sectarian organization that disappeared in the late first century, and the rabbis and patriarchs who gradually became the leaders of the Jews had an undeniable but complex relationship with their predecessors. There is general agreement, however, that the political impact of the Destruction should be seen mainly as an internal Jewish problem.19 I would like to explain why I think that this view and the various more current refinements of it are wrong, without attempting to produce a full history of the rabbinic movement or the patriarchate.²⁰

The legal and administrative implications of direct Roman rule must be taken seriously. First, when the Romans annexed a province, they subjected it to Roman law and entrusted all legal and political authority in the province to the Roman governor and his staff, and to the local city councils. They did not recognize the autonomy of the local population (except, of course, of the citizen bodies of the Greek cities, in a very tenuous way), and they did not appoint intermediaries between the “natives” and themselves—the main characteristics of the old client-kingship system, which by the later first century was an unambiguous failure. It is thus counterintuitive to think that the Romans granted official status to the patriarchs and their rabbinic protégés after 70 or 135.²¹

To be sure, the government did nothing to prevent Jews from patronizing their native legal experts for advice and arbitration. Yet by failing to recognize their jurisdiction, they made them effectively powerless to compete with the Roman courts and the arbitration of Jewish city councillors and landowners for most purposes. We may in a general way compare the Palestinian situation with the deleterious effects on the native priesthood of the (far less radical) Severan reforms of the ancient nome system in Egypt: the transformation of the old nome capitals into more or less normal Greco-Roman cities, in which both political power and religious authority were concentrated, apparently seriously undermined the financial well-being of the rural temples and the authority of their clergy.²² For Palestine, even G. Alon, who always ascribed to the rabbis absolutely as much power and popularity as the most romantically sentimental reading of rabbinic literature would allow, admitted that in the second through fourth centuries, it was mainly the city councils and other urban and rural magnates who controlled the legal affairs of the Jews through a mixture of local (partly Torah-based) custom, Greco-Oriental common law, and equity.23 In fact, the Babatha papyri may now suggest that even this view requires revision, for one of the striking facts about Babatha and company is that they apparently made almost no use of local judges but brought even trivial cases to the Roman governor.²⁴ If we could extrapolate from Arabia to Galilee (which is far from certain), then we should conclude that local judges and legal experts, whether rabbis, town councillors, or rural padroni, were less important as legal authorities than even the most skeptical reader of rabbinic literature would have guessed.

Nevertheless, even if they enjoyed little substantial authority, some might argue that the rabbis were influential in extensive circles as embodiments of Torah. By contrast, I would argue that such circles were very limited, though not wholly nonexistent. One reason for this was the partial collapse of Judaism described above. However, in order to make this argument more cogently, I need to confront head-on the common narrative of the rise of the rabbis and patriarchs, which is based on the extensive evidence of rabbinic literature. In sum, I do not disagree with the common narrative, at least in my minimalist version, while stressing that this minimalist version is a history of the rabbis and not, as is often claimed, a history of Jewish society in Roman Palestine in general.

The common narrative in its minimalist version runs roughly as follows: a rabbinic or protorabbinic movement consisting largely of former Pharisaic and/or priestly scribes, judges, and teachers began to take shape after the Destruction, perhaps mainly around Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai and/or Rabban Gamaliel II, the latter a descendant of a prominent Pharisaic family of Jerusalem, ancestor of the patriarchal dynasty influential among the Jews until the early fifth century, and remembered by rabbinic tradition as a dynamic and powerful figure.²⁵ A recent study by Shaye Cohen suggests that these earliest rabbis enjoyed substantial judicial prestige, at least with respect to such interestingly backward-looking legal categories as purity and priestly gifts.26 This prestige was not confined to Judaea but extended in a limited way even to Galilee and the Palestinian coastal cities. The Bar Kokhba revolt and the consequent massacre in Judaea were probably responsible for the fact that the rabbis of the middle and later second century, the main objects of Cohen’s study, were characterized by a practically sectarian involution: they were unconcerned with and of no concern to Jews outside their own pietistic circles. Gamaliel’s son, Simon, enjoyed correspondingly little general prestige.

Around the beginning of the third century, for reasons long the object of speculation and still unknown, the position of the patriarchs and rabbis began to change—a change most scholars follow rabbinic literature in attributing partly to the activities of the patriarch Judah I. He somehow became a wealthy landowner, well-connected in the increasingly prosperous Galilean cities and even, the Talmudim claim (or rather fantasize), in the Roman imperial court.²⁷ He or his son may have been the famous Jewish “ethnarch” referred to by Origen as behaving regally, to the point of executing criminals—though without imperial authorization. It was probably in this period, too, that the patriarchs began to claim Davidic ancestry.²⁸ Cohen argues that around 200 rabbinic judicial activity broadened to include issues of interest outside rabbinic circles, like civil law and Sabbath observance. Apparently, rabbinic judicial prestige was growing again, perhaps in part because the rabbinic movement left its rural Galilean exile for the cities, mainly Sepphoris and Tiberias, but also Caesarea, Scythopolis–Beth Shean, and Lydda.

The move to the cities also had significant financial implications for the patriarchs and rabbis. It connected them to long-distance trade networks and so was a necessary precondition for the loosening of their dependence on the Galilean countryside.²⁹ Patriarchs and rabbis could now more easily establish contacts outside Palestine; with a certain amount of hard selling and help from wealthy and sympathetic diasporic Jews and Roman officials, such contacts were slowly transformed into recognition of the authority of the patriarch and his protégés, who were not all rabbis, by at least some Diaspora communities.30 Evidence for the mechanism of this development is nonexistent, but one possibility, which I do not intend to be exclusive, may be suggested.

I will argue below that in the second and third centuries the Jewish communities in the Diaspora experienced a decline comparable, and related, to the disintegration of Palestinian Jewish society in the same period. But this decline was never complete. Some communities escaped the effects of the diaspora revolt of 115–117, and had enough demographic bulk and institutional density to continue functioning, if probably in a weakened state. Such communities occasionally needed to petition the government in connection with problems raised chiefly by the conflict between their municipal obligations and those of Jewish law. The evidence for such a conflict is abundant in the first century, as we know from the writings of Josephus and Philo, and again in the fifth century, when it was one of the main issues in the legislation about the Jews in the Theodosian Code, 16.8. Though it is far sparser in the second and third, it is even then not wholly nonexistent (see chapter 6).

Petitions to the emperor were most likely to be heard if presented by a large pressure group, especially if it was represented by a well-born and well-connected grandee.³¹ Thus, the Jews of the Diaspora cities had a better chance of a hearing if they presented themselves at court as “the Jews” (which is how they always appear in the Theodosian Code) and enjoyed the advocacy of a noble intermediary than if they were merely, say, “the (eminently ignorable) Jews resident in Laodicea Combusta.” In the first century, the Jews of the cities had often received such help from members and agents of the Herodian family. If the patriarchs now assumed the role of Herodian-style advocates for Diaspora communities, they would have acquired political leverage (and enhanced fund-raising potential) there, not to mention visibility in the imperial court (is this the reality behind the fictional tales of the meetings of “Antoninus and Rabbi”?) and renown at home.³²

Whatever the mechanism of the patriarchs’ diasporic rise, it is surely significant that for the third century the Palestinian Talmud reports rabbinic fund-raising trips abroad, some of them presumably on the patriarch’s behalf. It also reports patriarchal exercise of authority over judicial appointments. One obscure passage is sometimes thought to contain an early reference to the collection of the so-called aurum coronarium—the patriarchal tax—said later to have been exacted mainly from the Diaspora, but the silence of rabbinic literature apart from this passage probably indicates that in the third century it had not yet made its transformation from gift to exaction.33 Other stories describe the classically patronal behavior of the patriarchs of the third century—the morning greetings by bands of clients and competition among the latter for access to their patron, and even gangs of toughs being employed as a “private army”.³⁴ The rabbis were among the beneficiaries of patriarchal patronage, especially as recipients of appointments as judges and religious functionaries, mainly in Galilee, but also in the cities of Arabia, Phoenicia, Syria, and perhaps even farther afield.

In the same period the rabbis likely worked to acquire influence independent of patriarchal patronage. There is no reason to think that all or even most of the rabbinic fund-raising trips abroad mentioned in the Palestinian Talmud were undertaken on behalf of the patriarch.³⁵ Of special interest as a particularly blatant and problematic case of rabbinic hard selling is the account of a fund-raising trip to Emesa (Homs, in Syria) ostensibly on behalf of widows and orphans but in fact on behalf of the rabbis themselves, a piece of mischief of which one opinion quoted in the Talmud approves, ex post facto!³⁶ The Palestinian Talmud also describes rabbinic grandees appointing their needy fellows to communal posts, intervening with municipal governments to secure tax breaks for friends, and interposing themselves as advocates in the trials of ordinary Jews.37 Some rabbis, and others on the fringes of rabbinic circles, were acquiring visibility and prestige through their rhetorical ability, that is, by preaching in synagogues—also reported to have been increasingly a rabbinic concern in the third century.³⁸ There is a tendency in rabbinic literature, more pronounced in the later documents, to portray some rabbis as “holy men,” working miracles, making rain, and performing cures.³⁹ Rabbis also acquired influence by offering legal advice. Though a full study of cases reported in the Palestinian Talmud, comparable to Cohen’s study of the earlier rabbinic literature, remains to be done, most cases that came before the rabbis of the third century seem to have originated within rabbinic circles.⁴⁰ Yet there seems no reason to doubt the reports of the Talmud that occasionally their opinions on some matters were sought by urban communities (even outside Palestine), local village elders primarily in Lower Galilee, and others.⁴¹

In the late fourth century the patriarchs reached the peak of their power. The Palestinian church father Epiphanius and the Theodosian Code both indicate that the apostole, or aurum coronarium, was now collected as if it were a conventional tax, as indeed it may have been as early as 363, when the emperor Julian “encouraged” his “brother,” the patriarch Iulus (= Hillel), to cancel it and so free the Jews from its shackles.⁴² In 399, the western emperor Honorius did in fact briefly cancel the right to collect the tax,43 as Julian had never had the opportunity to do, but in the eastern empire this right was consistently affirmed.⁴⁴ Imperial laws of the 390s seem to recognize the patriarch’s jurisdiction over the primates (leaders) of the Jews throughout the empire,⁴⁵ who in turn were authorized to legislate and judge concerning Jewish religious, though not civil, law.⁴⁶ Epiphanius (Panarion 30.11), writing in the 370s, describes a patriarchal agent traveling through Asia Minor collecting taxes and removing archisynagogues and azanitae (hazanim) from office. The patriarchs were thus recognized by law as occupying the pinnacle of the Jewish ecclesiastical pyramid. Furthermore, by the 390s,⁴⁷ they were viri inlustres (the highest rank in the late imperial senate) and honorary praetorian prefects and so in some sense (precisely what sense is obscure, since these honors were just that) occupied a position surprisingly near the pinnacle of the Roman imperial pyramid, certainly ranking higher than the governors of their native province of Palaestina Secunda, who were mere clarissimi, members, that is, of the lowest senatorial rank.

The importance of the patriarchs in the late fourth century is confirmed by contemporary writers: for Epiphanius, the patriarch was a regal figure, complete with a consistorium (an advisory council, like that of the emperor), a fiscal administration, archives public and, in the church father’s none too credible story, secret as well, and regents.⁴⁸ The Jewish world as ruled by him was a sort of Roman Empire in miniature but in its pre-Constantinian state—rotten at the core and on the brink of transformation. More telling, or less obviously tendentious, may be Jerome’s account of the patriarch’s role in the deposition and execution of a Roman governor of Palestine around 390, and Libanius’s inclusion of possibly the same patriarch in his circle of high-ranking friends.49

Concurrently, the patriarchs’ links to the rabbis seem to have weakened, or become less exclusive, continuing a process begun already by Judah I. One reason for this is likely to have been the growing importance of the patriarchs’ ties to the Diaspora, where Jewish communities were once again on the rise. If it is true that one function of patriarchal agents in the Diaspora communities was advocacy, then they would have needed training primarily in rhetoric. This would have had a strong influence on the composition of the patriarchs’ clientele, which in turn seems to be reflected in Libanius’s correspondence. The latter testifies to a steady exchange of clients, most of them students of rhetoric, between the sophist and the patriarch.⁵⁰ There is no reason a priori why the occasional rabbinic figure might not have had such training.⁵¹ But both rhetorical and rabbinic education were presumably sufficiently rigorous to render mastery of both rare. In fact, it is unattested. Thus, the patriarchs of the fourth century, unlike those of the third, are scarcely mentioned in rabbinic literature. Nevertheless, Epiphanius (Panarion 30.4) still imagined that the chief function of the consistorium of the patriarch was to teach him Torah; that is, he describes rabbis or rabbi-like figures as having performed a crucial advisory role in the patriarchal court, though Epiphanius’s patriarch was subject to other influences as well. There may be no reason to take the account of this clumsy and slightly paranoid champion of Christian orthodoxy at face value, but it does remain likely that there were rabbis among the primates mentioned in the law codes. According to a law in the Theodosian Code (16.8.29), these primates tried to continue collection of the apostole after the death or deposition of the last patriarch in the 420s. Another factor in the loosening of the patriarchs’ ties to the rabbis in the fourth century may be the marginalization of the curial classes (members of the city councils) of Tiberias and Sepphoris. Some wealthy curiales elsewhere responded to the increasingly burdensome and dishonorable character of their hereditary obligations by joining the imperial bureaus (especially in the fifth century, with the rise of Constantinople) or the Christian clergy, or by securing illegally and at great cost papers demonstrating senatorial rank and therefore providing exemption from curial duties.52 It would be naive to suppose that wealthy Jews failed without exception to take either of the first two options, which would have required their conversion to Christianity. The christianization of the cities, to be discussed below, may have been to some extent an internal development produced by systemic pressures, rather than a purely foreign implantation; and a difficult Sepphorite inscription apparently commemorating a gift to a synagogue by a clarissimus (i.e., senatorial) comes called Gelasios, a descendant of archisynagogues, may provide an example of the third.⁵³ But for the remainder of the curiales, the progressive marginalization of their class in the third and fourth centuries may have forced more and more of them to seek the protection of the patriarch, further tilting the balance of the patriarchal clientele away from the rabbis. We may further speculate that this provides a partial explanation for the abolition of the patriarchate in the 420s. With the Christianization of the cities and the newly enhanced dependence of the northern Palestinian Jewish elites on the patriarch, he now for the first time in history had a power base that made him an open rival of the local government and the church.

The Limits of Patriarchal and Rabbinic Authority

This narrative is, as I suggested, unobjectionable and, with some quibbling over details, would probably be accepted by many specialists in the field, though I have intentionally made it rather more minimalist than is usual and have toned down the institutional history elements of the standard account, which I find uncongenial for reasons to be discussed below.⁵⁴ Nevertheless, as an account of the history of Jewish Palestine from 100 to 400 C.E.—as opposed to an account of patriarchal and rabbinic history—it is inadequate. Archaeological remains impose the most important qualifications on this account. Here I will briefly note that patriarchal wealth (enormous as it was) and influence (enormous as it is said to have been) left no material traces in Palestine, not even as a single synagogue dedication.55 (This is interestingly not the case in the Diaspora.) Furthermore, though patriarchal and rabbinic authority may have increased between 150 and 350, patriarchs and rabbis always remained in important ways marginal, so that there is much about Palestinian society that this change does not tell us.

Indeed, the written remains themselves offer clear indications of the constraints on rabbinic and patriarchal influence. In the third century rabbinic and patriarchal authority were unquestionably limited. The rabbis and patriarchs had become more aggressive—a policy that apparently yielded real results. Yet the Palestinian Talmud itself, interested though it is in playing up rabbinic authority, never describes the rabbis as possessing jurisdiction in the technical sense.⁵⁶ No one was compelled to accept rabbinic judgment. The rabbis could threaten, plead, and cajole but could not subpoena or impose a sentence.⁵⁷ Only the Roman governor and his agents had such authority. An eastern law of 398 quoted in Theodosian Code 2.1.10 (Linder, no. 28)—posted when the patriarchs and their primates were at the height of their power, in conditions far more amenable than those of the third century to rabbinic judges—is of interest for what it fails to authorize. The primates are granted authority only over religious law; for all other purposes the Jews are obliged to attend regular courts (of course the state cannot, and does not attempt to, control the use of arbitri ex compromisso, i.e., informal arbitrators, and yields to them what it cannot deny, a certain de facto authority).⁵⁸ From the perspective of the Jewish primates themselves, this division of authority was highly problematic, since all law was religious law, whereas for the state, the category of Jewish religious law would, by analogy with Christian religious law, presumably have been limited to such issues as liturgical practice, kashrut, and so on. Marriage, divorce, guardianship, inheritance, and similar matters of critical halakhic importance were arguably outside the jurisdiction of the Jewish judges, who thus, even at the height of their post-Destruction authority, had in fact precious little jurisdiction at all.

Like the authority of the primates, a category I assume included rabbis, patriarchal authority, especially before the fourth century, too depended not on the existence of an embedded institutional structure but on something far less formal: the power of patriarchs and rabbis depended on the consensus of the ruled.59 This is so notwithstanding the patriarchs’ genuinely growing wealth and influence, claims of royal descent, and occasional displays of regal high-handedness. My emphasis on the limitations on patriarchal power disagrees with most modern accounts of the patriarchate after Judah I. But those historians who extrapolate entire institutional histories from rabbinic literature often neglect to mention the isolation of the anecdotes they depend on so heavily, or their literary function or context. A characteristic case is the common treatment of the anecdote that serves as the centerpiece of all standard accounts of patriarchal control of rural Palestinian religious life. It is worth quoting the anecdote in extenso:

The people of Simonias came to Rabbi (Judah I) and said, “We wish you to give us one person who will be a preacher, judge, hazan, teacher of Bible and Mishnah (safar [u]metanyan), and will fulfil all our needs.” He gave them Levi bar Sisi. They made him a big bema and set him upon it, and asked him, “How does an armless woman perform the halitzah ceremony?” and he did not answer them. “And what if, in the halitzah ceremony, she spat blood?” and he did not answer. They said, “Perhaps he is not a master of [legal] instruction. Let us ask him a question of aggadah.” …he did not answer. They returned to Rabbi and said, “Is this the intercessor we petitioned you for?”60 He said, “By your lives! I’ve given you a man like myself!”… [Rabbi then summons Levi and asks him the same questions and he answers them easily.] Rabbi said, “Why did you not answer them [the villagers]?” He said, “They made me a big bema and sat me upon it and my spirit swelled.” And Rabbi applied to him the verse, etc., and said, “Who caused you to become foolish in words of Torah? It was only because you elevated yourself through them.” (Y. Yevamot 12:7, 13a)

This story is quoted in Y. Yevamot 12 because of the questions about the halitzah ceremony, whereby a childless widow is released from her biblical obligation to marry her brother-in-law, which are relevant to the concerns of the tractate. But the story also appears in different contexts, indicating that it circulated independently and so was probably formulated for reasons unconnected with halitzah.⁶¹ In the “historical” interpretation of the story, it is often noted that the villagers had the option of rejecting an incompetent patriarchal appointee. But this would in fact have been a trivial qualification of patriarchal authority—provincials could ask the Roman emperor, whose authority is indubitable, to remove an incompetent governor, too. It is less often emphasized that the patriarch did not simply appoint a functionary; rather, the Simonians petitioned the patriarch. What we have here, then, is something less than a display of formal administrative authority; it is a demonstration of patriarchal prestige, which served as a guarantee to the villagers that the communal functionary would be appropriate. The patriarch was not alone in possessing such prestige. Apparently Rabbi Shimon ben Laqish (mid-late third century), among other rabbis, enjoyed it too, for the Jews of Bostra approached him with a request to appoint a communal functionary similar to the one requested by the Simonians.⁶² What is least often observed about the story is that it is a homily, not a historical account, and one of its points is to warn rabbinic religious functionaries not to get carried away with the authority of their positions, lest in their pride they forget their Torah (and lose their jobs).⁶³ As such, the story is important evidence that people in rabbinic circles were in the third and fourth centuries being employed as functionaries, at least in the larger and wealthier villages in Lower Galilee like Simonias, which could afford it.64 It also rather touchingly supposes that rabbis might be overwhelmed by such unaccustomed power. But, though it significantly presupposes the patriarch’s influence, it tells us very little indeed about the extent and nature of his authority and certainly fails to demonstrate that he was more influential than other important rabbis.

Likewise, Y. Hagigah 1:7, 76c, another homiletic tale, this time about the importance of Torah study for all (perhaps intended to encourage rabbis to accept positions as rural schoolmasters), is often used as “proof” that “the patriarchs” supervised rural education. What the story actually says is that one patriarch, Judah III, once sent out three rabbis to tour Palestinian villages and appoint in them (or examine) schoolteachers. In one village, finding none, they asked the villagers to bring to them the guardians of the village. When they did so, the rabbis asserted that these were not the village’s guardians but its destroyers; the true guardians are teachers of Torah, as it is written, etc. Once again, the point is not historical but moral; nevertheless, this story, like the previous one, may assume the increasing importance of rabbis as communal functionaries. It may even be true that a patriarch did once (or several patriarchs did several times) send out teams to villages to inspect teachers. Can we conclude from this isolated sermon that rural Palestinian education was under the supervision of the patriarchs, tout court? Obviously not. In sum, the Talmudic anecdotes that scholars use to demonstrate the institutional authority of the patriarchate demonstrate at most the prestige and influence of some of the incumbents.

The Fourth Century

There is little reason a priori to think that the position of the rabbis changed, despite the elevation of the patriarchate. Many of the homiletic and legal tales in the Palestinian Talmud reflect conditions in the fourth century, and these indicate that while rabbis or people with rabbinic associations still worked, and were expected to work, as communal functionaries, teachers, and so on, sometimes in villages, their geographical diffusion was not in fact very great. Information provided by the Palestinian Talmud and the Palestinian midrashim makes it likely that the rabbinic movement was mainly urban.65 When villages are mentioned in the Palestinian Talmud, they are usually in the immediate vicinity of Tiberias or Sepphoris, the main rabbinic centers. Even so, it seems to me that such non-Palestinian cities as Bostra, Naveh (the main town of Batanaea), and Tyre figure more prominently in the Palestinian Talmud than even big, quasi-urban Lower Galilean villages like Arab and Beth Shearim. The densely packed Jewish population of Upper Galilee and the Golan, so important in archaeology, is hardly mentioned in the rabbinic literature at all. It is perhaps noteworthy that in one story a rabbi who ventured out of Tiberias into the Galilean countryside is said simply to have “gone outside” (nafaq lebara).⁶⁶ The geographical diffusion of rabbinic culture in Palestine and vicinity was thus identical with that of Greco-Roman urban culture.

The story of the rabbi who “went outside,” which goes on to make the rabbi answer the locals’ legal questions (incorrectly, it turns out), implies that though rabbis were not a regular presence in rural Palestine—notwithstanding their work in some big villages and occasional visits even elsewhere—they were not entirely without prestige there. It is striking that the Palestinian Talmud and midrashim record few complaints about rabbis being treated with open disrespect in the countryside,⁶⁷ perhaps in part because rabbinic literature tends to ignore what its protagonists were powerless to change. Or perhaps rabbis preferred to go where they knew they would be well received; the Talmud does record many instances of the rabbis’ failing to intervene to stop practices of which they disapproved.⁶⁸ Nevertheless, it seems certain that they enjoyed a limited and compartmental, perhaps gradually increasing, influence.

The rabbis did not control anything in rural Palestine—not synagogues, not charity collection or distribution, nor anything else. But as acknowledged experts in Jewish law, protégés of the patriarch, and so on, they might be approached (and given that most of them lived in the cities, the villagers had to take the initiative) with some regularity for some purposes. By the fourth century, then, the rabbis may have lacked formal authority for the most part, but they were not without a certain compartmentalized and largely informal influence (acquired through the hard work of fund-raising, preaching, and setting themselves up as intermediaries between common folk and the powerful). Thus they constituted a limited and marginal but nevertheless discernible part of the system.

The patriarchs of the fourth century may have been less interested in promoting their influence in the Palestinian countryside than the rabbis were. This contradicts the common argument a fortiori about patriarchal influence; since we know they were powerful in the Diaspora, we can take for granted their dominance in Palestine. I would argue a different position—that the patriarchs extended their influence in the Diaspora and in Palestine simultaneously—both from evidence and from hypothesis.

First the evidence: apart from the talmudic anecdotes discussed above, there is remarkably little of it for patriarchal interference in rural Palestine. With the exception of a single story that may have nothing to do with the patriarch, all information about patriarchal fund-raising and tax collection, and about the activities of their agents, concerns Diaspora cities.69 The unimpressive epigraphical evidence for patriarchal influence is likewise entirely diasporic: a synagogue inscription from Stobi, in Macedonia (CIJ 694); an epitaph from Venusia, in the Basilicata, mentioning the presence at the funeral of the deceased young daughter of communal leaders of duo apostuli et duo rebbites who recited threnoi;⁷⁰ an epitaph from Catania, Sicily, dated 383 (CIJ 1.650 = Noy, Jewish Inscriptions, no. 145); perhaps CIJ 719, from Argos, Greece (see comments of Noy at 145).

Now the hypothesis: The patriarchs of the fourth century were, if the legal and literary sources do not completely deceive us, mainly concerned with raising money, although we have no idea what they did with it all, apart from transforming it into senatorial rank. For this purpose, the Jewish peasants of Palestine were of little utility. Though they were probably nearing the peak of their prosperity and populousness in the later fourth century (which is to say, they had more available surplus than they were used to, did more buying and selling, and made more use of coins), the fact remains that they were still peasants with a heavy tax burden and limited (though not nonexistent) access to gold, the only stable currency in the later Roman Empire. Any attempt to exact taxes is likely to have produced small returns and generated mainly resentment. The cities of the Diaspora offered much richer pickings. The Jews in these places were probably mostly artisans and merchants, not peasants.71 Since most personal taxes were land taxes, artisans and merchants had a comparatively light tax burden and, given their complete dependence for survival on urban markets, relatively easy access to cash.⁷² The largest Jewish communities tended to be in the largest cities—easily accessible and conveniently centered on their synagogues, and possessing in some cases by the fourth century the rudiments of a loosely hierarchical organization, all of which facilitated collection.⁷³

It is likely that the sources present a slightly distorted picture of the character of patriarchal authority even in the Diaspora. The laws of the late fourth century take for granted, and so may have functioned to prescribe, an organized clerical hierarchy in Jewish communities, subject to the authority (dicio) of the patriarchs (this issue is discussed in more detail below). This clergy, however, was certainly less institutionalized than its Christian counterpart, if it existed at all; we would scarcely have guessed of its existence from the inscriptions. It was at most a thin terminological veneer imperfectly concealing, in most places, a basically self-regulating euergetistic structure.74 In practice, this must have meant that it was harder for the patriarchs to exert control over these communities than a superficial reading of the evidence indicates. It cannot have been hard to shirk orders, and some communities would have been split or would have ignored, or been ignored by, the apostoloi completely. Imperial authorization of patriarchal power rarely made much practical difference.⁷⁵ It is true that primates actually enjoyed formal jurisdiction over religious law, but Jewish religious law was so murky and contentious a category, and it was in practice probably so unclear who counted as a primas, that it is hard to see why a Roman governor would have wished to get involved in trying to impose the judgment of a primas on an uncomplying Jew; thus, imperial authorization counted mainly as an expression of goodwill (which was not of course to be taken lightly). Furthermore, the patriarch’s right to collect the apostole was just that, and no more: the laws, that is, never suggest that the government obligated the Jews to pay, only that the patriarch was allowed to keep what he could raise. This was no small concession: the emperors cannot have been happy to see precious metals disappear into patriarchal coffers, and this unhappiness twice found legal expression.⁷⁶ Furthermore, it is striking that some Diaspora communities (we do not know how many) actually submitted, voluntarily, to the patriarchs and came to think of their gifts as obligatory and perhaps even to allow patriarchal interference in their internal governance. But we should be careful not to exaggerate the extent of imperial privilege or patriarchal power.

In sum, I have been arguing that rabbis and patriarchs rarely wielded much formal authority. Even the patriarchs, whose history is usually written in constitutional terms, enjoyed mainly the informal prestige accruing to any great and wealthy patron with a far-flung network of important dependents, and very briefly succeeded in transforming this hard-won auctoritas into formal status and legal jurisdiction (which is not to deny the possibility that some Jews were impressed by their dynastic pretensions). The rabbis, for their part, never attained so high a level of official recognition, but they too, both as clients of the patriarchs and in some cases as small-scale patrons in their own right, enjoyed a certain prestige. Neither patriarchs nor rabbis, however, had much impact on the lives of Palestinian Jews. The patriarchs’ main interest, especially in the fourth century, was in maintaining their ties in the Diaspora; they had little to gain from interfering in the lives of Palestinian Jews, though the latter did show them the deference due grand figures, and they are likely to have acquired a strong voice in local politics and, as suggested above, influence over the local Jewish urban elites. As for the rabbis, they too were recipients of deference due experts in Torah, but mostly they affected the lives of Palestinian Jews by serving as or advising rural religious functionaries—judges, schoolteachers, Torah readers, and the like. They seem rarely to have served such functions in Upper Galilee or the Golan; even nearer the rabbinic centers, in the villages of Lower Galilee, they were employed only by those few villages that wished, and could afford, to do so, and probably somewhat more frequently in the fourth century than in the third. There they were functionaries rather than authorities—not therefore necessarily without influence, since functionaries can transform service into control. But, as far as we are aware, whatever influence they had was ideologically compartmental and geographically restricted.

 

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1 As even the most responsible and serious historians have trouble avoiding; see, e.g., S. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, pp. 214–31.

² On “colonies” in the imperial period, which often enjoyed little more than additional prestige, see P. Garnsey and R. Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 26–28; 189–90; B. Isaac, The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), pp. 342–63.

³ For a recent discussion, see H. Galsterer, “Roman Law in the Provinces: Some Problems in Transmission,” in M. Crawford, ed., L’Impero romano e le strutture economiche e sociali delle province (Como: New Press 1986), pp. 13–27. Galsterer offers a plausible compromise between those who suppose that Roman annexation involved a thorough going change in legal behavior (e.g., H. J. Wolff, “Römisches Provinzialrecht in der Provinz Arabia,” in ANRW II.13 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1978), pp. 788–804; and “Le droit provincial dans la province romaine d’Arabie,” RIDA 23 (1976): 271–90), and the pure laissez-faireists, such as Millar.

⁴ See, e.g., the discussion of Emesa in F. Millar, The Roman Near East (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 300–309. The distinction between the Jews (and perhaps the Phoenicians) and other inhabitants of the Roman Near East in this respect is implicit throughout Millar’s book, and though he probably overstated his case, there seems to me to be a hard core of truth to it.

⁵ See R. Gordon, “Religion in the Roman Empire: The Civic Compromise and its Limits,” in Pagan Priests: Religion and Power in the Ancient World M. Beard and J. North, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 240–41.

⁶ For a general account, see Bowersock, Roman Arabia; Millar, Roman Near East, pp. 387–436.

⁷ For some suggestive observations, see, in addition to his Roman Arabia, pp. 76–89, Bowersock, “Greek Culture at Petra and Bostra in the Third Century AD,” in Ho Hellenismos sten Anatole: Praktika a’ Diethnous Arkhaiologikou Synedriou Delphoi 6–9 Noembriou 1986 (Athens: Evropaiko Politistiko Kentro Delphon, 1991), 15–22 (I thank Kostas Buraselis for bringing this to my attention); there is, however, a puzzling simplicity to Bowersock’s insistence on viewing the adoption of Greco-Roman political institutions, iconography, etc., as aspects of “Arab selfexpression,” a formulation that needs to be rethought, though not necessarily wholly rejected, in the light of Millar’s conclusions in Roman Near East. And see now the important discussion of H. Cotton, “The Languages of the Documents from the Judaean Desert,” ZPE 125 (1999): 219–31, who notes the near disappearance of Nabataean from documents after 106 (there are two exceptions); oddly, the four Jewish Aramaic documents postdate 106, but all except for Babatha’s ketubbah are in effect Roman documents (including a tax receipt!) written in a different language (I would add that these documents may be important evidence for the multilingualism of scribes in Mahoza).

⁸ For detailed discussion, see B. Isaac and I. Roll, “Judaea in the Early Years of Hadrian’s Reign,” Latomus 38 (1979): 54–66; Isaac, Limits of Empire, pp. 106–7.

⁹ See S. Lieberman, “Jewish Life in Eretz Yisrael as Reflected in the Palestinian Talmud,” in Texts and Studies (New York: Ktav, 1974), pp. 180–89, for discussion of some relevant texts.

¹⁰ See in general Isaac, Limits of Empire, pp. 104–18. Z. Safrai, “The Roman Army in the Galilee,” in Galilee, pp. 103–14 was right to insist on the economic and social importance of the army but went too far. On Roman roads, see the detailed discussion in B. Isaac, The Near East under Roman Rule (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 48–75.

¹¹ For the Great Revolt, see Josephus, War 6.420: total number of prisoners, 97,000; total number of those killed in siege of Jerusalem, 1.1 million (the smaller number of prisoners is obviously the more plausible, and it could be argued that Josephus may even have had access to official figures; the number of dead cannot have been other than guesswork). For the Bar Kokhba revolt, Cassius Dio (apud Xiphilinus) 69.14.1: fifty Judaean fortresses and 985 villages destroyed; 580,000 Jews were killed in battle, and the casualties of famine and disease were innumerable. See comments of M. Stern, GLAJJ II, no. 440. For a general discussion of the statistics provided by ancient writers, see Parkin, Demography, pp. 58–66.

¹² The standard discussions of “responses to the destruction,” e.g., B. Bokser, “Rabbinic Responses to Catastrophe: From Continuity to Discontinuity,” PAAJR 50 (1983): 37–61; M. Stone, “Reactions to Destructions (sic) of the Second Temple,” JSJ 12 (1981): 195–204, cf. also S. Cohen, “Significance of Yavneh,” tend to concentrate on explicit post-70 discussions of the destruction—mainly 4 Ezra and similar works, and the heavily homiletic discussions in rabbinic literature, composed centuries after the event. Such accounts often describe the Destruction as a theological problem to which various intellectuals found generally acceptable solutions. Cohen observes that the earliest rabbinic literature manifests little direct concern with the Destruction. But when this literature was written, the Destruction was no more than a theological problem—a suitable topic for somber moralizing reflection. This is not to deny that rabbinic Judaism was shaped by the Destruction, a point emphasized by, for example, Bokser, in The Origin of the Seder: The Passover Rite and Early Rabbinic Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

¹³ See M. Stone, e.g., in Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, CRINT 2.2 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1984), pp. 412–14; but one cannot help being impressed by the difficulty of adequately explaining the jarring transition halfway through the book from profound pessimism to standard piety. I adopt Stone’s interpretation with diffidence. For a general discussion of the post-Destruction apocalypses, see C. Rowland, “The Parting of the Ways: The Evidence of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic and Mystical Material,” in J. D. G. Dunn, ed., Jews and Christians: Parting of the Ways, AD 70 to 134, WUNT 66 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1991), pp. 213–37, esp. 219–22. Rowland is especially good on why 4 Ezra’s surrender (for he too adopts Stone’s interpretation) may have been attractive after 70.

¹⁴ See S. Schwartz, Josephus, pp. 176–77 and, for Martial, the relevant passages in GLAJJ I. (For a different approach to Martial, see M. Williams, “Domitian, the Jews and the ‘Judaizers’—A Simple Matter of Cupiditas and Maiestas?” Historia 39 [1990]: 196–211.) Josephus, Ant 4.145–49 seems, for example, to reflect arguments against legal observance used by Jews in Josephus’s time—arguments that, interestingly enough, depend for their appeal on a critique of submission to authority and of the Law’s empowerment of its mediators, exemplified by Moses. The account as a whole (126–155) is a warning to such scoffers. Cf. also Syriac Baruch 41.3, “those who forsake the covenant.”

¹⁵ See M. Goodman, Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), pp. 121–24.

¹⁶ I adopt the interpretation proposed by G. Alon, The Jews in Their Land, p. 587, and followed by Peter Schäfer, “The Causes of the Bar Kokhba Revolt,” in J. Petuchowski and E. Fleischer, eds., Studies in Aggadah, Targum and Jewish Liturgy in Memory of Joseph Heinemann (Jerusalem: Magnes 1981), 74–94, esp. 90–94. Also, Schäfer, Der Bar Kochba-Aufstand (Tübingen: Mohr, 1981), pp. 45–50. Other explanations—e.g., Graetz’s view (apud Alon, Jews in their Land, p. 66 n. 35) that they were trying to avoid having to pay the tax of two denarii per annum to the fiscus Judaicus imposed on Jews after 70—are unconvincing.

¹⁷ My usage here is informed by C. Geertz, “Common Sense as a Cultural System,” Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic, 1983), pp. 73–93.

¹⁸ W. Eck, “The Bar Kokhba Revolt: The Roman Point of View,” JRS 89 (1999): 76–89, has now argued that the revolt spread outside Judaea, but the evidence is poor; at any rate, Galilee was certainly less damaged than Judaea by its failure.

¹⁹ See my review of D. Goodblatt, JJS 47 (1996): 167–69, for full discussion. It is only fair to point out that I contributed to what I now regard as an elementary error in my Josephus.

²⁰ Several large studies of the patriarchate have recently been published: Goodblatt, Monarchic Principle; M. Jacobs, Die Institution des Jüdischen Patriarchen (Tübingen: Mohr, 1995); K. Strobel, “Jüdisches Patriarchat, Rabbinentum, und Priesterdynastie von Emesa: Historische Phänomene innerhalb des Imperium Romanum der Kaiserzeit,” Ktema 14 (1989): 39–77 (published 1994); L. Levine, “The Status of the Patriarch in the Third and Fourth Century: Sources and Methodology,” JJS 47 (1996): 1–32; S. Schwartz, “The Patriarchs and the Diaspora,” JJS 50 (1999): 208–22.

²¹ These points are discussed in greater detail in my review of Goodblatt and in “Patriarchs and the Diaspora.”

²² See R. Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 261–68, for an account of the decline of the temples; the connection with the Severan reform is my own. For a different approach, see Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt, especially pp. 37–82.

²³ A remarkable admission that did nothing to alter the essential rabbinocentricity of his account; see “Those Appointed for Money,” 382–86; though Goodman, State and Society in Roman Galilee, A.D. 132–212 (Totowa: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983), pp. 122–26, understands the functioning of Jewish society in Roman Palestine very differently, this is basically his view, too. But note now Z. Safrai, Haqehillah Hayehudit Be’eretz Yisrael Bitequfat Hamishnah Vehatalmud (Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar, 1995), pp. 77–78, who imagines that Alon underestimated the importance of the rabbinic courts, that, indeed, nonrabbinic courts were of no significance in Jewish Palestine—an approach characteristic of the diadoche of Alon.

²⁴ See previous chapter, note 58.

²⁵ This is the view I expressed in Josephus, pp. 170–208. In broad outline it follows Neusner; and S. Cohen, “Significance of Yavneh.”

²⁶ I would like to thank Cohen for letting me see this fundamental essay, an excerpt of which was published as “The Place of the Rabbis.” The full essay was written in 1983 and has now appeared in Cambridge History of Judaism, 3: 922–90. See also C. Hezser, “Social Fragmentation, Plurality of Opinion, and Nonobservance of Halakhah: Rabbis and Community in Late Roman Palestine,” JSQ 1 (1993–1994): 234–51.

²⁷ See Levine, “Patriarch,” 654–59; note the “historicism” of the surprisingly influential article of M. D. Herr, “The Historical Significance of the Dialogues between Jewish Sages and Roman Dignitaries,” SH 22 (1971): 123–50.

²⁸ See Goodblatt, Monarchic Principle, pp. 141–75.

²⁹ I would hesitate to suggest that this is reflected in Judah I’s alleged deathbed instruction that he not be eulogized in the villages (because of disputes, the Talmud explains, not as helpfully as one would wish), Y. Ketubot 12:3, 34d–35a. For the routine character of interprovincial commercial contacts in the high and later Roman Empire (especially for such relations between Palestine and Egypt), see Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity, p. 108. On the urbanization of the rabbis, H. Lapin, “Rabbis and Cities in Later Roman Palestine: The Literary Evidence,” JJS 50 (1999): 187–207, supercedes previous discussions.

³⁰ A rabbinic locus classicus both for the activities of patriarchal representatives abroad and for rabbinic hostility to some of these representatives (ilen demitmenin biksaf, as the rabbis call them: “those appointed for money”), is Y. Bikkurim 3:3, 65 c-d.

³¹ See Jones, LRE, 1:357–65.

³² An isolated homily may ascribe such a role to the patriarchs, though it seems to be referring to Palestine, not the Diaspora; see Levine, “Jewish Patriarch,” 659. For more on conditions in the Mediterranean Diaspora in the second and third centuries, see part 3, chap. 6.

³³ See Y. Sanhedrin 2:6, 20d = Genesis Rabbah 80:1 (ed. Theodor-Albeck, pp. 950–53), a sermon apparently attacking the fiscal rapaciousness of Judah II, though other interpretations are possible—see below; otherwise, rabbinic sources say nothing about patriarchal taxation, except for some minor involvement in the municipal taxes of Tiberias, primarily as possessing the authority to exempt rabbis from the obligation to pay them; see the discussion of Levine, “The Jewish Patriarch in Third Century Palestine,” in ANRW II 19.2 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1979), pp. 671–74, disregarding his unwarranted conclusion on the bottom of page 673; and see Goodblatt, Monarchic Principle, pp. 136–41. Why scholars have always posed the issue in the most extreme way, “when did the patriarchs acquire the authority to impose taxes?” instead of positing a gradual, halting, and uneven development from solicitation of gifts (implied by the very term aurum coronarium), I do not know. On aurum coronarium, see F. Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 140–42.

³⁴ See Y. Shabbat 6:9, 8c; Y. Yoma 8:5, 45b (Germans); Y. Horayot 3:2, 47a = Y. Sanhedrin 2:1, 19d–20a (“Goths”). Rashi, ad B. Berakhot 16b, already speculated (because such gifts were common in medieval France?) that these Goths were “Antoninus’s” gift to the patriarch, and remarkably enough this is reported as fact by Avi-Yonah, The Jews of Palestine (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), pp. 59, 120, who also followed Rashi in regarding these slaves (?) as a private army. Levine, “Jewish Patriarch,” p. 681, uses a turn of phrase whose meaning is not obvious: “(The patriarchs) employed gendarmes, but no army.” For discussion, see Jacobs, Die Institution, pp. 43–44. On the employment of gangs by landowners, see P. Garnsey and G. Woolf, “Patronage of the Rural Poor in the Roman World,” in Patronage in Ancient Society, pp. 152–67; and in the same volume, K. Hopwood, “Bandits, Elites, and Rural Order,” pp. 171–85.

³⁵ See Goodblatt, Monarchic Principle, p. 140.

³⁶ Y. Megillah 3:1, 73d.

³⁷ See, for example, Y. Sanhedrin 3:9, 21c, though the rabbi in question was Babylonian and it is unclear where the anecdote is set. Similarly, Y. Shabbat 1:4, 3c, when a “great man” would come to R. Jonathan’s village, he would send him tokens of respect, so as to soften his heart toward the widows and orphans. A full collection of passages in which rabbis assume the role of intermediaries would be instructive, since this seems to me likely to have been a significant way in which they acquired influence. Note also Y. Berakhot 9:1, 11d, about the two late-third-century rabbis (R. Yohanan and R. Jonathan) who went “to make peace in the villages of the South” (me’bad shelama be’ilen qiryata dedaroma).

³⁸ See L. Levine, “The Sages and the Synagogue in Late Antiquity: The Evidence of the Galilee,” in Galilee, pp. 209–10.

³⁹ See, for example, B. Bokser, “Wonder-Working and the Rabbinic Tradition: The Case of Hanina Ben Dosa,” JSJ 16 (1985): 42–92.

⁴⁰ Levine, Rabbinic Class, pp. 127–33, claims that 80 percent of cases reported in the Y concern rabbis and their families and students. But in C. Hezser’s thorough analysis of the cases in Y. Bavot (Form, Function, and Historical Significance of the Rabbinic Story in Yerushalmi Neziqin (Tübingen: Mohr, 1993), pp. 396–98), 54 percent definitely concern rabbis and their connections, and in the rest the litigants are anonymous.

⁴¹ Points similar to these are made at greater length and with full documentation by Catherine Hezser, Social Structure. I thank her for discussing these issues with me before her book’s publication.

⁴² Julian, epistulae 51 = Linder, no. 13. Cohen’s attempt to explain away Eusebius’s mention of apostoloi (“Pagan and Christian Evidence,” p. 171): Eusebius does not explicitly connect them with the patriarch (but he comes pretty close) and says nothing of their power in the Diaspora synagogues (though it was the obvious place for messengers from overseas to come, and even if they lacked power, why should they have lacked prestige?) seems to me unnecessary. Most likely they were what they seemed—messengers from the patriarchs trying (with ungaugeable but surely mixed success) to raise money and interest in the Diaspora synagogues. For more detailed discussions of the evidence, see S. Schwartz, “Patriarchs and the Diaspora” and Levine, “Status of the Patriarch,” p. 13–6.

⁴³ CTh 16.8.14 = Linder, no. 30; rescission: CTh 16.8.17 = Linder, 34.

⁴⁴ So apparently CTh 16.8.15 = Linder, no. 32.

⁴⁵ CTh 16.8.8=Linder, no. 20; 16.8.13 = Linder, no. 27.

⁴⁶ CTh 2.1.10 = Linder, no. 28. See below.

⁴⁷ But probably not much earlier; Julian addresses Iulus as aidesimotatos, which has no administrative significance, though we would not expect technical terminology in a rhetorical context; but the mosaic inscription from the floor of the synagogue of Hamath Tiberias that calls the patriarchs lamprotatoi (= clarissimi, the lowest of the senatorial ranks) is unlikely to be much earlier than the mid-fourth century.

⁴⁸ For some salutary, if at points excessive, skepticism about Epiphanius’s story, see Z. Rubin, “Joseph the Comes and the Attempts to Convert Galilee to Christianity in the Fourth Century C.E.” Cathedra 26 (1982): 105–16 (in Hebrew). Contra Rubin, though, Epiphanius does not say there was a bishop in Tiberias but rather a bishop near Tiberias—which is to say that Epiphanius knew there was no bishop in Tiberias and did not know where the nearest one was in Constantine’s time (Beth Shean?).

⁴⁹ Jerome, Epp. 57.3 (CSEL 54.506). For Libanius, see the detailed commentary in GLAJJ 2, nos. 496–504. Like Jerome’s, Libanius’s letters indicate that in the 380s and 390s the patriarch meddled in provincial high politics.

⁵⁰ See S. Schwartz, “Patriarchs and the Diaspora” for further discussion.

⁵¹ Notwithstanding the alleged rabbinic ban on rhetorical training, which prohibited only teaching, not study: see E. E. Hallewy, “Concerning the Ban on Greek Wisdom,” Tarbiz 41 (1972): 269–74; Lieberman, Hellenism, pp. 100ff.

⁵² On the decline of the curial classes, see the classic account in LRE 1.737–57, with the important qualifications of M. Whittow, “Ruling the Late Roman and Early Byzantine City: A Continuous History,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 3–29.

⁵³ CIJ 2.991 = Lifshitz, Donateurs et fondateurs, no. 74, dated by Schwabe to the first half of the fifth century.

⁵⁴ A minimalist approach is not unprecedented. It was already adumbrated by Ronald Syme, “Ipse Ille Patriarcha,” Emperors and Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), pp. 17–29. S. J. D. Cohen extended Syme’s claims, arguing strongly that the explosion of interest in the patriarchate in legal and Christian and pagan literary sources in the later fourth century indicates a sudden expansion of patriarchal power, especially in the Diaspora; his assumption that patriarchal power was well established in Palestine earlier requires examination: see “Pagan and Christian Evidence,” pp. 170–75. See also M. Goodman, “The Roman State and the Jewish Patriarch in the Third Century,” in Galilee, pp. 127–39. A minimalist approach to patriarchal authority in diaspora communities is implicit also in T. Rajak and D. Noy, “Archisynagogoi: Office, Title, and Social Status in the Greco-Jewish Synagogue,” JRS 83 (1993): 75–93; see also Strobel, “Jüdisches Patriarchat.” I find it not unsurprising that a maximalist approach, in the tradition of Alon, still finds new adherents (and/or people outside Israel willing to publish their work): e.g., E. Habas [Rubin], “Rabban Gamaliel of Yavneh and His Sons: The Patriarchate before and after the Bar Kokhva Revolt,” JJS 50 (1999): 21ff.

⁵⁵ The lamprotatoi patriarchai of Lifshitz, Donateurs et fondateurs, no. 76 (Hamat Tiberias) are mentioned only as masters/patrons of a donor.

⁵⁶ My position is only a small step beyond the conclusion reached a century ago by H. P. Chajes, “Les juges juifs en Palestine de l’an 70 à l’an 500,” REJ 39 (1899): 39–52: “il n’existait pas de tribuneaux au véritable sense du mot, fonctionnant d’une manière permanente. Nous trouvons surtout des juges isolés, ayant des pouvoirs plus ou moins étendus, mais exerçant leur action dans un domaine restreint, avec l’autorisation ou, du moins, la tolérance des autorités” (p. 52). G. Alon’s subsequent “disproof” (“Those Appointed for Money,” pp. 382–36), is based entirely on rabbinic passages that are exegetical, prescriptive, or found only in the Babylonian Talmud. See also J. Mélèze-Modrzejewski, apud D. Sperber, A Dictionary of Greek and Latin Legal Terms in Rabbinic Literature (Jerusalem: Bar Ilan University Press, 1984), pp. 213–14. See also J. Neusner, Judaism in Society: The Evidence of the Yerushalmi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), for the material collected rather than Neusner’s comments.

⁵⁷ See, e.g., Y. Moed Qatan 3:1, 81d; the only means of compulsion Rabbi Joshua ben Levi has is the threat of excommunication, which he refuses to use on principle; Y. Nedarim 9:4, 41c, Rav resorts to a curse to punish a man who refused to appear before him. Though Rav was Babylonian, the story is set in Palestine.

⁵⁸ The following remarkable passage from the early seventh century (?) Ma’asim Livnei Eretz Yisrael (apparently extrapolating from a halakhah like that attributed to R. Aqiva in B. Bava Qama 113a—I thank Eliezer Diamond for this reference) seems relevant, but it is difficult to know how: “A gentile who comes to be judged in accordance with Jewish law may be so judged. If the judgment is tending (to favor the gentile, then he is to be judged—by the Jewish judge) according to the laws of the nations, but he may not be judged crookedly, lest the Name be desecrated. And he (the gentile) must write a compromissum [a document authorizing arbitration] for the judgment he is requesting” (J. Mann, “Sefer Hama’asim Livnei Eretz Yisrael,” Tarbiz 1 no. 3 [1930]: 8). This rule is puzzling because Roman law had long since forbidden Jews to judge Christians; and it is also unclear whether the compromissum is required because Jewish judges are always considered arbitri or because their jurisdiction (de facto or de jure?) does not extend to Christians. Since the case in question is obviously civil, not religious in a narrow sense, it seems unlikely that the Jewish judge could have had formal jurisdiction of any sort.

⁵⁹ For criticism of the “institutional history” approach, see my review of Goodblatt, The Monarchic Principle, JJS 47 (1996): 167–69; and “The Patriarchs and the Diaspora.”

⁶⁰ Haden paysuna depaysantak—following the translation of M. Sokoloff, Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period (Jerusalem: Bar Ilan University Press, 1992), s. v. PYYSWN; correct Neusner accordingly.

⁶¹ See also Genesis Rabbah 81:1 = Theodor-Albeck, p. 969.

⁶² Y Sheviit 6:1, 36d. The language of the request is identical to that in Y. Yevamot, perhaps reflecting a standard formula. I am skeptical that there was in the third century any formal “right of minui,” or if there was, that it had any connection with village appointments. In any case, the Palestinian Talmud occasionally mentions appointments made by nonpatriarchal rabbis, and the schematic pseudohistory of minui in Y. Sanhedrin 1:2, 19a admits that in its day (?) the patriarch was no longer the exclusive holder of the right. See Alon, Jews in their Land, pp. 719–27, and, in more detail, “Those Appointed for Money,” pp. 401–10, for an attempt to read Y. Sanhedrin as real history. See also Levine, “Status of the Patriarch,” 7–10.

⁶³ Which is not to deny the obvious fact that for the editors of the Palestinian Talmud the story’s point was exclusively halakhic.

⁶⁴ Cf. the story in Y. Megillah 4:5, 75b of Rabbi Shimon the Bible teacher/reader (safra) of Tarbenet, vel sim. (the text is uncertain), dismissed from his job for refusing to adopt an unlawful manner of Torah reading and subsequently praised for his obstinacy by an important rabbi. Clearly there was anxiety in some rabbinic circles about the implications of taking a post in a village—the compromises required, and so on.

⁶⁵ See discussion in Hezser, The Social Structure, pp. 157–65. Hezser herself is mildly skeptical. But the matter now seems settled by H. Lapin, “Rabbis and Cities.”

⁶⁶ Y. Betzah 1.4, 60c; and see Sokoloff, Dictionary, s. v. br. Neusner’s translation is seriously misleading.

⁶⁷ See material collected by Levine, Rabbinic Class, pp. 98–133.

⁶⁸ For example, Y. Berakhot 5:3, 9c, containing several pericopae in which rabbis in synagogues witness but fail to correct what they regard as errors in liturgical practice; contrast Y. Megillah 4:1, 74d, a string of anecdotes about interventions in synagogue liturgy by Rabbi Shmuel bar Rav Yizhak.

⁶⁹ See Y. Sanhedrin 2:6, 20d = Genesis Rabbah 80:1 (ed. Theodor-Albeck, pp. 950–53): the Jews cannot pay the priestly gifts because “the king” (in the Palestinian Talmud) or “the nasi (in Gen.R.) has taken all.” Even if Genesis Rabbah is correct, the reference is not to a money tax but an impost in kind—thus not the apostole. Strobel’s suggestion (“Jüdisches Patriarchat,” p. 66 n. 209) that the story refers to rent from the patriarchal estates is attractive.

⁷⁰ For the Stobi inscription, see the discussion of Cohen, “Pagan and Christian Evidence,” pp. 172–73; Venusian inscription, D. Noy, Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), no. 86 = CIJ 1.611. The juxtaposition of apostuli and rebbites seems significant, and this is furthermore the earliest case known of the use of the word “rabbi” as a substantive rather than a title. However, the dating is controversial. Apostuli suggests a date no later than c. 420, but the exceptionally “barbarous” character of the Latin orthography, as well as the fact that other burials in the same catacomb chamber seem “late” (i.e., sixth century), have generated some resistance to an early fifth century dating (and see now M. Williams, “The Jews of Early Byzantine Venusia: The Family of Faustinus I, the Father,” JJS 50 [1999]: 38–52). If the late dating is correct, then the inscription demonstrates the otherwise unattested employment of apostoloi either by the Palestinian academies, the Babylonian exilarchs, or an unknown authority. See comments of Noy ad loc. All these texts are discussed in Schwartz, “Patriarchs and the Diaspora”; and Levine, “Status of the Patriarch,” pp. 13–6.

⁷¹ The evidence is almost all late antique. There were of course Jewish peasants in Egypt (CPJ passim); how typical for northern Syria were Libanius’s Jewish tenant farmers? (see GLAJJ, 2, no. 495a). Note also, around the year 400, the apparently prosperous Jewish landowner Licinius in the region of Hippo Regius, whose legal entanglements with the local bishop, Victor, are the subject of a recently (1974) discovered letter of Augustine (J. Divjak, ed., Sancti Aureli Augustini Opera, sec. 2 pars. 6, CSEL 88 (Vienna, 1981) no. 8, with the comments of Helmut Castritius, “The Jews in North Africa at the Time of Augustine of Hippo: Their Social and Legal Position,” Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies, B.I. (Jerusalem, 1986), 31–37); similarly on Minorca in precisely the same period (see sec. 3 chap. 6). For Jewish glassmakers at Constantinople and Emesa, see J.-P. Sodini, “L’artisanat urbain à l’époque paléochrétienne (iv^e–vii^e s.),” Ktema 4 (1979): 94; and H. J. Magoulias, “Trades and Crafts in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries as Viewed in the Lives of the Saints,” Byzantinoslavica 37 (1976): 23–24; for other Jewish artisans in late antique Asia Minor at Korykos, see J. Keil and A. Wilhelm, Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua, vol. 3 III (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931), no. 237 (shoemaker), nos. 344, 448 (perfumers), no. 607 (head of goldsmiths’ guild); for Jewish merchants in the late antique Adriatic area, L. Ruggini, “Ebrei e Orientali nell’Italia Settentrionale,” Studia et documenta historiae et juris 25 (1959): 231–41. The complex question of the Jews’ liability for curial service is also relevant here because in most, though not all, places such liability depended on ownership of land; see below and discussion in Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, pp. 75–77, with his comments on the particular laws cited there; LRE 1.737ff.

⁷² The only personal tax assessed on urban merchants and artisans was the much-resented but economically hardly onerous chrysargyron, instituted in the early fourth century and preceded perhaps by some sort of head tax; for a general account, see LRE 1.431; R. P. Duncan-Jones, Structure and Scale in the Roman Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 187–98; Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity, pp. 153–54.

⁷³ That the apostole was mediated through the communal leaders explains why CTh 16.8.14, the western law of 399 forbidding collection of the tax, lists archisynagogues and elders together with apostoli as those on whom the prohibition falls. Rajak and Noy, “Archisynagogoi,” 80, however, regard the law’s list as blatantly erroneous.

⁷⁴ The fundamental discussion is now Rajak and Noy, “Archisynagogoi,” who speak of the Diaspora communities as possessing a patronal structure, though this is misleading, since it is probable that the communal institutions depended on the wealthy (cf. P. Veyne, Bread and Circuses (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 10. Euergetism is “private liberality for public benefit”); with whom individual Jews entered into relationships of dependency—assuming that charity distribution did not provide a completely adequate safety net—will be discussed below. Furthermore, Rajak and Noy are skeptical that the patriarch could have intervened in local synagogue appointments as described by Palladius, Life of Chrysostom (PG 47, p. 51, the patriarch changes archisynagogues at Antioch annually) and Epiphanius in his story of Joseph’s deposition of archisynagogues, and so on, in Cilicia. But a letter of Libanius (GLAJJ 2, no. 504) indicates that the patriarch could appoint an archon of the Jews at Antioch, but also that the Jews could remove the man from office on their own initiative. Thus, Palladius may have been right for the 390s, but even then patriarchal authority was neither absolute nor uncontested. This would not change Rajak’s and Noy’s larger picture.

⁷⁵ Rajak and Noy, “Archisynagogi,” 79–80.

⁷⁶ See above. Both Julian and Honorius implied that the Jews found the tax an unbearable burden; Honorius even called the patriarch depopulator Judaeorum—despoiler of the Jews. Clearly professional rhetoricians were at work here, as often in the law codes, and the emperors had reasons of their own for outlawing the tax. Clearly, also, some Jews were unwilling to pay. They could have been forced by the local archisynagogue, but it is hard to imagine that the apostles had any recourse if the archisynagogues themselves were unwilling to pay.