History of the Jews (27 page)

This great enterprise in social metaphysics began humbly enough in the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem in 70
AD
. The hereditary priestly families, and the traditional Jewish upper class as a whole, perished in the ruin of the city. Henceforth the Jews formed themselves into a cathedocracy: they were ruled from the teacher’s chair. This had always been inherent in Judaism—for were not prophets instruments through whom God taught his people? But now it became explicit. Tradition says that the Pharisaic rabbi, Johanan ben Zakkai, the deputy head of the Sanhedrin, was smuggled out of besieged Jerusalem in a coffin. He had opposed the revolt and spoke for the long-established element in Judaism who believed that God and the faith were better served without the burden and corruption of the state. He obtained permission from the Roman authorities to set up a centre for the regulation of the Jewish religion at Jabneh (Jamnia), near the coast west of Jerusalem. There the Sanhedrin and the state were buried, and in their place a synod of rabbis met, in a vineyard near a dovecote, or in the upper chamber of a house. The rabbi and the synagogue became the normative institutions of Judaism, which from now on was essentially a congregationalist faith. The academy at Jabneh made the annual calculations of the Jewish calendar. It completed the canonization of the Bible. It ruled that, despite the fall of the Temple, certain ceremonies, such as the solemn eating of the Passover meal, were to be regularly enacted. It established the form of community prayers and laid down rules for fasting and pilgrimage. The new spirit of Judaism was in marked reaction to the violent exaltation of the zealots and nationalists. ‘Do not hurry to tear down the altars of the gentiles’, the Rabbi Jonathan was remembered as saying, ‘lest you be forced to rebuild them with your own hands.’ Or again: ‘If you are planting trees, and someone tells you the Messiah has come, put the sapling in first, then go and welcome the Messiah.’
¹³⁹
At Jabneh, the sword was forgotten, the pen ruled. The system was a self-perpetuating oligarchy,
the academy selecting or ‘ordaining’ new rabbis on the basis of learning and merit. But authority tended to be vested in families distinguished for their scholarship. In due course the progeny of Rabbi Jonathan were ousted by Rabbi Gamaliel
II
, son of the man who had taught St Paul. He was recognized by the Romans as
nasi
or patriarch.

These scholars, as a body, declined to join the Bar Kokhba revolt. But, of course, it affected them. Scholars often had to meet secretly. Jabneh itself became untenable, and after the revolt was crushed the rabbinical authorities transferred themselves to the town of Usha in western Galilee. Most rabbis were poor. They worked, usually with their hands. Constructing the Jewish history of these times is difficult, for the Jews themselves had ceased to write it, and the biographical and other information recorded emerges incidentally and without anchorage in chronology from passages in the halakhah or legal rulings, or in the aggadah stories and legends. Jewish academic society was not always homogeneous and self-contained. One of the greatest Jabneh scholars, Elisha ben Avuyah, became a heretic. But one of his pupils, the Rabbi Meir, best of the second-century scholars, may have been a convert. Women played their part. Meir’s wife Bruria made herself into a leading halakhic authority. At times the Jews were harassed or even persecuted by the imperial authorities. Sometimes they were left alone. At times they worked in harmony with Rome. Their leaders received grants of imperial lands and were permitted to exercise wide judicial powers. The Christian scholar Origen (185-254) says the
nasi
even imposed death-sentences. He certainly had the right to collect taxes. The Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi, or Judah the Prince, who lived in the second half of the second century and the beginning of the third, was a rich man attended by guards, who ruled the Jewish community both of Galilee and of the south almost like a secular potentate. Almost, but not quite: he spent his wealth on supporting scholars, the ablest of whom ate at the top table in his hall; he exempted scholarly men from taxation, at the expense of the workers; and in times of scarcity he fed scholars, but not the unlettered, from his food reserves. Even his maidservant, it is said, knew Hebrew and could explain the meaning of rare words. Judah was an intellectual elitist of the most uncompromising kind. He used to say, grimly: ‘It is the unlearned who bring trouble into the world.’
¹⁴⁰

Dynasties of scholars existed even in the period of the Second Commonwealth, when they are classified as zugot or ‘pairs’. There were five pairs of the leading scholars, the last being the famous Hillel, Christ’s teacher, and his opponent Shammai. Their descendants and followers, and other scholars who joined the elite, are known as the
tannaim. Hillel’s grandson, Gamaliel the Elder, was the first of six generations, Judah Ha-Nasi the last. The next generation, beginning with Rabbi Hiya Rabbah about 220
AD
, inaugurated the age of the amoraim, which lasted five generations in Judaea, up to the end of the fourth century, and eight generations in Babylon, up to the end of the fifth. There had, of course, been large Jewish communities in Babylon and its surroundings since the Exile. Contact was continuous since Babylonian Jewry accepted the calendar calculations from the Jerusalem authorities, and later from Jabneh. Babylonian Jews also came to Jerusalem on pilgrimage when this was possible. Pharisee or rabbinical Judaism came to Babylonia as a direct result of the Bar Kokhba revolt, when refugee scholars fleeing from Judaea established academies in what was then the territory of the Parthians. These schools were centralized at Sura, south of what is now Baghdad, and at Pumbedita to the west, where they flourished until the eleventh century. The location of the western academies in Palestine varied. In Judah Ha-Nasi’s time he concentrated all scholarship at Bet Shearim, but after his death there were important academies at Caesarea, Tiberias and Lydda.

The physical traces of this period of Jewish history are not impressive. Jewish archaeologists have not, of course, been able to explore sites in Iraq. The Jewish settlement at Sura had vanished completely as long ago as the 1170s, when the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela visited the spot; the town, he wrote, was in ruins. By contrast he found a sizeable community at Pumbedita, but that is the last we hear of it. On the other hand, excavations in 1932 uncovered, at the Roman caravan city of Dura Europus on the Euphrates, the remains of a synagogue dated 245
AD
, with inscriptions in Aramaic, Greek and Pahlevi-Parthian. The Jewish colony there dated back, it appears, to the destruction and exile of the Northern Kingdom, but had been reinforced by more orthodox Jews after the revolts of 66-70 and 132-35. Even so it was a heterodox community, as perhaps were many at that time. The architecture was Hellenistic, as one would expect, but the surprise lay in some thirty painted panels (now in the Damascus National Museum), which illustrate the messianic theme of the Return, the restoration and salvation. There are images of the patriarchs, of Moses and the Exodus, of the loss of the Ark and its return, of David and Esther. Scholars relate these paintings to the illustrated Bibles which are believed to have existed in the second and third centuries
AD
, and which indicate that Christian art too had a Jewish origin. Evidently the rule on images was not then strictly observed, at any rate in all Jewish circles.
¹⁴¹

A number of synagogues and tombs from the time of the sages have survived in Palestine. At Tiberias on the Lake of Galilee, the fourth-century synagogue also has human and animal images on its mosaic floor, and signs of the zodiac too. On the hill near the town is the tomb of the martyr, Rabbi Akiva, and that of Johanan ben Zakkai; two miles down the lake, Rabbi Meir has his tomb. At Capernaum, where the centurion whose servant Jesus healed built a synagogue, its second-third-century successor was excavated between 1905 and 1926, and carvings discovered of the
shofar
and
menorah
, the manna-pot, the palm tree and the shield of King David. Three synagogues have been unearthed in Syria and in northern Israel, and just off the Nazareth-Haifa road is Judah Ha-Nasi’s academic centre of Bet Shearim, with its synagogue, catacombs and cemetery—the last crowded with figurative art and concealing, somewhere, the tomb of Judah himself.
¹⁴²

But the chief memorials to this age of collective and individual scholarship are the Jewish holy writings themselves. Jewish sacred scholarship should be seen as a series of layers, each dependent on its predecessor. The first is the Pentateuch itself, which was essentially complete before the Exile, though some editing clearly went on after the Return. This is the basic body of written Jewish law, on which all else rests. Then come the books of the prophets, the psalms and wisdom literature, canonization of which was completed, as we have seen, under Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, between 70 and 132
AD
. To this were added various non-canonical works essential to the study of Jewish religion and history: the Greek translation of the Bible, or Septuagint; the works of Josephus; the Apocrypha and various papyri.

The next layer or stage was the sorting out and writing of Oral Law, which had been accumulating for centuries. This was a practice termed Mishnah, meaning to repeat or study, since it was originally memorized and recapitulated. Mishnah consisted of three elements: the midrash, that is the method of interpreting the Pentateuch to make clear points of law; the halakhah, plural halakhot, the body of generally accepted legal decisions on particular points; and the aggadah or homilies, including anecdotes and legends used to convey understanding of the law to the ordinary people. Gradually, over many generations, these interpretations, rulings and illustrations found written form. After the Bar Kokhba revolt, and culminating in the work of Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi and his school at the end of the second century
AD
, this material was edited into a book called the Mishnah, the epitome of ‘repetition’. It has six orders, each divided into a variable number of tractates. The first is
Zera’im
, with eleven
tractates, dealing with benedictions, offerings and titles.
Mo’ed
, with twelve tractates, covers the Sabbath and feasts.
Nashim
(seven tractates) deals with marriage and divorce.
Nezikin
(ten) covers civil wrongs or torts, judges, punishments and witnesses.
Kodashim
(eleven) deals with sacrifices and sacrileges, overlapping somewhat with the first order. Finally,
Tohorot
(twelve) covers uncleanliness and rituals.
¹⁴³
In addition to the Mishnah, there is a collection of sayings and rulings by the tannaim, four times larger in bulk, known as the Tosefta. The exact provenance, date and composition of the Tosefta—and its precise relationship to the Mishnah—have been subjects of unresolved scholarly dispute for over a thousand years.
¹⁴⁴

Of course, immediately the Mishnah was complete, further generations of scholars—who were, it should be remembered, determining legal theory in the light of actual cases—began to comment upon it. By this time, since the rabbinic methods had spread to Babylonia, there were two centres of commentary, in Eretz Israel and in the Babylonian academies. Both produced volumes of Talmud, a word meaning ‘study’ or ‘learning’, which were compiled by the various generations of the amoraim. The Jerusalem Talmud, more correctly called the Talmud of the West, was completed by the end of the fourth century
AD
, and the Babylonian Talmud a century later. Each has folios of commentary dealing with the tractates of the Mishnah. This formed the third layer.

Thereafter further layers were added:
Perushim
, or commentaries, on both the Talmuds, of which the outstanding example was Rashi’s on the Babylonian Talmud in the eleventh century; and
Hiddushim
or
novellae
, which compare and reconcile different sources, so producing new rulings or halakhot, the classic
novellae
being composed on the Babylonian Talmud in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries. There was another layer of
responsa prudentium
(
She’elot u-Teshuvot
) or written answers by leading scholars to questions put to them. The last of the layers consisted of attempts to simplify and codify this enormous mass of material, by such outstanding scholars as Isaac Alfasi, Maimonides, Jacob ben Asher and Joseph Caro, from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. From the fifth to the eleventh centuries, which is known as the age of the
gaons
or
geonim
, scholars worked to produce collective rulings and compilations bearing the authority of academies. Later, in what is known as the rabbinic age, rulings were decentralized and individual scholars dominated the evolution of the Law. As an epilogue, from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, came the age of the aharonim or later scholars.

During all this time, Jewish communities, spread throughout the
Near East and Mediterranean, and eventually through most of central and eastern Europe, settled most of their legal problems through their own religious courts, so this multi-layered body of writings constituted not just a work of continuing research into the true meaning of the Bible, but a living body of communal law, dealing with actual cases and real people. Seen in Western terms, it was natural law, the law of the Bible, the code of Justinian, the canon law, the English common law, the European civil law, the parliamentary statutes, the American Constitution and the Napoleonic Code all rolled into one. Only in the nineteenth century, by which time many Jews had been emancipated and had ceased to live in judicial autonomy, did the study of Jewish halakhah begin to become academic—and even then it continued to govern Jewish marriage law in advanced societies and many other aspects of life in the backward areas.