How Judaism Survived the Temple: The Rabbis, Mishnah and Talmud

Rabbinic Judaism in one paragraph

In 70 CE the Romans burned the Temple in Jerusalem, and with it the centre of Jewish religion as it had been practised for centuries: sacrifice, the priesthood, and pilgrimage to a single holy place. Sixty-five years later a second revolt ended with Jerusalem turned into a Roman colony that Jews could not enter. Out of these disasters a group of scholars, who called their teachers rabbi, “my master”, built a religion that could be practised anywhere: daily prayer in place of the daily offering, the synagogue and the study house in place of the Temple, and an expanding body of law, which they called the Oral Torah and traced back to Moses. They compiled it in the Mishnah around 200 CE and debated it for another four centuries in the Talmuds of Galilee and Babylonia. Their authority grew slowly, and the archaeology of the period shows a Jewish world more varied than their writings admit. But by the time the Arab armies arrived in the 630s, the rabbis’ Judaism was well on the way to becoming simply Judaism. Majority

The traditional account, preserved in the rabbis’ own writings, presents this as continuity: the sages at Yavneh received the tradition from their teachers, who received it in an unbroken chain from Moses at Sinai. Historians see a real continuity with the Pharisees of the Second Temple period (§6), but also a reinvention, and the gap between those two pictures is the subject of this chapter. Majority

Timeline of rabbinic Judaism and its evidence

The destruction and its aftermath

The revolt that began in 66 CE ended in the summer of 70, when Titus’s legions broke into the Temple precinct. Josephus, a former rebel general who watched the siege from the Roman side, describes the sanctuary burning and claims Titus had wanted to spare it; the Christian writer Sulpicius Severus, writing around 400 and possibly following Tacitus, says Titus ordered it destroyed. Either way, the building and its rites ended.^[1]​^[23]​^[7] Consensus on the destruction; Contested on Titus’s intent.

What the destruction removed was enormous. The Torah’s laws of purity, atonement and the festivals were written around a sanctuary. The high priest’s rite on the Day of Atonement, the Passover lamb, the first fruits, the half-shekel tax: all assumed the Temple. Rome turned the half-shekel into the fiscus Iudaicus, a tax paid by Jews to the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome.^[24] Consensus

Many Jews expected the Temple to be rebuilt, as it had been after the Babylonian destruction (§5). That hope drove the next great revolt. The causes of the Bar Kokhba war of 132 are disputed: Cassius Dio blames Hadrian’s plan to refound Jerusalem as a Roman colony with a temple of Jupiter; a late Roman source blames a ban on circumcision.^[8]​^[25] Its leader, Shimon bar Kosiba, minted coins reading “Year one of the redemption of Israel” and “For the freedom of Jerusalem”, and styled himself nĕśîʾ yiśrāʾēl, “prince of Israel”.^[26]​^[27] Dio reports 580,000 Jewish dead and 985 villages destroyed; the figure is probably exaggerated, but the devastation of Judaea is confirmed by archaeology.^[8]​^[28] Majority

After 135, Jews were forbidden to enter Jerusalem except, by later accounts, on the anniversary of the destruction. Judaea was depopulated; the province was renamed Syria Palaestina. The surviving Jewish population and its scholars moved north, to Galilee, where the rabbinic movement would grow for the next five centuries.^[28]​^[7] Majority

Yavneh: what happened, and what did not

The rabbis’ own story of their origins begins with an escape. During the siege, Yohanan ben Zakkai has his disciples carry him out of Jerusalem in a coffin, meets the Roman general Vespasian, predicts that he will become emperor, and asks for a single favour: “Give me Yavneh and its sages.”^[29]​^[2] At Yavneh, a small town near the coast, the sages are said to have reconstituted the religion. Consensus on what the sources say.

The story is a founding legend, told in its full form in texts written centuries later; a version in which Vespasian is greeted as emperor appears in Josephus too, applied to Josephus himself.^[30] Most historians accept that a circle of sages gathered at Yavneh after 70 under Yohanan ben Zakkai and then Rabban Gamaliel II, but not the dramatic details.^[3] Majority

The Council of Jamnia. A great deal was later loaded onto Yavneh. In 1871 the historian Heinrich Graetz proposed that a council there, around 90 CE, closed the canon of the Hebrew Bible, and for a century textbooks repeated it. The only rabbinic evidence is a debate in the Mishnah about whether the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes “defile the hands”, that is, have the sanctity of Scripture, decided “on the day they seated Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah” as head of the academy.^[31] Rabbi Akiva’s verdict on the first book is famous: “all the writings are holy but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies” (Joshua Kulp’s translation). In 1964 Jack P. Lewis showed that nothing in the sources describes a council deciding the canon, and most scholars now treat “Jamnia” as a modern construction. The scriptures used at Yavneh were largely those Josephus already counts as twenty-two books (§0); the edges remained debated afterwards.^[32]​^[33] Majority

A grand coalition. In an influential article of 1984, Shaye Cohen argued that Yavneh’s real significance was the end of sectarianism. Before 70 there were Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and others, each claiming to be the true Israel (§6). The rabbis at Yavneh, he argued, created a community that tolerated disagreement within itself, recording majority and minority opinions side by side, rather than splitting into sects.^[3] The Mishnah and Talmuds do preserve dissenting views as a matter of principle. Majority on the pattern; Contested on how early it began.

Were the rabbis Pharisees? The rabbinic sages descend in large part from the Pharisees, whom Josephus describes as experts in “ancestral traditions” not written in the law of Moses.^[34] Hillel and Shammai, the great teachers of the generation before the destruction, appear in rabbinic texts as founders of two schools. But the rabbis rarely called themselves Pharisees, and they absorbed priestly and scribal traditions as well.^[3]​^[35] Majority

The Oral Torah and the Mishnah

The central idea of rabbinic Judaism is that God gave Moses two Torahs at Sinai: the written one, and an oral one that explains it. The tractate Avot, “the Fathers”, opens with the chain of transmission: Moses received the Torah at Sinai and passed it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets, the prophets to the men of the Great Assembly, and from them through pairs of teachers to Hillel and Shammai and the rabbis.^[11] Consensus on the text.

Historians read this chain as a claim of authority, not a record. Its earliest stages are legendary, and the “men of the Great Assembly” are otherwise almost unknown. It allowed the rabbis to present their rules, many of them clearly developed in their own time, as ancient and Mosaic. The rabbis themselves were not naive about this; one of the most striking stories in the Talmud, quoted below, has Moses visit Rabbi Akiva’s classroom and fail to understand the teaching attributed to him.^[36] Majority

The Mishnah. Around 200 CE, in Galilee, the circle of Rabbi Judah the Patriarch (Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi, often just “Rabbi”) produced the Mishnah, “repetition” or “teaching”. It is a law code in Hebrew, organised in six orders and sixty-three tractates: agriculture, festivals, women and marriage, damages and courts, sacrifices, and purity. Its most remarkable feature is how much of it concerns things that no longer existed. The fifth and sixth orders describe Temple sacrifice and priestly purity in exact detail, more than a century after the Temple fell.^[10]​^[37] Consensus

Jacob Neusner argued that the Mishnah should be read as a utopian document, a vision of an ordered, holy Israel built in the mind by sages who had lost the real Temple, not a description of how Jews lived.^[37] Others stress that the Mishnah preserves earlier traditions and real legal practice. Both are probably right for different parts of it. Contested

Whether the Mishnah was written down by Rabbi Judah or memorised and recited is itself debated. The Talmuds speak of professional reciters, tannaim, who memorised it, and of a rule against writing the oral teaching; a famous letter of Sherira Gaon in 987 CE survives in two versions that disagree on exactly this point.^[12]​^[10] Contested

Midrash. Alongside the Mishnah, the rabbis produced commentaries that derive law and teaching from the verses of Scripture: the Mekhilta on Exodus, the Sifra on Leviticus, the Sifre on Numbers and Deuteronomy, and later collections such as Genesis Rabbah. These show how the rabbis read the Bible: word by word, connecting distant verses, and finding new meaning in every repetition.^[10] Consensus

The two Talmuds

The Mishnah became the textbook of the rabbinic schools, and the discussions of it, called gemara, “completion”, eventually filled two enormous works.^[10] Consensus

The Babylonian Talmud’s anonymous layer, the stam, frames and connects the statements of named rabbis, and in the view of David Weiss Halivni, Shamma Friedman and Jeffrey Rubenstein it was composed by editors who lived after the last named authorities. These editors created the Talmud’s characteristic dialectic, its back-and-forth of question, objection and resolution.^[22] Majority

Babylonia mattered because Jews there lived outside the Roman Empire, under Parthian and then Sasanian Persian rule, with their own recognised leader, the exilarch (rêš gālûtā), who claimed descent from King David. The community was large and old, going back to the exile of 586 BCE (§4). Its academies would dominate Jewish learning for centuries after the Talmud was finished (§8).^[13] Majority

From oral to written. No manuscript of either Talmud survives from late antiquity. The oldest fragments are from the Cairo Geniza (§0, §8); the only nearly complete manuscript of the Babylonian Talmud is the Munich codex of 1342. The first complete printed edition of the Babylonian Talmud, by the Christian printer Daniel Bomberg in Venice in 1520–23, fixed the page numbering still used today.^[38]​^[10] Consensus

Prayer instead of sacrifice

The most important change was in daily religious life. Without sacrifice, the rabbis taught, prayer and good deeds atoned. A story in Avot de-Rabbi Natan has Yohanan ben Zakkai walking past the ruins with his disciple Rabbi Joshua, who laments that the place where Israel’s sins were atoned is destroyed. Yohanan answers: “My son, be not grieved, for we have another means of atonement which is as effective, and that is, the practice of lovingkindness, as it is stated, For I desire lovingkindness and not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6; A. Cohen’s Soncino translation).^[2]​^[39] Consensus on the text.

The daily services were modelled on the Temple’s timetable. The Talmud records Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi’s view that “the prayers were instituted based on the daily offerings” (William Davidson translation): the morning prayer to the morning offering, the afternoon prayer to the afternoon offering.^[40] The core of each service became the ʿAmidah, the “standing prayer” of eighteen blessings, whose arrangement the Talmud attributes to the sages at Yavneh under Rabban Gamaliel II.^[41] The exact wording was not fixed for centuries; the first prayer books appear only in the ninth and tenth centuries (§8).^[42] Majority

Other Temple rites were translated into home and synagogue. The Passover seder, with its order of cups, questions and foods and its retelling of the Exodus, took its classic form in the Mishnah’s tractate Pesaḥim, in place of the Passover lamb.^[43] Scholars debate how much of it predates 70 and how far it was shaped by Greco-Roman symposium customs.^[44] Contested

The synagogue and its floors

Synagogues existed before 70, as places for reading the Torah (§6). After 70 they became the main institution of local Jewish life. Most of the surviving synagogue buildings in the land of Israel, however, date from the fourth to the seventh centuries, not from the generation of Yavneh.^[45] Majority

The archaeology of these synagogues produced one of the great surprises of the twentieth century. Their mosaic floors show biblical scenes, but also the zodiac, the four seasons as women, and at the centre the Greek sun god Helios driving his chariot.^[45]

• Dura-Europos (Syria), rebuilt in 244/245 CE: walls covered with frescoes of biblical scenes, including Moses, the Exodus, Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones and the Temple, in a period when the rabbis’ texts discourage images.^[14] Consensus
• Hammat Tiberias, 4th century in the excavator Moshe Dothan’s dating (Jodi Magness argues for the late 4th or early 5th): a zodiac wheel with Helios at its centre, the seasons in the corners and a Torah shrine flanked by menorahs, in a synagogue whose donor calls himself a “pupil of the most illustrious patriarchs”.^[15]​^[46]​^[16] Majority on the date.
• Beit Alfa, 6th century: a cruder but complete version of the same scheme, with the binding of Isaac below the zodiac, signed by the craftsmen Marianos and his son Hanina.^[20] Majority
• Rehob, near Beth Shean, 6th–7th century: a mosaic of 29 lines and 364 words of Hebrew legal text on the sabbatical year and tithes, closely parallel to the Tosefta and Jerusalem Talmud, the oldest physical copy of a rabbinic text.^[21] Majority

What did Helios mean to the congregations who walked over him? Proposals range from a symbol of God’s power over the cosmos, to the calendar on which the festivals depended, to an angelic being, to an image that had lost any specific religious meaning.^[45]​^[16] What these floors show beyond doubt is that synagogue communities chose and paid for imagery that the rabbinic texts do not mention, and that the rabbis did not control every synagogue. The Rehob floor shows the opposite case: a community that wrote rabbinic law into its pavement. Majority

How influential were the rabbis?

The Talmud presents the rabbis as Israel’s natural leaders. The other evidence suggests that for a long time they were a small, self-selected scholarly class. Majority

Catherine Hezser’s study of the rabbinic movement in Roman Palestine found a loose network of teachers and disciples, not an institution, with no power to enforce its rulings except through persuasion and the patronage of the Patriarch.^[47] Rabbinic texts complain about the ʿam ha-ʾareṣ, “the people of the land”, who did not observe the sages’ rules on purity and tithes.^[47] Majority

Seth Schwartz went further. In Imperialism and Jewish Society (2001) he argued that after the disasters of 70 and 135, Jewish society in Palestine largely dissolved into the surrounding Roman culture; the rabbis were marginal; and Judaism was reconstituted as a religion of synagogue communities only in the fourth century and later, partly in reaction to a Christian empire that treated Jews as a religious group.^[35] Critics answer that the absence of evidence for Jewish practice in the second and third centuries is partly an accident of what survives, and that the rabbinic texts themselves show wide social contact.^[45] Contested

What is not in doubt is the long-term result. By the early Islamic period the Babylonian Talmud was being studied across the Jewish world, and the leaders of the Babylonian academies were answering legal questions from Spain to Yemen (§8). Consensus

Who is a Jew? The matrilineal rule

In the Bible, descent runs through the father. Joseph’s sons by his Egyptian wife Asenath become two of the tribes of Israel; Moses marries Zipporah, a Midianite; David’s ancestor Boaz marries Ruth the Moabite.^[48]​^[49]​^[50] The book of Ezra, in the Persian period, demands the expulsion of foreign wives and their children, but does not state a principle of descent through the mother (§5).^[51]​^[52] Consensus

The matrilineal rule appears first in the Mishnah. Tractate Kiddushin sets out who the child of a union belongs to, and ends with any woman who cannot contract a valid betrothal with that man or with others: “the child follows her status. And what case is this? The child issue of a female slave or a gentile woman” (Joshua Kulp’s translation).^[53] Shaye Cohen has argued that the principle was a rabbinic innovation of the second century CE. Among possible reasons he discusses the Roman law rule that the child of a marriage without legal capacity follows the mother, and the biblical laws against mixtures of kinds.^[52] Majority

The traditional view holds that the rule is ancient, derived by the rabbis from Deuteronomy 7:3–4 (“he will turn away your son from following me”), which the Talmud reads as referring to the gentile father’s influence on the grandson through a Jewish mother.^[54]​^[55] Reform Judaism in the United States has since 1983 also recognised children of Jewish fathers raised as Jews (§13).^[56] Contested

Judaism and the rise of Christianity

The followers of Jesus began as a Jewish movement (§6). How and when the two became separate religions is one of the most debated questions of the period. Contested

The Birkat ha-Minim, “the blessing concerning heretics”, is the twelfth blessing of the ʿAmidah. The Talmud says Samuel the Small composed it at Yavneh at Rabban Gamaliel’s request.^[41] Versions from the Cairo Geniza curse the minim, heretics, and the noṣrim, Christians. An older scholarly consensus read the blessing as a deliberate expulsion of Jewish Christians from the synagogues around 90 CE, and connected it with the Gospel of John’s references to believers being put out of the synagogue. Reuven Kimelman argued in 1981 that the word noṣrim is not found in the oldest evidence and may have been added later, and that minim covered many kinds of heretics.^[57] Joel Marcus has replied that the blessing was aimed at Jewish followers of Jesus from an early date, as the Gospel of John and later Christian writers suggest.^[58] Contested

Since the 1990s, many scholars have argued that the “parting of the ways” was slow and uneven. In Antioch in 386–387, John Chrysostom preached eight sermons against Christians who attended synagogue and kept Jewish festivals, which shows that ordinary people did not yet see a sharp boundary.^[59] Daniel Boyarin has argued that the boundary was drawn mainly by heresiologists and rabbis of the fourth and fifth centuries, each defining the other as outsiders, and enforced by the laws of the Christian empire.^[60] Majority that the separation was gradual; Contested on its timing.

The Christian empire changed the conditions of Jewish life. Laws in the Theodosian Code forbade Jews to own Christian slaves, to marry Christians or to build new synagogues, and the office of the Patriarch lapsed around 429.^[19]​^[18] The hope of rebuilding the Temple flared once, in 363, when the pagan emperor Julian authorised it; the attempt ended within months, after a fire and Julian’s death on campaign.^[17] Majority

The evidence ledger for rabbinic Judaism

Primary sources

1. The chain of tradition: Mishnah Avot 1:1

Hebrew: Mōšeh qibbēl tôrâ missînay ûmĕsārāh lîhôšuaʿ, wîhôšuaʿ lizqēnîm, ûzqēnîm linbîʾîm, ûnbîʾîm mĕsārûhā lĕʾanšê kĕneset haggĕdôlâ.

“Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly.” (Joshua Kulp’s translation)^[11]

What it proves. That by the third century the rabbis presented their own teaching as part of a single tradition reaching back to Sinai. The chain skips the priests, who in the Bible are the guardians of the law, and runs through prophets and sages to the rabbis. It is a claim to authority by a class of scholars, not priests. Tractate Avot is probably later than most of the Mishnah, from the mid-third century.^[10] Majority

2. Yavneh and the canon: Mishnah Yadayim 3:5

Hebrew (abridged): kol kitbê haqqōdeš mĕṭammĕʾîn ʾet hayyādayim. šîr haššîrîm wĕqōhelet mĕṭammĕʾîn ʾet hayyādayim … ʾāmar rabbî ʿăqîbā … šekkol hakkĕtûbîm qōdeš, wĕšîr haššîrîm qōdeš qodāšîm.

“All the Holy Scriptures defile the hands. The Song of Songs and Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) defile the hands … Rabbi Akiba said: … for all the writings are holy but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies.” (Joshua Kulp’s translation)^[31]

What it proves. That the sages at Yavneh discussed the status of two disputed books, and that the dispute continued to be remembered with several views. It does not describe a council deciding the whole canon, and it shows that most books were already taken for granted. “Defiling the hands” was a purity rule that protected scrolls of Scripture from careless handling. Majority

3. Another atonement: Avot de-Rabbi Natan A 4

“It happened once that Rabban Joḥanan b. Zakkai was coming out of Jerusalem, followed by R. Joshua, and he beheld the Temple in ruins. ‘Woe to us,’ cried R. Joshua, ‘for this house that lies in ruins, the place where atonement was made for the sins of Israel!’ Rabban Joḥanan said to him, ‘My son, be not grieved, for we have another means of atonement which is as effective, and that is, the practice of lovingkindness, as it is stated, For I desire lovingkindness and not sacrifice’.” (A. Cohen’s Soncino translation)^[2]​^[39]

What it proves. How the rabbis, writing in late antiquity, wanted the transition remembered: not as a catastrophe that ended Judaism, but as a turn to ethics, study and prayer that the prophets had already announced. The same chapter tells the coffin story of the escape to Yavneh. Consensus on the text; Majority that it is a later legend about real figures.

4. Moses in Akiva’s classroom: Babylonian Talmud, Menahot 29b

The Talmud tells that when Moses went up to receive the Torah, he found God attaching small crowns to its letters. God explains that in a future generation a man named Akiva will derive “mounds upon mounds of halakhot” from each crown. Moses asks to see him, and sits at the end of the eighth row of Akiva’s study hall:

”… and did not understand what they were saying. Moses’ strength waned … When Rabbi Akiva arrived at the discussion of one matter, his students said to him: My teacher, from where do you derive this? Rabbi Akiva said to them: It is a halakha transmitted to Moses from Sinai. When Moses heard this, his mind was put at ease.” (William Davidson translation)^[36]

What it proves. That the rabbis knew their teaching looked very different from the written Torah, and could reflect on that difference with humour and boldness. The story affirms the Mosaic origin of the Oral Torah while admitting that Moses himself would not recognise it. It is one of the clearest expressions of how the rabbis understood tradition: as a living development that remains faithful to its source. Majority

5. “It is not in heaven”: Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 59b

In a legal dispute about the purity of an oven, Rabbi Eliezer brings miraculous proofs for his view: a carob tree uproots itself, a stream flows backwards, the walls of the study house lean, and finally a heavenly voice declares that the law follows him. Rabbi Joshua stands and quotes Deuteronomy 30:12, lōʾ baššāmayim hîʾ, “It is not in heaven”, and Rabbi Jeremiah explains: the Torah has already been given at Sinai, and decisions follow the majority. Elijah later reports that God smiled and said, “My children have triumphed over Me” (William Davidson translation).^[61]

What it proves. The rabbis’ principle that authority lies in the reasoned interpretation of the sages by majority, not in prophecy or revelation. Prophecy, in rabbinic teaching, had ceased; the age of the sage had replaced it. Consensus on the text; Majority on its significance.

6. The four species in wartime: a letter of Bar Kosiba, c. 134 CE

In March 1960 Yigael Yadin found in the “Cave of Letters” in Naḥal Ḥever, above the Dead Sea, a bundle of fifteen letters, most of them from Shimon bar Kosiba to his officers, in Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek. One, in Aramaic, concerns the festival of Sukkot:

“Shimeon to Yehudah bar Menashe to Qiryath ‘Arab(v)aya. I have sent to you two donkeys that you shall send with them two men to Yehonathan bar Be’ayan and to Masabala in order that they shall pack and send to the camp, towards you, palm branches and citrons. And you, from your place, send others who will bring you myrtles and willows.” (Yadin’s translation)^[9]​^[62]

What it proves. That the leader of the revolt, in the middle of a losing war, took trouble to obtain the four plant species for the festival as prescribed in Leviticus 23:40. Observance of Pharisaic-rabbinic practice was part of the rebellion’s religious identity. The name “Bar Kokhba”, “son of the star”, is a pun used by his supporters; the letters show his real name was bar Kosiba. Consensus

7. “This is the King Messiah”: Jerusalem Talmud, Taʿanit 4:5

“Rebbi Simeon ben Yohai stated: Aqiba my teacher used to preach, there appeared a star out of Jacob (Numbers 24:17), there appeared Koziba out of Jacob. When Rebbi Aqiba saw Bar Koziba he said, this is King Messias. Rebbi Joḥanan ben Torta said to him, Aqiba! Grass will grow from your jaws and still David’s son will not have come.” (Heinrich Guggenheimer’s translation)^[63]

What it proves. That later rabbinic tradition remembered the revolt as messianic, and remembered that one of its own greatest teachers had supported it, along with a rabbi who mocked him for it. The rabbis’ later caution about calculating the end may owe much to this memory. Majority

8. The child follows the mother: Mishnah Kiddushin 3:12

“Wherever there is kiddushin and there is no transgression, the child goes after the status of the male … And any [woman] who can not contract kiddushin with that particular person or with others, the child follows her status. And what case is this? The child issue of a female slave or a gentile woman.” (Joshua Kulp’s translation)^[53]

What it proves. The earliest statement of the rule that the child of a gentile mother is a gentile. Combined with other rulings, it produces the principle that the child of a Jewish mother is Jewish whatever the father. It is formulated as part of a legal system about the status of children, not as a statement about Jewish identity in the modern sense. Consensus on the text.

What is absent from the record of the rabbinic period

• A Temple, sacrifice, or a high priest. None after 70. Priests kept their genealogies, and some synagogue inscriptions list the priestly courses, but they lost their central role.^[45] Consensus
• A fixed prayer book. Rabbinic sources describe the blessings and their themes; written prayer books appear only in the ninth and tenth centuries.^[42] Majority
• A council that defined the Bible or the faith. Rabbinic Judaism had no creed until the Middle Ages (§8) and no central council with power to define doctrine. Majority
• Rabbis as congregational clergy. A rabbi in this period is a scholar and teacher of law, not the leader of a synagogue; the paid communal rabbi is a medieval development.^[47]​^[45] Majority
• Bat mitzvah, women’s study of Talmud, or women as rabbis. All are modern (§11, §13). Consensus
• Manuscripts of the Talmud from the period. The oldest fragments are centuries later. Consensus

Debates about the rabbinic period

Continuity or invention?

These views overlap more than the table suggests. Nearly all historians accept that rabbinic law contains much older material and that its organisation as a system is a post-70 achievement. Contested

Did the rabbis control the synagogues?

Lee Levine argues that synagogues were community institutions run by local leaders, and that rabbis had only partial and growing influence over them; the zodiac floors are evidence of that independence.^[45] Others note that the Rehob inscription, the priestly-course lists and the Hebrew and Aramaic inscriptions show rabbinic ideas entering synagogues by the sixth century, and that a Geniza fragment of the Jerusalem Talmud reports that “in the days of Rebbi Abun they started depicting by mosaics and he did not protest against it” (Guggenheimer’s translation): the images need not mean defiance of the rabbis.^[64] Majority that rabbinic control was partial.

Was the matrilineal rule ancient?

Shaye Cohen argues for a second-century origin, pointing to the biblical evidence of patrilineal descent and the absence of the rule in Second Temple sources, including Josephus and Philo.^[52] The traditional view, and some scholars, see the rule as already implicit in Ezra’s expulsion of foreign wives and their children, in the son of an Israelite mother and Egyptian father counted among Israel in Leviticus 24:10, and in the way the rabbis read Deuteronomy 7.^[51]​^[65]​^[54] Contested

Further reading

• Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (3rd ed., Westminster John Knox, 2014), and “The Significance of Yavneh”, Hebrew Union College Annual 55 (1984).
• Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton, 2001).
• Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (2nd ed., Yale, 2005).
• H. L. Strack and Günter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (Fortress, 1996) — the standard reference on dates and texts.
• Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (Johns Hopkins, 2003).
• Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Pennsylvania, 2004).
• Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (Allen Lane, 2007).
• Barry W. Holtz, ed., Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts (Summit, 1984) — a practical introduction to reading Mishnah, Talmud and midrash.
• The Mishnah and both Talmuds in Hebrew and English are on Sefaria, free.