Apart from the right to teach Scripture publicly, the most pressing need felt by the surviving rabbis was for the reorganization of a body that would revive the functions of the former Sanhedrin and pass judgment on disputed questions of law and dogma. Accordingly, a high court was organized under the leadership of Simeon ben Gamaliel (reigned c. 135–c. 175), the son of the previous patriarch (the Roman term for the head of the Palestinian Jewish community) of the house of Hillel, in association with rabbis representing other schools and interests. In the ensuing struggle for power, Gamaliel managed to concentrate all communal authority in his office. The reign of Gamaliel’s son and successor, Judah the Prince, marked the climax of this period of rabbinic activity, otherwise known as the “age of the tannaim” (teachers). Armed with wealth, Roman backing, and dynastic legitimacy (which the patriarch now traced to the house of David), Judah sought to standardize Jewish practice through a corpus of legal norms that would reflect accepted views of the rabbinate on every aspect of life. The Mishna that soon emerged became the primary reference work in all rabbinic schools and constituted the core around which the Talmud was later compiled (see Talmud and Midrash). It thus remains the best single introduction to the complex of rabbinic values and practices as they evolved in Roman Palestine. The making of the Mishna
Although the promulgation of an official corpus represented a break with rabbinic precedent, Judah’s Mishna did have antecedents. During the 1st and 2nd centuries ce, rabbinic schools had compiled for their own use collections of Midrashim (singular Midrash, meaning “investigation” or “interpretation”), in which the results of their exegesis and application of Scripture to problematic situations were recorded in terse legal form. By 200 ce several such compilations were circulating in Jewish schools and were being utilized by judges. While adhering to the structural form of these earlier collections, Judah compiled a new one in which universally accepted views were recorded alongside those still in dispute, thereby largely reducing the margin for individual discretion in the interpretation of the law. Although his action aroused opposition and some rabbis continued to invoke their own collections, the authority of his office and the obvious advantages of a unified system of law soon outweighed centrifugal tendencies, and his Mishna attained quasi-canonical status, becoming known as “The Mishna” or “Our Mishna.” Yet, for all its clarity and comprehensiveness, its phraseology was often obscure or too terse to satisfy all needs, and a companion work known as the Tosefta (“Additions”), in which omitted traditions and explanatory notes were recorded, was compiled shortly thereafter. Neither compilation elucidated the processes by which decisions had been elicited, and various authorities therefore set about collecting the Midrashic discussions of their schools and recording them in the order of the verses of Scripture. During the 3rd and 4th centuries, Midrashim on the Pentateuch were compiled and introduced as school texts.
Fundamentally legal in character, this literature regulated every aspect of life; the six divisions of the Mishna—on agriculture, festivals, family life, civil law, sacrificial and dietary laws, and purity—encompass virtually every area of Jewish experience. Accordingly, the Mishna also recorded the principal Pharisaic and rabbinic definitions and goals of the religious life. One tract, Pirqe Avot (“Sayings of the Fathers”), treated the meaning and posture of a life according to the Torah, while other passages made reference to the mystical studies into which only the most advanced and religiously worthy were initiated—e.g., the activities of the Merkava" class="md-crosslink">Merkava, or divine “Chariot,” and the doctrines of creation. The rabbinic program of a life dedicated to study and fulfillment of the will of God was thus a graded structure in which the canons of morality and piety were attainable on various levels, from the popular and practical to the esoteric and metaphysical. Innumerable sermons and homilies preserved in the Midrashic collections, liturgical compositions for daily and festival services, and mystical tracts circulated among initiates all testify to the deep spirituality that informed Rabbinic Judaism. The age of the amoraim: the making of the Talmuds (3rd–6th century) Palestine (c. 220–c. 400)
The promulgation of the Mishna initiated the period of the (lecturers or interpreters), teachers who made the Mishna the basic text of legal exegesis. The curriculum now centred on the elucidation of the text of the standard compilation, harmonization of its decisions with extra-Mishnaic traditions recorded in other collections, and the application of its principles to new situations. Amoraic studies have been preserved in two running commentaries on the Mishna, known as the Palestinian (or Jerusalem) Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud, reflecting the study and legislation of the academies of the two principal Jewish centres in the Roman and Persian empires. (Talmud is also the comprehensive term for the whole collections, Palestinian and Babylonian, containing Mishna, commentaries, and other matter.)
The schools were the primary agencies through which the rabbinic way of life and literature was communicated to the masses. The types of schools ranged from the primary school to the advanced “house of study” and more formal academy (yeshiva), the synagogue, and the Jewish court. Primary schools had long been available in the villages and cities of Palestine, and tannaitic law made education of male children a religious duty. Introduced at the age of five or six to Scripture, the student advanced at the age of 10 to Mishna and finally in midadolescence to Talmud, or the processes of legal reasoning. Regular reading of Scripture in the synagogue on Mondays, Thursdays, Sabbaths, and festivals, coupled with concurrent translations into the Aramaic vernacular and frequent sermons, provided for lifelong instruction in the literature and the various teachings elicited from it. The amoraic emphasis on the moral and spiritual aims of Scripture and its ritual is reflected in their Midrashic collections, which are predominantly homileticalrather than legal in character.
An amoraic sermon conceded that, of every 1,000 beginners in primary school, only one would be expected to continue as far as Talmud. In the 4th century, however, there were enough advanced students to warrant academies in Lydda, Caesarea, Sepphoris, and Tiberias (in Palestine), where leading scholars trained disciples for communal service as teachers and judges. In Caesarea—the principal port and seat of the Roman administration of Palestine, where pagans, Christians, and Samaritans maintained renowned cultural institutions—the Jews too established an academy that was singularly free of patriarchal control. The outstanding rabbinic scholar there, Abbahu (c. 279–320), wielded great influence with the Roman authorities. Because he combined learning with personal wealth and political power, he attracted some of the most gifted students of the day to the city. About 350 the studies and decisions of the authorities in Caesarea were compiled as a tract on the civil law of the Mishna. Half a century later, the academy of Tiberias issued a similar collection on other tracts of the Mishna, and this compilation, in conjunction with the Caesarean material, constituted the Palestinian Talmud.