Despite increasing tensions between some rabbinic circles and the patriarch, his office was the agency that provided a basic unity to the Jews of the Roman Empire. Officially recognized as a Roman prefect, the patriarch at the same time sent representatives to Jewish communities to inform them of the Jewish calendar and other decisions of general concern and to collect an annual tax of a half shekel, paid by male Jews for his treasury. As titular head of the Jewish community of Palestine and as a vestigial heir of the Davidic monarchy, the patriarch was a reminder of a glorious past and a symbol of hope for a brighter future. How enduring these hopes were may be seen from the efforts to gain permission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Although reconstruction of the Temple was authorized by the emperor Julian (reigned 361–363), it came to naught because of a disastrous fire on the sacred site and the emperor’s subsequent death.
The adoption of Christianity as the religion of the empire had no direct effect on the religious freedom of the Jews. The ever-mounting hostility between the two religions, however, resulted in severe curtailment of Jewish disciplinary rights over their coreligionists, interference in the collection of patriarchal taxes, restriction of the right to build synagogues, and, finally, upon the death of the patriarch Gamaliel VI about 425, the abolition of the patriarchate and the diversion of the Jewish tax to the imperial treasury. Mediterranean Jewry was now fragmented into disjointed communities and synagogues. But the principles of the regulation of the Jewish calendar had been committed to writing in approximately 359 by the patriarch Hillel II, and this, coupled with the widespread presence of rabbis, ensured the continuity of Jewish adherence. Even the restrictions on synagogal worship and preaching imposed by the Eastern emperor Justinian I (reigned 527–565) apparently had no devastating effect. A new genre of liturgical poetry, combining ecstatic prayer with didactic motifs, developed in this period of political decline and won acceptance in synagogues in Asia Minor as well as beyond the Euphrates. Babylonia (200–650)
In the increasingly unfriendly climate of Christendom, Jews were consoled by the knowledge that in nearby Babylonia (then under Persian rule) a vast population of Jews lived under a network of effective and autonomous Jewish institutions and officials. Steadily worsening conditions in Palestine drew many Jews to Persian domains, where economic opportunities and the Jewish communal structure enabled them to gain a better livelihood while living in accordance with their ancestral traditions. To regulate internal Jewish affairs and ensure the steady flow of taxes, the Parthian, or Arsacid, rulers (247 bce–224 ce) had appointed in approximately 100 ce an exilarch, or “head of the [Jews in] exile”—who claimed more direct Davidic descent than the Palestinian patriarch—to rule over the Jews as a quasi-prince. About 220, two Babylonian disciples of Judah ha-Nasi, Abba Arika (known as Rav) and Samuel bar Abba, began to propagate the Mishna and related tannaitic literature as normative standards. As heads of the academies at Sura and Nehardea, respectively, Rav and Samuel cultivated a native Babylonian rabbinate, which increasingly provided the manpower for local Jewish courts and other communal services. While the usual tensions between temporal and religious arms frequently existed in Babylonia, the symbiosis of exilarchate and rabbinate endured until the middle of the 11th century.
Paradoxically, Babylonian rabbinism derived its theological and political strength from its fundamentally unoriginal character. As a transplant of Palestinian Judaism, it asserted its historical legitimacy to the Sāsānian dynasty (224–651), who protected Jewish practices against interference from fanatical Magian priests, and to native Jewish officials, who argued for the validity of indigenous Babylonian deviations from Palestinian norms. But ultimately the historical importance of this transplantation lay in Babylonia’s serving as the proving ground for the adaptability of Palestinian Judaism to a Diaspora situation. Legal and theological adaptations generated by the new locale and the needs of the times inevitably produced changes in the religious tradition. The laws of agriculture, purity, and sacrifices all of necessity fell into disuse. The principles embodied in these laws, however, and the core of the legal and theological system—consisting of faith in the revelation and election of Israel, the requirement that the individual live by the canons of Jewish civil and family law, and the network of communal institutions modeled on those of Palestinian Judaism—remained intact, thereby ensuring a basic continuity and uniformity among rabbinically oriented communities everywhere. Because historical circumstances made Babylonia the mediator of this tradition to all Jewish communities in the High Middle Ages (9th–12th centuries), the Babylonian version of Jewish religion became synonymous with normative Judaism and the measure of Judaic authenticity everywhere.
“The law of the [Gentile] government is binding”—the principle formulated by Samuel (died 254), head of the academy at Nehardea—summarizes the essential novelty in rabbinic reorientation to life on foreign soil. Whereas Palestinian rabbis had complied with imperial decrees of taxation as legitimate de facto—and this was all that Samuel had in mind—Babylonian teachers now rationalized governmental authority in this respect as legitimate de jure, thus enjoining upon the Jews political quietism and submissiveness as part of their religious doctrine. In all other areas of civil law, the Jews were instructed by their rabbis to file suit in Jewish courts and thus to conduct their businesses as well as their family lives by rabbinic law.
While the rabbis could impose their discipline more effectively in matters of public law than in private religious practice, the density of the Jewish population in many areas of Parthia (northeastern Iran) and Babylonia facilitated the application of moral and disciplinary pressures. The most effective vehicle for the dissemination of their teachings was the academies, where judges and communal teachers were trained; among these institutions, those of Sura and Pumbedita remained preeminent. Frequent public lectures in the synagogues of the academies on Sabbaths and festivals were capped by public kalla (study-course) assemblies for alumni of the schools during the two months, Adar (February–March) and Elul (August–September), when the lull in agricultural work freed many to attend semiannual refresher instruction. These meetings were followed by regular popular lectures during the festival seasons that soon followed. Thus, while rabbis constituted a distinct class within the community, their efforts were oriented toward making as much of the community as possible members of a learned and religious elite. The harmonious relations that obtained with but few interruptions over the centuries between the Sāsānian rulers and their Jewish subjects gave the Jewish population the air of a quasi-state, which the Jewish leadership frequently extolled as superior to the Jewish community of Palestine.
The dissemination of the Palestinian Talmud probably stimulated the Babylonians to follow suit by collecting and arranging the records of study and decisions of their own academies and courts. The Babylonian Talmud, which apparently underwent several stages of redaction (c. 500–650) on the basis of the proto-Talmuds—the early collections of commentaries on the Mishna used in the academies—accordingly became the standard of reference for judicial precedent and theological doctrine for all of Babylonian Jewry and all those communities under its influence. Some scholars have postulated a group of anonymous editors of these earlier materials, calling them stammaim (“anonymous ones”). As had been the case with the Mishna, the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud was later designated by authorities as marking the end of a period in Jewish history. The scholars who added the finishing stylistic touches, known as savoraʾim (“explicators”), were classified as a transitional stage between the amoraim and the geonim.