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 amoraim (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.
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.
The enduring vigour of Jewish faith during these centuries is graphically demonstrated by the missionary activity of Jews throughout the ancient Middle East, especially in the Arabian Peninsula. Proud Jewish tribes living in close proximity to each other in the vicinity of Yathrib (later Medina, Muhammad’s home city) engaged in agriculture and commerce and proclaimed the superiority of their monotheistic ethos and eschatology. In Yemen (southwestern Arabia) the last of the Ḥimyarite rulers (reigned from c. 2nd century ce), Dhu Nuwas, proclaimed himself a Jew and finally suffered defeat in approximately 525 as a consequence of Christian influence on the Abyssinian armies. Jewish missionaries, however, continued to compete with Christian missionaries and thus helped to lay the groundwork for the birth of an indigenous Arabic monotheism—Islam—that was to alter the course of world history.