In ancient Judaea, there were no rabbis. Until the first century of the Common Era the experts in the Torah—the divine teachings and commandments professed by descendants of ancient Israelites known by then as Jews (from the name of the kingdom of Judah)—as well as in rituals, were hereditary priests affiliated with the Jerusalem Temple. The priests and the temple were supported by a tax, tithes, and contributions. And while synagogues and scriptural learning beyond the temple were known already in the third century BCE in Egypt and became more established by the first century BCE in Judaea, the annual cycle of Jewish life revolved around the temple, with pilgrimages on Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkoth, and personal sin offerings at other times as well. Thus ordinary Israelites had to rely on the priests to serve as intermediaries between them and God; it was difficult for them to break into the priestly tribe and its structures of power.¹

Things began to change when the Romans first subjugated Judaea in 63 BCE. A new administrative and legal order was imposed, new cities emerged, and new temples to Roman gods were built across the region. New festivals created a different annual rhythm. Coins with images of Roman deities and likenesses of emperors replaced those with Jewish symbols. Along came new social structures and with them new claims to authority and new political elites. The older vessels of power and social influence were destabilized: Jewish courts appear to have been sidelined by Roman courts; in 37 BCE the Romans appointed Herod, an Idumean whose family was forced to convert to Judaism after the conquest of Idumea by the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty, as the king of Judaea. Herod then embarked on a despotic but expansive rule to please Rome. His massive building projects encompassed new cities and monumental fortresses. Jerusalem became an admired Jewish metropolis, with its temple expanded and modernized.

During this period the legitimacy of the temple priests was increasingly questioned, and Herod claimed a new prerogative to appoint them; Roman governors took it up after his death. Judaeans became split among several sectarian groups—Essenes, a community of followers of Jesus, and others. Some of this is captured in the New Testament, in which Jesus is shown preaching in synagogues, reading the prophets, and arguing about the observance of commandments or payment of taxes with Pharisees, Sadducees, and scribes. All these groups posed a challenge to the status of Jewish priests. But while the scope of their influence might have been eroding when the temple still stood, they and the temple remained central—even if vociferously contested—to Judaism and to the observance of God’s commandments.

All of this collapsed with a series of devastating uprisings against Roman rule. A major revolt, which started in 66 CE, resulted in the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, just decades after Herod had renovated it. By the time the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135 CE ended, most Jews had been expelled from Judaea, now renamed Syria-Palaestina, by the Romans. Jerusalem was turned into a Roman military colony and renamed Aelia Capitolina in honor of Emperor Hadrian (full name Publius Aelius Hadrianus) and the Capitoline triad of Roman deities—Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. A Roman historian, Cassius Dio, wrote nearly a century later that a temple to Jupiter had even been built on the ruins of the Jewish temple (archaeological evidence is inconclusive).

Aside from the physical devastation of Judaea and the displacement of the Jewish population, many of whom resettled in Galilee, one third of Judaea’s Jews may have been killed or taken captive during the conflicts. As Dio remarked, “practically all of Judaea was made desolate.” This destruction and forced exile violated Roman convention across the empire. Romans tended to allow local cults to continue, and after the wreckage wrought to punish rebelling populations, they typically allowed them to rebuild.

The obliteration of Judaea and the Jerusalem Temple disrupted the practice of some rituals within Judaism in profound ways. The annual pilgrimages to Jerusalem, offerings and sacrifices, and the agricultural practices such as tithing had contributed, as Krista Dalton puts it in How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity, to “a sense of cohesive cultural rhythm, facilitating exchange of animals, goods, prayers, and taxes on a routine calendar cycle.” This was all now gone, and with it the stature of the priests, who no longer had a clear function. Who then was to lead the Jews and guide them on how to practice Judaism and observe divine commandments without the temple? What to do with tithes and atonement offerings?

As dramatic as this rupture was, Dalton overplays it, failing to convey the complexity of the previous decades that brought the decrease of priestly authority and the rise of alternative voices. Many Jews already lived far away from Jerusalem and never visited the temple. How to observe the commandments in daily life was also already a subject of debate before the destruction of the temple. Phrased succinctly but ambiguously in the sacred scriptures, the commandments required explanations. “Six days you shall labor and do all your work,” the Torah says, “but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God: you shall not do any work.” But what counted as work? This is exactly what Jesus and the Pharisees were discussing when Jesus entered a synagogue and cured a man with a “withered hand” on the Sabbath, and when his hungry disciples plucked grain while passing a field. Even more questions emerged after the temple was destroyed.

The scholars and interpreters of the Torah who came to be called “rabbis”² emerged as figures of authority in this moment of “immense national trauma” out of what Dalton calls “a remnant of Judaean intelligentsia (priests, scribes, and Pharisees) who largely fled to Galilee following the destruction and restructuring of the province under Rome.” We know about them because they created “an entirely new domain of knowledge”—as represented, for example, by Midrash, the Mishnah, and the Talmud—that became the foundation of Judaism as it is practiced today. This body of literature, replete with anecdotes and stories about individual rabbis, offers a glimpse into who they were, or at least how they and their disciples imagined themselves and wanted to be remembered. Their conversations, debates, and quarrels—often fictive, connecting different characters across time and space—capture how they grappled with questions of practice and observance of the Torah without the temple. The Torah was what now provided cohesiveness as “a cultural object shared between Jews” that “could persist through interpretation and study.”

The rabbis formed study circles in cities of Roman Palestine, such as Tiberias and Sepphoris in Galilee and Lydda (now Lod in central Israel). They traveled together and debated real-life situations over food and wine. (Dalton annoyingly uses “noshed,” a word from Yiddish, which developed in Europe over a millennium later.) Their literature shows how the rabbis created Torah expertise, deploying new methods of interpretation, and consolidated “jargon, mannerisms, and behaviors that marked inclusion within an emerging specialist group.” It also shows how they tried to teach others to accept their preeminence as Torah masters. As Dalton explains, this distinction was socially constructed.

The rabbis often learned and taught by example. In one of the texts, a group of them are described as having entered a Samaritan town, where they bought vegetables. One of them, Rabbi Akiva, decided to set aside money for the tithe on the produce he bought (untithed produce could not be consumed), prompting a rebuke and a question from Rabbi Gamaliel, both about tithing the produce of a Samaritan, since produce grown by non-Jews was not subject to tithes by Jews, and about setting a precedent. Akiva answered, “Have I established a law in Israel? I have only tithed my own vegetables.” To which Gamaliel responded, “Know that you have established a law in Israel by tithing your own vegetables,” and offered an alternative answer to the question, ruling grains and pulses subject to tithing but excluding vegetables. The minutiae of the laws here don’t bear parsing; what matters is that two opinions remain standing side by side. The literature rejects doctrines and definite answers in favor of continuous discussion and dissent. Dialogues built around ordinary experience highlight the exchange and change of opinions, offering different possibilities rather than direct rulings and expositions.

While rabbis could offer clashing viewpoints, these could not be fanciful: “Any teaching that does not have a parentage [‘a father’s house’ in the Hebrew] is no teaching,” the Palestinian Talmud states. Attributions to other rabbis seem to have functioned like the references and footnotes scholars use today to validate their own conclusions. The expertise, Dalton says, “was at once technical and reverential.” This created a class of peers—as it still does. In fact her book, consciously or not, mimics some tedious aspects of the rabbinic style through repeated disruptive references to other scholars, not just in footnotes but in the text; through the use of academic jargon; by assuming familiarity with esoteric arguments that she then declines to engage; and by discussing arcane developments within the field, such as the introduction of a “discursive turn.” Often missing are information and conclusions, as opposed to restatements, that would make the understanding of the ancient texts easier. Though scholars today want their expertise and knowledge to be noticed by the public, many contemporary readers of academic books feel like the sages visiting Rabbi Jonathan ben Hyrkanos: “He lectured but they did not understand. They started to get drowsy. He said to them, why are you getting drowsy? He started pelting them with pebbles.” They soon left his house.

These new communities of “experts” differed from the priests of the temple period in another way—rabbis could come from different walks of life. Their goal was to elevate the Torah and show its relevance in daily life, not to display symbols of status such as lineage, money, or power. Rabbi Yehoshua was learned because “his mother brought his crib to the synagogue so that his ears should cling to the words of the Torah.” Rabbi Akiva came from a “humble background,” and Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah began to learn only when he was a young adult and was immediately recognized for his wisdom—it was never too late to start. The Mishnah (a collection of rabbinical teachings chiefly from before the year 200) explicitly states:

If there were a bastard [mamzer] who is a Torah scholar and a High Priest who is an ignoramus, a bastard who is a Torah scholar precedes a High Priest who is an ignoramus, as Torah wisdom surpasses all else.

Another anecdote has Rabbi Yannai encountering “a lavishly dressed person” and inviting him for dinner. Over the meal Yannai examines him in the Torah, the Mishnah, the Talmud, and other texts; the rich man does not know much. Yannai then asks him to recite a blessing over the food, but the guest defers to his host, whereon Yannai asks him to repeat a humiliating phrase: “A dog has eaten Yannai’s bread.” The man, outraged by the insult, asks why, yet Yannai keeps on: “By what right did you merit to eat at my table?” To which the man responds: “I never heard nor repeated an evil report, nor have I ever seen two people fighting without making peace between them.” Yannai, now humbled himself, acknowledges that the man is pious even if he is not learned.

Dalton focuses on the centrality of dining for the rise of this scholarly group. The rabbinic literature is indeed brimming with stories of banquets and feasts, à la Roman convivia or Greek symposia. These seem like a literary device, providing a genial backdrop for teachings and pedagogical discussions and expressing the idea that opinions are fluid and develop among peers—Dalton would have served her readers better by distinguishing what is literary and what is likely a reflection of historical reality.

Those without knowledge of the Torah are exhorted to honor it and shown by anecdote how to conduct their lives. One text tells of Rabbi Hiyya bar Abba, who was invited to a banquet by a wealthy man in Laodicea, an ancient Greek city in Syria. The food served represented “every kind of produce that was created during the six days of creation.” The rabbi wanted to know how this man deserved all his wealth. The host responded, “I was a butcher…and whenever I saw a good animal, I set it aside for Shabbat.” In another, a rabbi prepared a Shabbat feast for Antoninus (whether a Roman emperor or governor is not clear), and another feast during a weekday. On Shabbat, cold dishes were served because Jews are forbidden to cook on that day, and on the weekday, the food was steaming hot. Antoninus remarked that the cold food on Shabbat tasted better than “the warm weekday food.” The rabbi explained that the warm food “was missing a single spice.” Confused, Antoninus asked, “Is there anything in the king’s treasury that is lacking?” The rabbi replied, “Do you have Shabbat?”

One way to honor the Torah was to provide for its scholars, whether hosting them for feasts or offering direct material support. Stories about dedicating tithes, previously sent to the temple in Jerusalem, to such scholars abound. Rabbi Yonah “gave his tithes to Rabbi Aha bar Ulla, not because he was a priest but because he studied Torah.” And Rabbi Simeon ben Yochai is said to have warned, “When you see towns torn from their place in the Land of Israel, know that they did not contribute to the wages” of those who disseminated the teachings of the Torah. The text cited as a warrant for the admonition was a verse from Jeremiah: “Why is the land ruined, torn down like an uninhabited wilderness? The LORD said, because they abandoned My Torah.”

Rabbis traveled far and wide for the sake of such patronage, but dependency made them vulnerable to the whims of donors. One rabbi was dismissed from his job as a teacher after he refused to shorten the children’s readings. Another rabbi issued a decision that was perceived to benefit his donor and finally left the country rather than seem to have profited from the accommodation.

Although Dalton claims that rabbis “embraced a rigorous lifestyle of study” and imagines them as devoted to the Torah and the discussion of scriptural law, like philosophers in Plato’s academy or a Greek symposium, some of her own examples show that rabbis made a living in other ways as well—in agriculture, for instance. Later in the Middle Ages, both in the Islamic and Christian realms, rabbis worked as merchants, vintners, or physicians, like Moses Maimonides, a physician to Sultan Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, known as Saladin. “Everyone,” he said,

who sets his heart to engage in Torah study but who does not work and makes a living from charity, profanes the name [of God], dishonors the Torah, extinguishes the light of faith, brings evil upon himself, and forfeits the life of the world to come, for it is forbidden to derive benefit from the words of Torah in this world…. All Torah that is not accompanied by work will eventually be negated and lead to sin. Ultimately, such a person will steal from others.

Some of the difficulties the rabbis wrestled with strikingly echo our own, and perhaps that is why Dalton so frequently and jarringly jumps from ancient times to the present. With the institutionalized accreditations of expertise and private and governmental funding of research in the twenty-first century, these challenges manifest themselves in new ways. Employed by universities, modern scholars engage full-time in pursuing and creating knowledge and sharing it with students—all of this dependent on subsidies, now increasingly threatened. Today’s scholars, too, create their own “epistemic communities,” with their own jargon and modes of sociability.

We stand at an inflexion point. If possession of specialized knowledge were enough to be considered an expert, pundits and influencers would not exist. Instead, expertise, as Dalton argues, is “relational”; it depends for its acceptance on being judged as trustworthy by others. Contemporary media and the political environment, as well as attacks on expertise driven by social media, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, have challenged conventional ideas about what reliable knowledge is, how it is produced, who possesses it, and who certifies it. Universities and scholars now are forced to defend what they do, as the ground shifts under their feet.